Watching this again after years and years convincing myself that this was in fact Tarantino’s crowning achievement was a strange experience. The first half of the film was all fine and good. It was all mostly how I remembered it. Occasional moments played out slightly differently though. Just tiny things here and there that were slightly skewed, probably due to recollecting the social memory of this film rather than the actual film itself. 

Aside from this, the only thing I kept thinking about was how much what was playing out, especially when it came to the visual framing and the short story formatting, like Sin City (which I have a slight distaste for). The style is hyper-real, graphic novels influenced both. I do believe Tarantino does it better here using this style, pulling from a wider range of inspiration with much more grace. But nevertheless it felt like a little boy pulling a series of images from a comic book; one of the very things why Zach Snyder rubs me the wrong way so often in his movies. 

But the thing that made me remember what made this film so great was the second half. As soon as Butch rides off into the sunset on Zed’s chopper, everything clicks. The first half was the setup up of the cruel cycle of this gangster life made to look cool and fun, as if from the the perspective of neebish teen. The second is the one that breaks the cycle. Butch escapes it, Jules rejects it, Vincent falls victim to it. At this point, the nonlinear structure actually becomes pretty conventional from a narrative POV as all of our characters complete their arcs perfectly right at the end even though this isn’t chronologically the case. It’s perfect, like clockwork.

I’m just going to jump back to the start of my review here and mention that while so many things ran differently in my head than how it actually went down in the movie, I was very surprised that the iconic line of the robbery was actually different at the end than at the start. Maybe I’m dumb for just noticing this but it fully supports how the film you’re watching in the beginning isn’t going to be the one you finish. It turns into something more ambiguous than that and definitely confirms that this is definitely Quentin’s masterwork (apologies to Brad Pitt's character in Inglorious Bastards).