Five genres collapsed into one revenge film. The first half of Tarantino's fourth feature; in some festivals it played as one four-hour movie.
A woman known only as The Bride is shot in the head at her own wedding. She wakes up four years later from a coma. The men who tried to kill her — and the boss who ordered the hit, Bill — are still out there. She makes a list. Volume 1 covers the first two names on the list: O-Ren Ishii, queen of the Tokyo underworld, and Vernita Green, a former assassin now living a suburban Pasadena life.
The film opens on Vernita's killing, then flashes back to The Bride waking from her coma. The bulk of Volume 1 is the Tokyo journey — the meeting with sword-maker Hattori Hanzō, the assault on the House of Blue Leaves, the duel with O-Ren in the snow garden. Volume 1 ends with three names crossed off the list. Five remain.
Kill Bill is Tarantino's most-formally-ambitious project. The film moves between live-action samurai film (the Hattori Hanzō sequences), anime (the O-Ren backstory, animated by Production I.G), 1970s grindhouse exploitation (the hospital wake-up), spaghetti western (Volume 2's burial sequence, technically), and Hong Kong wuxia. Each genre is invoked in its specific visual language — different aspect ratios, colour palettes, even film stocks.
Tarantino had originally written Kill Bill as a single film. Volumes 1 and 2 were edited from the same shoot, split because Harvey Weinstein insisted that a four-hour Kill Bill would not be commercial. Tarantino has talked, off and on for two decades, about releasing 'The Whole Bloody Affair' — the original four-hour cut — but the cut has only screened at festivals. The two-volume release is, by accident, structurally clean: Volume 1 is the action film, Volume 2 is the dialogue film.
The 18-minute final fight at the House of Blue Leaves is the centrepiece of Volume 1 and the most-discussed action sequence of Tarantino's career. The Bride fights through dozens of Crazy 88 assassins, then through O-Ren's bodyguard Gogo Yubari, then duels O-Ren in the garden. The sequence cycles through black-and-white, full colour, silhouette, and even one brief animated insert.
The choreography was directed by Yuen Woo-ping (the choreographer of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Uma Thurman trained for months. The sequence was shot over weeks. It is, in Tarantino's own framing, his attempt to make 'the best samurai film made by a non-Japanese director' — a goal he has insisted on with characteristic refusal of qualification.
Thurman had worked with Tarantino on Pulp Fiction. Kill Bill is the role he wrote specifically for her. The performance requires her to play extended fight choreography, suspended cable-work, dialogue in subtitled Japanese, dialogue in subtitled French — and the whole emotional through-line of a woman who has lost her child to the men who shot her at the altar.
The shoot was reportedly extremely difficult. Thurman was injured during a car-driving sequence that Tarantino had asked her to perform herself; the resulting friction between her and Tarantino became public in a 2018 New York Times piece. The film stands on its own, but the production has become its own contested history.