Samuel L. Jackson (Andrew Cooper, SMPSP/ © 2015 The Weinstein Company. All Rights Reserved)

Just in time for Christmas, director Quentin Tarantino gives you a big present drenched in a festive blood red. But it’s a present that feels boxed in, and never really opens up.

Sometime after the Civil War, a stagecoach travels through a snowy Wyoming landscape. Bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) escorts his latest capture, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to the town of Red Rock, where he will collect a generous reward and have the satisfaction of seeing her hang. On the road they reluctantly pick up two more passengers, Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a former union soldier who is now himself a bounty hunter of some repute, and Charles Mannix (Walt Goggins), an apparently bungling Southerner who claims to be the sheriff of Red Rock. A blizzard threatens to overcome the coach, so they take shelter at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a cabin where they meet several other travelers.

In typical Tarantino fashion, he copiously borrows from other filmmakers, visually quoting John Ford (he‘s hardly the first to echo the iconic threshold from The Searchers) and starting with a premise that’s straight Stagecoach. But one of the problems with The Hateful Eight is that Tarantino rips himself off all over the place, from Tim Roth’s impersonation of a Mr. Orange writhing in pain in Reservoir Dogs to a controversial scene that re-stages a pivotal speech in his screenplay for True Romance. I don’t mind him ripping off other filmmakers; he can take exploitation tropes and turn them into spectacular cinema. But he has an insufferable self-consciousness, and you can almost see Tarantino getting off on himself here, as if he’s making a clip-show of his greatest hits in Ultra Panavision.

About that format. Tarantino has long championed the experience of old-fashioned celluloid over the digital projection that the vast majority of movie houses now screen exclusively. The Hateful Eight, his eighth film, takes advantage of film in a way that he never has before—in a way that nobody has in 50 years. With the help of cinematographer Robert Richardson, Tarantino has resurrected the super wide-screen 70mm Ultra Panavision format, which was last used in 1966 for the epic Charlton Heston/Laurence Olivier adventure Khartoum.

Film buffs know that 70mm presentation can be the most thrilling and immersive of cinema experiences, and the Washington area is lucky to have the AFI Silver, which knows how to use it. Tarantino has made such a huge deal out of the format that he’s even had 70mm equipment installed in selected theaters around the country, like at Gallery Place. This three hour film comes in a 70mm roadshow presentation compete with an overture, intermission, and souvenir program.

Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bruce Dern (Andrew Cooper, SMPSP / © 2015 The Weinstein Company. All Rights Reserved)

But Tarantino uses this classic moviegoing spectacle on what is, for the most part, a (very gory) filmed play. In the end it all seems like a cruel set-up. He promises an old-fashioned cinematic experience, and gives you one—one that is stagy and at times stultifying, ostensibly a throwback to epic westerns but really more like a big budget whodunit, with extra blood and hate.

Much of the film unspools in a single interior setting; once the eight travelers meet each other at Minne’s Haberdashery, the movie becomes a talky drawing room mystery. Tarantino writes sharp dialogue and gets the most out of his actors, and everything he does is deliberate. Yet from the claustrophobic wide-screen drama to the appearance of Channing Tatum in a nearly unrecognizable deglammed form, to an annoying post-intermission recap, Tarantino seems to deliberately alienate his audience. Hey chumps, he seems to be saying (though he’d probably use the n-word), I’m using one of the most visually exciting formats in cinema to give you a closed circle of hell. Merry Christmas!

Quentin Tarantino is capable of thrilling movie magic, from the low-budget tension of Reservoir Dogs to the fragmented narrative of Pulp Fiction; from the gorgeous B-movie spectacle of Kill Bill and even to the Western landscapes of Django Unchained (a movie I didn’t like either). One would hope that the opportunity to revive a spectacular format would inspire him to greater heights of cinema, but he’s taken a cinematic step backward, and not in a good way.

I only had the chance to preview The Hateful Eight in a digital format, but I want to see the 70mm roadshow presentation just for the sake of seeing light projected through celluloid. I reluctantly admire the movie; I don’t much like it.

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The Hateful Eight
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino
With Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walt Goggins, Bruce Dern, Channing Tatum
Rated R for strong bloody violence, a scene of violent sexual content, language and some graphic nudity
The 187 minute 70mm roadshow version of the film opens Christmas Day at the AFI Silver and Regal Gallery Place.