Quentin Tarantino, a famous director of our time, has created many movies to challenge our expectations of film in different ways for each feature film he produces. In “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Tarantino plays with new elements that we haven’t seen from him before.

The movie starts in the 1960s, and features Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton, one of the more important characters, questioning his career as an actor. His stunt double, almost brother and main character of the film Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt, consoles him. As the movie goes on, you can see Dalton dissolving in a way as a side effect of his career going down the drain.

In the film, I find Tarantino distracting the audience from Cliff with tangential stories to distract from the “main story.” Personally, I find this appealing because it shows the different lives of people who seem pointless to anything a normal film storyline would be trying to focus on.

As the story progresses you see Tarantino playing with sound throughout the movie in ways he hadn’t done in his other films. In this one, the audience  always knows the source of the sound or music they’re hearing. To me, this leaves the movie seeming more simplistic than his other movies. It blends the scene together as a whole and it isn’t as flashy as his other films.

Throughout the movie you also see historic moments. One of my favorites is the insertion of the Manson Family. Cliff visits this “group” when he drops a hippie off. In the moment you know something is wrong by the way Tarantino sets up the film. The confidence of Cliff shows that he knows he is somewhere where he isn’t supposed to be. At the end of the film, it shows Cliff and Rick stopping the Manson family from killing anymore by killing them in a gruesome manner ,when in real life they actually killed Rick’s neighbor’s wife, Sharon Tate, who was pregnant at the time.

This film was a refresher from his other films in a way where it was shot in such a smooth way. Every scene connected in a way that made the whole movie seem fluid, even with the three different lives going on simultaneously. Tarantino made a complex film seem so simple, yet he completely immersed you in Hollywood in the ‘60s.