Samuel L Jackson is Major Marquis Warren, a black Civil War vet stuck on the side of a snowy road. One where Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland have their lives casually snuffed out by the police. This is the America of today, Tarantino says - not a world where Django won but one where he’s torn apart by dogs at Candyland. But The Hateful Eight is more clear-eyed about American history, and in this film a viciously racist Confederate terrorist finds himself raised to the role of lawman after the Civil War. After the Civil War too many freed slaves found themselves returned to bondage in all but name, still forced to toil in fields and denied many of their basic rights - except not in Django Unchained, where the plantation itself is blown to pieces, a triumphant fuck you to failures of Reconstruction. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust and Hitler denied the survivors their satisfaction by killing himself in a bunker - except not in Inglorious Basterds, where Jewish commandos turn him into hamburger meat. The Hateful Eight feels like Quentin Tarantino’s response to his last two film, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained, two movies that were revisionist revenge sagas that saw the historical underdog rise up, righting the wrongs of history. We spend some of the first half of the movie immersed in the glory of the outdoors and then almost the entire second half trapped inside a single room with a group of despicable characters who begin to cut each other down, looking for secret enemies and acting on old grudges. Shot in 70mm in the snowy, gorgeous mountains of Telluride, The Hateful Eight is perhaps Tarantino’s talkiest script since Reservoir Dogs, a similar ‘bottle episode’ type story. The Hateful Eight is nihilistic in the extreme, a raging scream of anger at America’s racial problem, a movie that posits we have never gotten over the sins of slavery and that wonders if the only way we can is to find someone else to savagely oppress. Every time you think someone is having a change of heart they’re just getting ready to be heinous - often physically and brutally - to someone else. Every time you think a character could be heroic he behaves like a monster.

This movie is about scumbags and murders, racists and sexists, shitty human beings all. Quentin Tarantino is not fooling around with the title of his latest film, The Hateful Eight.

The movie original sin