THE HATEFUL EIGHT in 70mm

SUN CLASSIC in 70mm

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 travellers come to learn they may not make it to Red Rock after all…

‘However much pain Tarantino inflicts on his characters, his fans know he loves actors, language, and cinema, and that while he sets out to shock, he does so mostly in order to please. On the surface, The Hateful Eight is the kind of energetically flimsy entertainment we’ve come to expect from him: a giggly blend of political incorrectness and grand guignol, hovering on the brink of self-parody and sometimes slipping over.

Yet bigger ambitions are implicit in his choice to shoot on 70-millimetre film, a format traditionally reserved for epics. Whatever Tarantino may say to interviewers, there are ample hints that the saloon can be taken as a microcosm of the United States, and the conflicts between his characters echo enduring divisions between men and women, north and south, black and white.’ The Age