The strangest thing has happened to Quentin Tarantino in the last five years: His movies have turned into blockbusters. His last two films, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, both crossed the $100 million mark, making more money than three of Steven Spielberg’s last four films. Among Tarantino’s fans—of which I am a proud member, two decades standing—he will always be our indie filmmaker, the movie obsessive with his own in-jokes, meta references, and cinematic winks. (Red Apple cigarettes! The Vega family! His awkward cameos!) There was a time that Tarantino felt like a revolution, but that’s not what he is now. Today Tarantino is a Hollywood institution, the autonomous establishment, a man with absolute power to make whatever movie he, specifically, wants to make.

This is a victory, of course. I’d rather Tarantino have this power than, say, Michael Bay, but it comes with a price. I am beginning to worry that Tarantino has gone down the rabbit hole. He has always been an indulgent filmmaker: That indulgence, his willingness to just go for it, has always been one of his foremost strengths. But I’m not sure there’s anybody to reel him in, to dial him down, and bring him back to the world where the rest of us live. Tarantino, with Django Unchained and now The Hateful Eight, I fear, is beginning to drift too far afield.

This not to say that The Hateful Eight is without its pleasures, far from it: Tarantino is still a preternaturally skilled filmmaker, and the guy could make a phone book dance with delight. But there is a sameness to The Hateful Eight, a sense that we have been down this road before, with higher stakes, with a firmer hand on the till. All the Tarantino signatures are there, but a little more so, to less effect. The extended dialogue stretches last a little too long; the blood splatters a little too loudly; the performances are a little too luxuriant and protracted; the narrative disjointedness is a little too fractured and telegraphed. Tarantino has made a movie in which everyone in it not only knows they’re in a Tarantino movie, they don’t really know a world outside of one. On the whole, this isn’t always the worst thing. A Tarantino movie isn’t the worst place to hang out, after all, but it’s moving him farther and farther away from the rest of us.

This is Tarantino’s Big Western, and he hews closely to Western conventions, even down to a (magnificent) Ennio Morricone score. We have four main characters, coming in from a rough trail and heavy blizzard in post-Civil War-Wyoming. One’s a bounty hunter, The Hangman (Kurt Russell), bringing in a second, a foul-mouthed fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) for judgment in Red Rock. They pick up two others, a racist former Rebel soldier (Walton Goggins) headed to Red Rock to become the new sheriff, and a former Union soldier turned bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson) who is both a war hero and, in Tarantino-ese, one dangerous motherfucker.

Tarantino liked the notion of these characters so much that he never really conceived of them of people. They live in Tarantino’s imagination, and only there.

To get out of the storm, they come across a haberdashery, where they run into a former Rebel general (Bruce Dern), a Mexican cowhand (Damian Bechir), a “cow puncher” (Michael Madsen) and a British hangman (Tim Roth). Here are your eight. For all the talk of Tarantino’s insistence on 70 mm film—and Wyoming does look fantastic in the rare landscape shots—the movie takes place almost entirely within that haberdashery: In many ways, it’s like a bottle episode of a television series where our main characters are stuck in a room together and have nothing else to do but talk and talk and talk. The movie is broken into two halves—the first is slightly longer than the first—but the split is a strange one; the big event that both illuminates the first half and sets the stage for the second happens nearly three-quarters of the way through. It almost makes the ending feel rushed, an odd feel after so much of the movie takes its sweet time. Tarantino draws every scene out as long as he can, yet then somehow seems to sprint to a conclusion. It gives the film a feeling of slackness that’s difficult to escape. The movie needs a lot of screws tightened.