The Hateful Eight

For his eighth feature, Quentin Tarantino rolls out a huge Christmas gift for cinephiles—at least for those who love unnecessarily long, excessively violent westerns (and I count myself among this contingent).

The Hateful Eight is Tarantino’s take on roadshow pictures from the 1950s and ‘60s. A roadshow was an extended, 3-plus-hour version of a major movie—featuring a musical overture, and intermission, and an entre act—booked for a limited engagement in a handful of cities and screened in a large format presentation.  Always a staunch advocate of films being made and screened on celluloid rather than digital video, the writer/director not only resurrected the Ultra Panavision 70 system—an anamorphicly squeezed 65mm format that renders an absurdly wide aspect ratio of 2.76:1, which was used for only a handful of pictures such as Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and Battle of the Bulge (1965)—but he also presents the movie in this format.  Unlike most recent 70mm releases, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), Kenneth Brannah’s Hamlet (1996), and Ron Howard’s Far and Away (1992), Tarantino pulls out all the stops by making his holiday launch a major event with the full roadshow treatment, including a souvenir color program handed to you as you enter the cinema. 

But all the excitement accompanying this unique occurrence makes the disappointment even greater that neither the movie, nor the 70mm rollout, are brilliant or flawless achievements. Like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which debuted a week earlier, The Hateful Eight is more a great film-going experience than a great film.  It’s a picture you want to see on opening day with a huge crowd, in the biggest, grandest, oldest movie palace you can find. I’m lucky to live within walking distance of such a theater, where the 70mm system is permanently installed and it’s maintained and run by one of the last full-time, old-school, union projectionists left in the country. Needless to say, it was a merry Christmas indeed for me, the seven friends who joined me, and the over eight hundred people with whom we shared the opening night show.  Unfortunately, Tarantino and the Weinstein Company seem more concerned with selling tickets, making headlines, and scoring Oscar nominations than they are in ensuring that everyone who sees The Hateful Eight gets the proper experience the director intended and promotes.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, roadshow engagements lasted for two weeks before the standard version of the movie went into general release in 35mm. And this specialty edition would play in less then forty cities, in theaters staffed by personnel who knew how to handle this type of exhibition.  For The Hateful Eight, Tarantino and the Weinstein Company set themselves the unrealistic goal of competently releasing a 70mm film in 100 theaters in 2015. This lofty aspiration meant hastily re-equipping several venues, most of which had abandoned film projection during the recent changeover to digital.  Many of these fly-by-night retrofit installations went into multiplexes run by AMC (a chain notorious for botching even the simplest special engagements, like the digital broadcasts of live plays and operas put on by entertainment content provider Fathom Events). The Weinstein Company contracted with the reputable Boston Light and Sound to cobble together the majority of the 70mm projectors that eventually got crammed into these cinemas. While there is no company in the country with as much experience building and servicing film projectors, the time restrictions BL&S had to work under were completely out of line with the tradition of classic roadshow pictures of the past. Back then, far fewer theaters participated, and any special gear that was required was installed and tested for months before the movie opened. 

The great Hateful Eight retrofit project began by locating all the 70mm equipment still in existence, even if it had been abandoned or partially destroyed. With far too few working projectors and backup parts to accommodate the 100-theater goal, Boston Light and Sound engineers designed and manufactured a multitude of gears, platters, rollers, lamp housings, and anamorphic lenses capable of unsqueezing the Ultra Panavision image to its proper aspect ratio. Most of these units were full of quirks and held the potential for problems like delays in start times, shows needing to pause mid-movie due to playback issues, and the film itself tearing or getting badly scratched.

The biggest issue BL&S faced was the fact that most modern projection booths can no longer house the twin 70mm projectors needed for “change-over” projection (where each ten-to-twenty-minute reel is run and rewound individually, with the projectionist seamlessly switching back and forth between the alternating machines).  And even in booths with enough space, there was no way BL&S could cobble together the sufficient number of 70mm projectors required for proper changeover projection in 100 theaters. Moreover, the concept of dedicating one person’s attention to running one movie for every show of every day is a thing of the past: ninety-six percent of all working projectionists are now used to simply pressing a button on a computer to start each show in each cinema of their multiplex. 

BL&S solution to these obstacles was to construct “plug-and-play kits” of platters that could spool the entire film, including twelve minutes of black leader for the intermission, through a single projector. Thus they devised a way to recreate that grand, old-fashioned roadshow sensation under cheap, modern multiplex conditions. But since these platters (and many of the shafts and rollers that carry the film from them to the projectors) were not originally intended to handle the much larger and much heavier 70mm stock, the idea that a theater employee could just start the movie and leave it running for three hours was dubious at best. The potential obstacles wouldn’t have been as big a deal if a union of experienced technicians were still manning the projection booths of most theater chains. But these days the folks assigned to oversee movie playback systems are simply not the dedicated craftsmen of just ten years ago. 

Fortunately, the potential for multiple disasters became clear by late December. To stave off a totally botched release, BL&S initiated a search for people skilled in handling celluloid—retired projectionists, technicians from film festivals, and cinema archivists. For the majority of cinemas, a dedicated projectionist was obtained to supervise every screening. But in most cases, they had less than a week (often only a morning) to prepare for the Christmas Day premiere. And since the movie is over three hours long, and the Weinstein Co. insisted on up to five screenings per day, a typical shift prepping and running these shows can last fourteen to twenty hours a day for the full duration of the engagement.  Plenty of horror stories have been reported since opening night. Most of these bungled screenings, as predicted, involve the film stopping, falling off the platters, or getting scratched while navigating the undersized rollers. In some cases, theaters have had to switch to the digital back-up file shipped with the print by the second showing—completely negating all the expense and effort involved in installing their 70mm system.

Even worse, some chains that booked the roadshow could not properly project the widescreen image in the cinema they chose to retrofit. (In many cases this was due to contractual obligations with Disney that Star Wars would play in the grand cinemas that wold be ideally suited to 70mm projection.) In a few instances, the throw distances from the booth to the screen are too shallow for the available anamorphic lens, and the edges of the frame get cropped on each side.  Then there are the many screens that were simply too small to begin with. While Ultra-Panavision is a very large format, it’s not big the way IMAX is big.  In fact, it’s the opposite of IMAX. It’s not oversized width and height; it’s just incredibly wide. Therefor it requires an uncommonly huge screen to achieve the sensation of size and scope. On a small screen, the additional masking at the top and bottom of the image renders the picture smaller, not larger, than a normal widescreen presentation—hardly the spectacle Tarantino is trying to recreate.  (Anyone who remembers watching movies on old 4x3 TVs might recall what letterboxed films looked like on those tiny screens. Seeing the laserdisc of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on an old-fashioned TV is like looking at a black screen with a tiny ribbon of image dividing the top and bottom half of the set; would you want to pay extra for the cinematic equivalent of that?)

All these substandard retrofits and playback problems could have been avoided if the studio simply restricted the roadshow version to around forty theaters and the director and/or cinematographer oversaw the installation, set-up, and testing of each one. Unrealistic? Stanley Kubrick apparently used to personally check every cinema that screened one of his movies, and that was hundreds of theaters. Since Tarantino claims he is only planning to direct two more features in his lifetime, I think he could have afforded to devote a bit more time to making sure that everyone who sees his eighth picture sees it the way he intended them to. It would not have required Kubrickian levels of obsessiveness to visit each theater, rule out the ones that clearly weren’t up to the job, and help work out the bugs at those that did. Of course, canceling engagements can damage relations between venues and distributors and would certainly cut into the all-important opening weekend gross. But since Tarantino is co-leading a mission to preserve the tradition of film projection for as long as possible, that consideration should trump all other concerns. The stakes for this mission are high because every screening that fails is another nail in the celluloid coffin.

Ultimately, the roadshow version of The Hateful Eight opened in just shy of the 100 theaters hoped for. The final number is 97 screens, I believe. The catastrophe that could have occurred was minimized by the dedication of the technicians who stepped up to ensure the playback went smoothly for the majority of screenings. As of this posting, I’ve read about far fewer disasters than I expected (and I’ve been following the rollout closely). As of the end of the first week’s run, the typical young audience reaction to the roadshow experience has been that it’s a gimmick, but an exciting gimmick rather than a stupid or pretentious one. The film has grossed far less than Tarantino's previous movie Django Unchained, but it has been this biggest money maker even for many independent theaters across the country and has excited many new audiences about celluloid.

The behind-the-scenes narrative of The Hateful Eight’s release is in many ways more interesting than the minor story Tarantino created for this giant film. The movie is set a few years after the Civil War, and it concerns eight nasty hombres (or seven hombres and one hombra? Not sure what a female hombre is called) who get caught in a Wyoming snowstorm on the way to the town of Red Rock.  It’s a chamber piece, or a “bottle movie,” which takes place in a couple of confined locations.  As we presume in a Tarantino picture, lots of talking and a great deal of brutality goes down, but neither the lengthy monologues nor the shocking violence feel as novel or well crafted as we expect from this filmmaker. 

Aside from the massive buildup of anticipation surrounding its opening day, The Hateful Eight also resembles Star Wars: The Force Awakens because of how stunningly unoriginal it is. This is not Tarantino doing his usual mash-up of tropes, ideas, and moments from other movies to create something entirely fresh and innovative. There are literally hundreds of intimate westerns like this one—from John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) to Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959)—though none are quite so operatically extravagant or graphically violent.  True, one can find elements from other films in The Hateful Eight, but they’re the type of obvious references that populate so much of contemporary American pop culture. The creative appropriation and pastiche that this director is both revered and dismissed for is much less evident in this picture than in his best work.

While The Hateful Eight pays surface homage to Agatha Christie mysteries like And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express, it more accurately mimics the structure, character conceits, plot points, and several key shots of Tarantino’s début film Reservoir Dogs. But whereas that movie cleverly deconstructed a sub-genre by focusing on all the scenes most heist pictures leave out, The Hateful Eight does not reinvent, analyze, or explore the western motifs of “strangers on a stagecoach,” or “guys cooped up in a building waiting for a showdown.” Instead, Tarantino uses these familiar constructs to indulge his fondness for a patient, extended narrative buildup with an explosive release. And this picture proves that he is still a master of the slow burn. With his stock company of terrific actors, and his love of writing his signature dialogue for them to recite, Tarantino milks his minimal tale for all it’s worth, making it a pleasure to sit through an over three-hour movie where very little actually happens.  But unlike the twenty-five minute, mostly subtitled basement tavern scene in Inglourious Basterds—perhaps the writer/director’s finest achievement in both of his crafts—the speeches and extended verbal showdowns here don’t play on multiple levels or engage our minds to the same degree. The post-Civil War racial commentary, that should permeate every scene of The Hateful Eight on a subtextual level, instead feels grafted on—just some detail to give more dimension and gravitas to Samual L. Jackson’s character and enable Tarantino’s entire cast to say “nigger” as often as possible.

Yet despite its structural similarities to Reservoir Dogs, The Hateful Eight does not play like a disappointing retread the way Tarantino’s previous picture, Django Unchained, did. Django featured themes and narrative devices so identical to those Tarantino employed in his prior movie that it is nearly impossible not to compare it negatively to the vastly superior Inglourious Basterds.  The Hateful Eight doesn’t have the same type of lofty ambitions that Basterds or Django (or any of this filmmaker’s other pictures) possess. It’s just straightforward nasty fun. Unlike the rest of his oeuvre, if his propensity for in-your-face shock value isn’t your cup of tea, there is little point in looking past it to discover any deeper, subtler merits. In the case of this movie (aside from the external, exhibition-related factors I discussed above), the director’s more astute and noteworthy touches are too few and far between. However, the lack of subtext and narrative complexity in The Hateful Eight is perfectly in keeping with the grand tradition of the roadshow classics. Ben-Hur, Cleopatra, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Exodus, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, How The West Was Won, Doctor Dolittle, and other movies of this kind were always big but rarely deep.

I enjoyed The Hateful Eight for many of the same reasons I liked the distinctly non-highbrow 70mm releases Airport, Tron, and Far and Away. They’re all packed with actors I love doing things that range from fascinating to ridiculous, and all these pictures are remarkable to look at when properly projected. The 70mm format is ideally suited for intimate spaces. We associate the large formats with epics that feature panoramic vistas and armies of thousands of non-CGI extras marching slowly across huge tracts of open land. But with a few exceptions, like Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Patton, the best examples of these films tell more personal tales, as in My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Ryan's Daughter. The 70mm negative captures the sharp details of confined sets even better than it reproduces outdoor locations. The decor and geography of Minnie's Haberdashery, where most of The Hateful Eight takes place, is exquisitely rendered. The limited depth of field inherent in Ultra-Panavision enables Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson to create clever compositions, with his actors and camera constantly circling each other and trading status positions. 

Clearly conveying the orientations and sightlines of eight characters in one room is a far more difficult job than photographing a scenic view or a marching army. Therefore a little picture like The Hateful Eight presents far more opportunities for a visually skilled director to apply his craft than does a big prestige feature like Around the World in 80 Days. There’s a reason a minimal story told on a vast canvas is usually more successful than an overblown narrative told in an equally grandiose fashion. Films are fundamentally about observing human behavior, not passively looking at impressive images. The greatest 3D movie ever made, in my view, is Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, in which just four characters interact in a single room. I certainly can’t go as far as to say The Hateful Eight is one of the best large format pictures ever made, but it will rank high on my list should I ever make one.

The Hateful Eight themselves are mostly comprised of Tarantino veterans: Kurt Russell (Death Proof), Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Four Rooms) Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill), Walton Goggins (Django Unchained), and Bruce Dern (Django Unchained), as well as the ubiquitous Samuel L. Jackson. Tarantino first-timers Demián Bichir (A Better Life), Channing Tatum (Magic Mike), and Jennifer Jason Leigh round out the lead roles. Everyone is fun to watch, but Leigh is the most exciting. Apart from the collaborations with her former husband Noah Baumbach (Greenberg, Margot at the Wedding), this one-of-a-kind actress has been absent from major roles for quite some time. If there’s any justice, she’ll join the list of middle-aged movie stars like John Travolta, Pam Grier, Robert Forster, and David Carradine, whose work with Tarantino launched career resurgence.

Many viewers will find it difficult to enjoy Leigh’s work in this picture, as her character is incredibly harsh and ugly. She is also the only woman in the main company and the majority of the violence is directed squarely at her—and much of it for crass comic effect. But she is an actress who practically built her career on roles in which she is mistreated by men—from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Last Exit to Brooklyn to Bastard Out of Carolina. Seeing her wicked, broken-tooth grin on her bloodied, black-eyed face take punch after punch and keep coming back for more—insulting, provoking, and laughing at the rest of the Eight—is pretty thrilling. She not only holds her own, she steals the movie.

Aside from the 70mm presentation, the most exciting aspect of The Hateful Eight is its score by Ennio Morricone (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Battle of Algiers, Cinema Paradiso, The Mission). Tarantino has been lifting cues from the legendary Italian composer for years, a practice that Morricone has openly disparaged. While Tarantino has never commissioned an original score for any of his previous pictures, he believed The Hateful Eight required one and that Morricone was the only person who could do it. Their initial contact wasn’t encouraging.  The eighty-seven year-old composer was busy with other projects and didn’t see why Tarantino shouldn’t just continue to appropriate his soundtracks without his consent. But the director won him over. With little time to compose the roughly fifty minutes of music, Morricone borrowed from himself, incorporating several unused tracks he wrote for John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi/horror masterpiece The Thing, a movie The Hateful Eight draws heavily from. The old and new music works beautifully. It’s Morricone’s first western score in over forty years, and it’s a welcome return.

I had a terrific time at The Hateful Eight, but I do hope Tarantino has another truly great film left in him. Something with the originality of Pulp Fiction, the maturity of Jackie Brown, the inventiveness of Kill Bill, or the out and out audacity of Inglourious Basterds.  The Hateful Eight is not in the same league with those terrific pictures. It belongs with the other highly enjoyable major releases of 2015—Star Wars, Mad Max:Fury Road, Spectre, Creed, Carol, The Big Short, Sicario, Trainwreck, etc.—all movies that satisfy without ever approaching greatness. Still, I’m so pleased I saw them. And those of us who love cinema and love seeing films projected on film owe a huge debt of gratitude to Quentin Tarantino.