The Hateful Eight was Tarantino's first true blue failure of a movie, even if it had its moments. No the "it's like a stageplay" argument won't work, the movie's problems are structural not in the choice to be decidedly uncinematic.

I understand why people have their problems but I think with time it will be viewed as a masterpiece. May I ask what problems you had with the structure? It worked for me - at first I disliked the flashback in the middle of the film but the more I think about it the more I really like it.

As for the other merits of the film, I feel like (this article)[http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/01/08/the-hateful-eights-lincoln-letter-and-the-lies-of-django-unchained] by Devin Faraci really sums up why I feel the film is so powerful.

Choice excerpt below, though I recommend reading the whole article.

Django Unchained (and Inglourious Basterds, to an extent) is a historical revisionist film that makes white people feel good. There’s a lot of terrible brutality and evil white people on screen and we get to cheer on the black man who stands up and destroys it all. It’s exhilarating and it’s fun and you feel like a good person for doing nothing more than rooting for Django to raze Candyland to the ground. You walk out of Django Unchained with the righteous glow of someone who stood up for something but you really just sat through a movie. You’re John Ruth in that stagecoach, feeling like a good person but not doing very much at all.

This isn’t a dig at Django Unchained - I love that film. I love Inglourious Basterds. I love Tarantino’s duology of historical revisionism, of films that give the stick back to those who got the short end of it originally. It’s the ultimate triumph of cinema, which is much more explicit in Basterds as Hitler dies in a burning movie theater, but it’s the same for both films - we don’t have to be beholden to the past. We can remake the past. We can save ourselves from it through the magic of the movies and imagination.

But at the same time we run the risk of disarming ourselves. Of forgetting the reality of today, and the way it is informed by the past. America’s 21st century racial problems begin in the 19th century, during the very same Reconstruction period in which The Hateful Eight is set. One hundred fifty years later we’re still feeling the impact of botched post-Civil War policies and a fire of white hatred that has passed from generation to generation. Many people didn’t recognize this in 2014, and the events in Ferguson acted like a wake up call to many white Americans who thought we had gotten past the hate, who thought we lived in a post-racial America, who thought the Civil Rights Era had put right what Reconstruction and Jim Crow had put wrong.

These people were believing the Lincoln Letter.

It’s worth noting that many of the people who thought we were living in a post-racial society reacted an awful lot like John Ruth when the falseness of their personal Lincoln Letter was revealed. There’s been a serious uptick in blatant racism in just the last year or two. You don’t have to look far to see it, and you only have to look at the GOP primary campaigns to see how strongly it’s resonating with a large segment of the population.

Django Unchained is the Lincoln Letter, and The Hateful Eight is where Tarantino reveals the lie, and forces us to examine the true state of the nation. It can be unpleasant, and many people have rankled at the way Tarantino rubs our noses in racism. There have been complaints about the use of ‘nigger,’ complaints that claim it’s Tarantino’s most juvenile use of the word, but I think it’s his most sophisticated. In the past he’s used it as a hipster or as a boundary pusher, but now he’s using it as a weapon. He’s using this word again and again instead of switching it out with the extremely varied slurs white people have for black people because he wants to ram the word home, driving it deeper each time.