By my stopwatch, four-fifths of "The Hateful Eight" takes place indoors, first in the stagecoach traveling to Minnie's, then in the cabin and a nearby barn. Tarantino asked his regular cinematographer, Robert Richardson, to shoot in Ultra Panavision 70mm, a format that has barely been used since the "road show" epics of the 1960s, and built an overture and an intermission into his already extravagant running time, yet he's staged most of the film's action away from direct sunlight. This is all fairly perverse, but it's these kinds of choices that make Tarantino more special than the filmmakers who dream of being the next Tarantino.

The problem isn't how Tarantino tells his story, but the deficiencies in the story itself—or maybe we should put "story" in quotes, because, more so than any Tarantino film, and this is saying a lot, what's onscreen doesn't feel like an intricately interconnected series of events, all of which feed into and build upon one another, but rather a succession of set pieces, most of which are tediously repetitive. Talk talk talk talk talk talk kill; talk talk talk talk talk talk kill, and so on, and so on. The N-word is sprinkled throughout; Tarantino loves the slur nearly as much he loves bare feet. But its use in "The Hateful Eight" is more problematic than in "Django," where the term had a whiplash sting; even if you suspected Tarantino of trying to get away with something, the film's righteous ire (presenting the Confederate South as a little Nazi Germany right here in the good old USA) made you pause before writing him off as an opportunist.

That's not the case here. The in-depth conversations about the Civil War and capitalism and justice vs. frontier justice are superficially interesting, until you suspect they're not there to tie the film's characters to the American Character, but to set the stage for killings. The context of a nasty, brutish time gives the artist permission to be nasty and brutish.

When the violence arrives in "Hateful Eight," it's unmoored not just from any morality espoused by the characters (who are hateful, after all!) but also, it seems, from Tarantino's own moral compass—if indeed he has one, and after this movie I have serious doubts. From "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" through his recent run of movies, he's given us a mix of proudly amoral and morally struggling characters, then shown them working through their hypocrisy and relativism in finely tuned, ping-pong style exchanges (like that final Travolta-Jackson conversation in "Pulp Fiction"). In "Hateful Eight," for the first time in Tarantino's career—and in contrast to such brutal, semi-exploitive but ultimately mournful films as "The Wild Bunch" and "U-Turn"—there's no detectable moral framework to speak of. We're just watching a bunch of scorpions in a bucket getting ready to sting each other, then stinging each other—sometimes verbally, sometimes with fists or guns or other weapons: tearing flesh, coating hardwood floors with gore and brains. [Spoilers from here.]