It’s a combination of using the right actors for the right parts while also incorporating the redemption arc and a greater evil. Ironically, Tarantino himself is hands down the least likeable person he ever put in one of his own movies. If only he took a cue from Kevin Smith and remained silent.
Tarantino has a knack for anti-heroes, and none of his films feature the classic hero archetype you’re used to from Hollywood. In fact, all of his protagonists are actually antagonists. You only side with them because that’s what you’re supposed to do, and he’ll use a lot of storytelling tricks to present a greater evil that puts the antihero in a better light.
Allow me to spoil some Quentin Tarantino movies.
In Reservoir Dogs, eight criminals get together to rob a jewelry store. None of them is a good guy; the good guys are the cops trying to catch them. The cop who gets his ear cut off and covered in gasoline – he’d be portrayed as the story’s hero in real life media.
Mr Orange is the undercover cop, and Mr White is the honorable criminal who protects him until the end. They’re the heroes based on the perspective we’re given in the movie. Although they are villains in their own rights, they are viewed as less evil than the other criminals. Each has heroic qualities, but ultimately, it’s Mr Pink (Steve Buscemi) who wins the day, and that is not the typical Hollywood ending. This is what sparked the buzz around Tarantino.
You have a greater evil in their boss and his son, along with the wild card Mr Blonde. Everyone has an annoying boss, and we all hate the boss’s annoying kid. It’s easy to relate to a jewel thief (see Oceans Eleven, etc) who has a boss like you do. But it’s harder to relate to someone torturing a man while dancing to “Stuck in the Middle”.
Really any of the other characters could have been the hero because of their redemption arcs, but personally I like Mr White, as his redemption ends at him killing Mr Orange as he realizes he was betrayed despite being the most honorable character on screen. A case could be made for Mr Orange as the ultimate hero though.
True Romance does the same – Clarence falls in love with prostitute Alabama, kills her pimp, and they go on a cross country trip with a suitcase full of cocaine.
They set up a drug deal with a Hollywood producer that ends with a shootout between the police, the mafia, and the producer’s security. They destroy the drugs, take the money, and leave while everybody dies because of their actions. Not exactly the clean Hollywood ending. But they’re in love, and you latch onto that as a viewer to completely ignore all the trouble they cause.
In this case, Clarence is able to get away with everything because ultimately he rescued a damsel in distress, which makes the entire insane trip a redemption arc. The pimp is a low-level goon, and the mob underboss is the greater evil. The producer and police are completely unloveable. You really have no choice but to side with Clarence and Alabama here because everybody else sucks.
It’s as if he pre-redeemed himself at the beginning for every bad thing that happens after. Nobody he killed was innocent, so they got what they deserved.
In Pulp Fiction instead of following the hero (Butch Coolidge, played by Bruce Willis), the timeline is shown out of order so you’re first introduced to a pair of hitmen. In gangster movies up until this point, Jules and Vincent would have been auxiliary goons but they’re the focal point of the film.
Just like in Reservoir Dogs, you’re unsure who to root for by the time Butch shoots Vincent in his apartment. You technically just watched the hero kill a villain, but you feel conflicted because you kinda like both of them and want them to get along.
Still, Butch is the professional athlete fighting gangsters, and he even rescues Marcellus Wallace from his fate with the gimp. They went pretty far to get you to genuinely feel bad for Wallace (thus showing even the greater evil has a greater evil), and it works. Butch is the main protagonist with a redemption arc of the film, despite it ending on a red herring for Jules and Vincent’s arcs due to it being shown out of order. Chronologically, the final line of the movie is Bruce telling Fabienne “Zed’s dead, baby.”
We know Vincent never redeemed himself from earlier in the movie, and Jules is left as open ended as what’s in the briefcase. But ultimately the movie in my opinion is about Marcellus Wallace, who finds redemption in the basement of a pawn shop. It’s a brilliant film in so many ways.
In From Dusk Till Dawn, the supernatural is used as the greater evil. Brothers Seth and Richard kidnap a family in the middle of a crime spree. It’s really hard to relate to them until they all end up in a situation where it’s humans vs non-humans, giving you the viewer the instant opportunity to relate to the humans, regardless of what crimes they committed to this point.
The instant the strip club turns into vampires, the Gecko brothers become heroes. Their violent tendencies are now a tool for good. They are evil Satanic vampires; kill them all and cheer. Every time a vampire dies, a human criminal gets their wings.
He robbed a bank and held two children hostage. Yeah, but he also decapitated that demon spawn. Tarantino even went the extra mile with a Harvey Weinstein impression so you can love his brother for killing him when he turns.
This is probably the easiest movie to understand how he pulls the trick off, but it’s the same redemption arc and greater evil leveraged in all of his movies.
Kill Bill is perhaps the most straight forward of Tarantino’s stories. It follows The Bride (Uma Thurman), an assassin who was betrayed by her ex. The two-film story focuses heavily on the redemption arc, and we are given all the information we need to follow it from start to finish.
It plays like a video game, in which she faces increasingly tougher bosses until she reaches the final boss, the evil greater than the Yakuza – a lying ex.
Because we’re watching a woman scorned by her former lover, there’s really no need for storytelling tricks. It’s relatable because we’ve all been scorned by a former lover. Instead of being confused over who we should root for, we just get to sit back and enjoy the gorgeously choreographed fight scenes. She is overcoming great obstacles, and we all know she’s going to ultimately kill Bill. We all want her to, because look at everything he put her through. You know it’s going to happen – it’s in the title.
But it’s still satisfying when she finally does by the end of the second movie.
Inglourious Basterds (eff you, Tarantino, for how hard I had to fight against my phone’s autocorrect to spell that right) is not your typical war movie. We are following war antiheroes.
Lt Aldo Raine and his unit are the absolute worst examples of soldiers. They are absolutely brutal and essentially represent all the war crimes you see and hear about in the media during a war. But the redemption arc and the greater evil are simple – they’re Jewish soldiers killing Nazis. This makes it like From Dusk Till Dawn in which he’s playing to our natural human instincts.
If it were not for that, it would be a much different film. Imagine everything else the same, except the sides were switched. Would you feel as good watching Nazis kill Jews with such sadistic and child-like glee? Would you just let it slide if they changed history and had Nazis burn Roosevelt or Churchill in a theater?
While I know there’s a percentage of you who probably would, Tarantino went with popular opinion. There’s also no real redemption arc in the movie because it leverages our natural feelings about a historic atrocity.
Django Unchained is like Inglourious Basterds and From Dusk Till Dawn. Tarantino uses a simple premise to provide a greater evil and redemption arc – slavery.
We are watching a slave be forced to put his life at risk in order to provide intel on his former owners. Because he’s successful, suddenly the bounty hunter is helping him with his own personal vendetta.
Everything Django does to destroy Candyland is justified because of white guilt. We’re in post-slavery America enough generations ahead that we can all safely say we wouldn’t have owned slaves if we lived back then. We would’ve been the good people who helped slaves. History tells us this isn’t true, but this movie is an homage to that entire thought process.
Like IB, if you flipped the roles and it was about a slave owner destroying an village and enslaving the residents, you would feel different about what you just watched.
Hateful Eight is an old western murder mystery remix of Reservoir Dogs. Once again we have eight pretty loathsome people in a room. They’re pretty much all criminals who were involved in an earlier crime, and they all end up dead or dying by the end.
The way the reveal is pulled off shows the greater evil is everybody who was in the room before we got there with the bounty hunters who have shaky pasts themselves. Instead of knowing the entire time Mr Orange was an undercover cop, you find out at the same time Mr White does when it’s too late to matter anymore.
Like Reservoir Dogs, one could make the argument for Warren, Ruth, or even Daisy and her family as the hero of the film but really nobody wins in this one.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is perhaps the most mature Tarantino movie. Obviously, I don’t mean ratings-wise because it has the lowest on-screen death ratio. But the lack of violence and emphasis on character dialogue and SoCal setting makes this a Pulp Fiction remix.
Only this time the focus is on a fading actor (Rick) and his stuntman (Cliff) instead of Butch. And the redemption arc and greater evil come in the form of Charles Manson and his family.
By the end, we’re again changing history, but it doesn’t matter. It’s fun watching Brad Pitt in his cool zone kicking hippie butt. Watching Sharon Tate and her friends get murdered by the Manson family would have been a bit unsettling, especially for surviving family members.
Despite his flaws, you can’t help but love Cliff and feel good at the possibility of what might have been had he been there that night.
That’s pretty much the trick – you can show your characters doing all sorts of bad things so long as they oppose the greater evil when the time comes. Tarantino plays with this concept a LOT throughout his films. It’s like a roshambo hierarchy of evil.
If you murder someone you’re a villain. But if that someone is a vampire, Nazi, slave owner, abusive pimp, rapist, etc, you get a pass. And if you kill Daisy, I’ll spend 8 hours straight watching her owner find creative ways to kill everybody who ever spoke or heard your name.