10 Django Unchained Lessons Tarantino Must Learn For New Western

6. Don't Be Afraid To Keep It Tight

A good movie is as long as it needs to be: I'm completely fine with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a similarly-minded western to Django Unchained, being 3 hours long. Not for a single solitary second does the movie feel like it's bloated or that it's dragging. Django Unchained, on the other hand... well, there simply wasn't enough story to justify its length, and with about half an hour to go, the movie began to feel kind of like it was pushing its luck: we needed an ending. It's not that the story became suddenly uninteresting, or that there weren't plot points to tie up: QT, as he sometimes does (often to great results), lost hold of his narrative drive for a second, and it was impossible to escape the feeling that you were watching something almost resembling filler. Don't get me wrong: QT's filler is entertaining as hell to watch, but Django began to lose momentum at this point, and at the critical moment where the story should have been winding down, we were going off the beaten track into material that could have easily been cut. A good movie doesn't have to be 3 hours long, especially a western: very few westerns run at 3 hours long, but given how much material QT tends to write during the scripting stages, there's a real chance that he's going to treat us to a Heaven's Gate-sized picture with this next venture. But there's nothing less "epic" about a shorter running time - one could certainly argue that QT's best film is Reservoir Dogs on account of its tightness. Given that Tarantino's plots are always relatively "thin," he should keep the length firmly in mind when embarking on this project.