The Quentin Tarantino movie inspired by ‘Mad Max’: “They’re all blaming each other for the apocalypse”
To watch a Quentin Tarantino movie is to watch a lavish homage to cinema history. Although he is an auteur in the strictest sense of the word – a filmmaker whose creative fingerprints are all over every frame and word of dialogue in his movies – Tarantino is a student of cinema first and foremost. He’s made spaghetti westerns, martial arts movies, and exploitation films, putting his own spin on genre conventions without losing their essence.
It’s easy to see callbacks to other movies in his work. For example, the dance competition at Jack Rabbit Slim in Pulp Fiction is a near-exact replica of a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders. Kill Bill draws heavily on Toshiyo Fujita’s Lady Snowblood, both visually and narratively, with the snow fight in Tarantino’s film being a direct homage to a scene in the 1973 Japanese movie. It would be impossible to create an exhaustive list of references in Tarantino’s movies, but suffice it to say that the closer you look, the more you find.
Still, it’s surprising that one of his movies is modeled in part on George R Miller’s iconic franchise Mad Max. Tarantino has never made a post-apocalyptic film and aside from that so-bad-it’s-offensive swipe at an Australian accent in his Django Unchained cameo, he has never shown much interest in antipodean matters. But in a 2015 interview, the Pulp Fiction director revealed that there are parallels between The Hateful Eight and Miller’s grim, petrol-fuelled hellscape.
“[The Hateful Eight] deals with the Civil War and, in particular, its aftermath,” he told Variety. “All the characters are to one degree or another survivors of the war and survivors of the way their society had crumbled.”
In this way, he explained, “The film almost plays like a post-apocalyptic movie to some degree, but instead of the Australian Outback, it all takes place in this icy, snow-covered wasteland.”
Mad Max centres on the titular character, a former police officer-turned-drifter who wanders the dystopian wasteland of a ravaged Australia, fighting between his lone wolf identity and his weakness for helping others. He is an anti-hero of sorts, at turns indifferent to the barbarity around him and at other times willing to put his life on the line to save innocent strangers.
As Tarantino explained, The Hateful Eight has some similarities. Set in the frozen tundra of Wyoming just after the American Civil War, it follows a group of strangers, many of whom, like Max, are some form of law enforcement, who take shelter from a blizzard in a haberdashery. Unlike the Mad Max franchise, all of the characters are villains, though some of them are more sympathetic than others.
Tarantino’s film is much more focused on the interpersonal relationships between all eight characters than on a single figure, but as the director pointed out, they are, like the characters in Mad Max, “From societies that don’t exist anymore, and they’re all blaming each other for the apocalypse.”
Visually, The Hateful Eight doesn’t hold a candle to the grisly, steampunk aesthetic of Mad Max, nor does it attempt to. However, the thematic crossover is undeniable. Many of Tarantino’s movies provide overt references to other movies, but this one is much more subtle and thought-provoking. The American Civil War has been dissected onscreen countless times, but comparing its aftermath to an apocalyptic hellscape in which society is left broken and reeling is surprisingly original.
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