Tarantino returns with Django Unchained

Love him or hate him, nothing brings the geeks together like a new Quentin Tarantino project, and it was recently announced that he’d finished a new script, Django Unchained.

The movie has to do with slavery in the American South, and Tarantino said he wants Will Smith and Lady Gaga to star in the film.

Django Unchained is thought to be inspired by the 1966 Django, directed by Sergio Corbucci, as well as the 2007 Japanese remake by director Takashi Miike, known as Sukiyaki Western Django, which featured Tarantino in a cameo as a character named Ringo.

It’s usually pretty hard to keep a screenplay under wraps, no matter what tricks a major studio tries, although Spielberg is probably still the best at keeping his scripts tightly concealed, and you’d probably have better luck getting access to missile launch codes. 



But when Tarantino has a new screenplay, it’s a given it will leak pretty quick, and it has. 

Already there’s been a photo of someone reading it, giving it the thumbs up, and a fan also created his own poster for the film, which is a nice piece of art.

 

Many others have weighed in with their thoughts on the script, and reviews, as always, are mixed.

Harry at Aint-It-Cool-News of course is raving like he read the screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia, which is a given. 

Vanity Fair loved it too, with John Lopez calling the script “pretty awesome,” saying that Tarantino “transmutes America’s original sin into compelling spaghetti drama…”

 

Of course Tarantino will think he’s making a very (self) important piece of work, but as one report on thefilmstage.com calls it a “100 percent pure popcorn and revenge flick.” 



A reviewer on IndieWire didn’t like the script, calling it Tarantino’s “most contrived work…it feels kind of stale to me, despite the subject matter, and not really what I’d call a reinvention, which I was expecting.” 



The title character of Django is also second fiddle to the Christoph Waltz character, and he “doesn’t really, fully, come alive until about the last 25 minutes of this almost 3-hour script / movie.”

 

The script is 166 pages, which would equal a grand total of two hours and forty-six minutes – without credits.