The Hateful Eight

I’m not here to defend this movie, nor to explain why it was my favorite film of last year, but to advise you to watch it again and try to see beyond the obvious elements that were the subject of the hottest takes of 2015. This western mystery is a play in disguise as a big operatic snowy masterpiece, where every performance is among the best roles that the cast have had in their careers.

Clocking in at 167 minutes (even longer in its roadshow version, with its overture, intermission, and additional footage), the runtime of The Hateful Eight is something of a commercial exception. But within this duration, Tarantino crafts a progressive and deceptively intricate tale, one in which not a minute is wasted.

The Hateful Eight is a reflective film in which the Hawksian Tarantino reevaluates the unfair comments he made about John Ford when Django came out. Maybe in rewatching some Ford movies featuring John Wayne in preparation for casting Kurt Russell in a role based on Wayne (and on the constructed authority Wayne brought to his characters—an authority that is questioned and then eliminated in The Hateful Eight), Tarantino realized he has more in common with Ford than he thought.