Quentin Tarantino's latest movie has already won or been nominated for awards centered around script, casting and the soundtrack, and rightly so. In Hateful Eight, he has assembled a stellar cast that delivers sharp dialogue in the midst of yet another homage to a classic genre of film - in this case, the Western.
Rotten Tomatoes gives a helpful overview of the plot:
Set six or eight or twelve years after the Civil War, a stagecoach hurtles through the wintry Wyoming landscape. The passengers, bounty hunter John Ruth and his fugitive Daisy Domergue, race towards the town of Red Rock where Ruth, known in these parts as "The Hangman," will bring Domergue to justice. Along the road, they encounter two strangers: Major Marquis Warren, a black former union soldier turned infamous bounty hunter, and Chris Mannix, a southern renegade who claims to be the town's new Sheriff. Losing their lead on the blizzard, Ruth, Domergue, Warren and Mannix seek refuge at Minnie's Haberdashery, a stagecoach stopover on a mountain pass. When they arrive at Minnie's, they are greeted not by the proprietor but by four unfamiliar faces. Bob, who's taking care of Minnie's while she's visiting her mother, is holed up with Oswaldo Mobray, the hangman of Red Rock, cow-puncher Joe Gage (Madsen), and Confederate General Sanford Smithers. As the storm overtakes the mountainside stopover, our eight travelers come to learn they may not make it to Red Rock after all...Tarantino reminds me of Stephen King in some ways. He has a knack for capturing the bleak depravities of the human heart - and make no mistake, this movie plumbs the depth of evil that resides within. These eight are called hateful for a reason. They are the kind of people who have both received and doled out the kind of violence and wickedness that you pray never crosses your path. Tarantino himself was a little surprised at how the movie played out once he began to film it. He told Entertainment Weekly ("Quentin Tarantino: The Hateful Eight interview"):
"I was realizing when I was watching it about [seven] weeks ago that this could almost be a post-apocalyptic movie, to some degree or another. It’s like this frozen wasteland, and the apocalypse has destroyed every semblance of their society and their way of life, and these survivors are huddled together in this pitiless wasteland shelter. And suddenly they’re all blaming each other for the apocalypse, but the apocalypse is the Civil War."
