Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

QUENTIN TARANTINO – THE HATEFUL EIGHT – 2015

A blizzard in Wyoming. Quite a few survivors of the Civil War after the Civil War who are just moving west to make a fortune. Four of them in a first stage coach are a band of thieves and murderers plundering the area. One girl of the gang has been captured by a bounty hunter and is to be hanged in the next city. The gang is there to catch the second group and liberate the girl. A second group of four in another stage coach with that girl, the bounty hunter, a Black officer of the cavalry who was in Baton Rouge and a last one coming to the next town to become the new sheriff.

The meeting in Minnie’s haberdashery is a real massacre. The massacre of all the women taking care of the place by the gangsters before the arrival of the second stage coach since the plan is that the brother in the gang is going to free the sister who is going to be hanged. Then the arrival of the second stage coach with four people instead of two, as they expected, makes things more complex.

The whole trick and interest is the great inventiveness of Quentin Tarantino’s imagination as for how to have them all kill one another till the last pair who will die alone from bleeding and cold since there will be no one coming for days because of the blizzard.

This film made a scandal in some circles. If it had been for the N*** word, that could be understood, though after the Civil War the escaping southerners as well as the escaping northerners used the N*** word more often than God and Satan. But it made a scandal because what it says about justice and police work on the frontier somewhere around 1866 or some months later is not very brilliant about the state of police work and justice in the USA at the time. Unluckily, knowing Tarantino, we can imagine that was a parable or a metaphor to speak of the present that is not at all brilliant in that field. So what! Let the police trade unions protest: that’s the best thing they know how to do, apart from shooting at anything moving before verifying what or who it is.

Apart from that the film has little interest and it does not want to be anything but entertainment. It is dense enough in twists and warps for the audience to enjoy it though it will gross out many sensitive souls and stomachs. But well we cannot have a far west omelet without shedding some blood.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU