At some point in his career, Quentin Tarantino decided he was done with making
regular movies.
Instead, he developed a crush for making movies about other movies. With Kill Bill it was kung fu and samurai epics, and this carried on into Death Proof as an homage to classic 70 B-movies.
He’s continuing the trend with Inglourious Basterds a film that is a love letter to classic cinema.
Basterds is an intentionally misspelled fantasy WWII movie where a group of American GI Jews, led by Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine, infiltrate Nazi occupied France with the goal of killing said Nazi’s in ludicrously graphic ways.
The story is told through separate acts, or vignettes, that focus on the Basterds as they go about terrorizing the Third Reich, as well as a few segments that don’t seem to directly relate with Nazi scalping.
At first this seems to be the fatal flaw of Basterds; the segments give the film a disjointed feeling, and with it a weird flow.
The movie moves past this awkward phase, however, and comes together to form a story that is Tarantino at his best; violent, overblown, and brilliantly hilarious.
The story feels like a modern day propaganda film, with Hitler being exaggerated to the point of being a cartoon character and the Basterds, as cruel as they may be, only doing what their country feels is absolutely necessary.
Featured is also polished writing that revels in long scenes of dialogue that seem to have no point to the main story, reminding us how rare it is to see a scene where two characters just talk amongst each other. No quick cuts. No action. Just dialogue.
Its impossible not to fall in love with Pitt’s Aldo “The Apache” Raine, with his thick Tennessee accent and charismatic gruffness. His speech is even more intense and strangely humorous then what is featured in trailers, and he most definitely gets his scalps.
Christoph Watlz’s Col. Hans Landa is the only other performance worth mentioning, but it’s for a good reason. He absolutely steals the show, showing an energy and aloofness that he manages to maintain even when speaking French, German and Italian. He has an unpredictability to his character that makes one act of violence towards the end downright shocking.
The direction is just as polished as the writing, with Tarantino holding back on the flourishes and dramatically epic shots that would make a movie such as this feel cheap.
It’s important to note the “fantasy” before WII, as this movie has as much historical accuracy as the Lord of the Rings. Tarantino doesn’t take liberties, he takes entire parts of our second World War history and throws them out the window.
Despite this, Inglourious Basterds manages to be one of Quentin Tarantino’s best movies in years.
