Brad Pitt takes no prisoners in Quentin Tarantino’s high-octane WWII revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds. As war rages in Europe, a Nazi-scalping squad of American soldiers, known to their enemy as “The Basterds,” is on a daring mission to take down the leaders of the Third Reich. Bursting with “action, hair-trigger suspense and a machine-gun spray of killer dialogue” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone), Inglourious Basterds is “another Tarantino masterpiece” (Jake Hamilton, CBS-TV)!Although Quentin Tarantino has cherished Enzo G. Castellari’s 1978 “macaroni” war flick The Inglorious Bastards for most of his film-geek life, his own Inglourious Basterds is no remake. Instead, as hinted by the Tarantino-esque misspelling, this is a lunatic fantasia of WWII, a brazen re-imagining of both history and the behind-enemy-lines war film subgenre. There’s a Dirty Not-Quite-Dozen of mostly Jewish commandos, led by a Tennessee good ol’ boy named Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) who reckons each warrior owes him one hundred Nazi scalps–and he means that literally. Even as Raine’s band strikes terror into the Nazi occupiers of France, a diabolically smart and self-assured German officer named Landa (Christoph Waltz) is busy validating his own legend as “The Jew Hunter.” Along the way, he wipes out the rural family of a grave young girl (Melanie Laurent) who will reappear years later in Paris, dreaming of vengeance on an epic scale.
Now, this isn’t one more big-screen comic book. As the masterly opening sequence reaffirms, Tarantino is a true filmmaker, with a deep respect for the integrity of screen space and the tension that can accumulate in contemplating two men seated at a table having a polite conversation. IB reunites QT with cinematographer Robert Richardson (who shot Kill Bill), and the colors and textures they serve up can be riveting, from the eerie red-hot glow of a tabletop in Adolf Hitler’s den, to the creamy swirl of a Parisian pastry in which Landa parks his cigarette. The action has been divided, Pulp Fiction-like, into five chapters, each featuring at least one spellbinding set-piece. It’s testimony to the integrity we mentioned that Tarantino can lock in the ferocious suspense of a scene for minutes on end, then explode the situation almost faster than the eye and ear can register, and then take the rest of the sequence to a new, wholly unanticipated level within seconds.
Again, be warned: This is not your “Greatest Generation,” Saving Private Ryan WWII. The sadism of Raine and his boys can be as unsavory as the Nazi variety; Tarantino’s latest cinematic protégé, Eli (director of Hostel) Roth, is aptly cast as a self-styled “golem” fond of pulping Nazis with a baseball bat. But get past that, and the sometimes disconcerting shifts to another location and another set of characters, and the movie should gather you up like a growing floodtide. Tarantino told the Cannes Film Festival audience that he wanted to show “Adolf Hitler defeated by cinema.” Cinema wins. –Richard T. Jameson
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January 2, 2006
#1
I want my money back.
Seriously.
Put it this way.
The best thing of the movie is Brad Pitt and he’s only, I repeat, ONLY in 10% of the movie and probably says under 100 words total. Even the slaying of Hitler wasn’t that good.
Oh sure they pumped him full of lead and then some more, I know he’s Hitler, but he’s barely portrayed as evil other than the fact that he’s given the status of being Hitler. So it was rather neutral to see him die.
I wish a brought a book or game boy or something to play through most of the movie. only in the last 20 minutes did ANYthing really happen.
I was ready to walk out had I not been so blocked into my seat at the theater
January 2, 2006
#2
To all the people who found this film brilliant, astounding.. or even a great film… you guys must have been high on cocaine or something cause this film was boring. The best part of this movie was the previews… that is it…
Don’t waste your money on this garbage.
January 2, 2006
#3
I like war movies, but this was rubbish. With the talent behind this movie they could have done a much better job.
There are SO many great stories to be told out there, why o why do they make such drivel??
Who decides which stories to tell, are these people nuts, bored or just ignorant?
January 2, 2006
#4
Everyone I know who does not have a man-crush on Q.T. thinks this movies SUCKS. And they are RIGHT.
BORING.
INSIPD.
TRITE.
UNFUNNY.
UNMOVING.
The opening scene (Hide-a-Jew) is awesome. After that — 2+ hours of sheer CRAP.
BYPASS.
January 2, 2006
#5
The blood-thirsty, revenge-laden, vicious, right-wing premise of “Inglourious Basterds” ignores the reality of wars, armies, and the real lives of soldiers. No soldier in any army should be scalped or dismembered merely because he is a member of any opposing army. For in a vast majority of cases he had no choice in entering that army or of wearing any particular uniform.
Therefore even American thugs, bullies, and mindless killers don’t have any right to commit atrocities just because they’re on the “right” side of any war, or in the “right” army. To picture our own boys and men in uniform during WWII as the monsters in this film is shameful.
The Axis side of WWII was fought by draftees into the German Army from many European countries and ethnic groups. In every country that Hitler’s war machine invaded, boys and men of partly-German parentage were drafted. They had no choice of whether they would serve as German soldiers. They little choice of which service or unit in which they would serve.
Therefore, “Germans” and “Nazis”, as this filmmaker uses them, were not interchangeable terms. As our war propaganda, they were understandable; but not as terms of reference in popular entertainment more than sixty years later.
Any German boy, living in Germany from 1933 to 1945, who dared to say “I’m not a Nazi, I’m a Christian-Democrat”, so I shouldn’t be drafted, he could be sent to prison or to a concentration camp. After the 1938 Anschluss into Vienna, if a Swiss-resident, partly-German, partly-Jewish foreign student, on being called up for military service by the German war machine, dared to say that he was both a Christian Democrat like his father, and partly Jewish, he’d have ended up in a concentration camp in Poland.
However, the German Army of WWII had a Code of Military Justice so strong that even the Nazis couldn’t weaken them. It had been designed to protect German soldiers from heavy-handed abuse by non-coms and officers. That is one of the reasons why the SS was formed; to get around those rules.
Generals like Erwin Rommel were loved by their soldiers because he was strong enough to require of Hitler that the Geneva Convention, not the SS, would govern the way that his men would fight the war, at least in North Africa. Toward the end of WWII, when Hitler was losing the war, and after General Rommel had been executed, some tank and infantry units of the German Army were transferred to the SS, without the consent of their officers, non-coms, or soldiers.
So even men assigned to the SS in 1944 to 1945 weren’t necessarily “free game” for Allied manhunters. To say otherwise in a modern film is a gross distortion of history.
I had a friend, a Swiss-resident German-Jewish friend drafted in 1938 after the Nazis invaded Vienna, where he was an art student. He hid in plain sight in the German Army for six years until he was liberated in 1944 by Canadians from Quebec.
His name was William. H. “Lucky” Dingler, a multi-lingual German Army Signal Corpsman. For 21 months he was attached to the original Afrika Korps, and worked for Erwin Rommel as a proud member of the DAK. He was brilliant; a human computer. What he saw he could draw perfectly. What he learned, what he heard, he never forgot. He kept the younger men for whom he was responsible fed and alive as much as he could.
He told me how he survived. He memorized the German Army’s Military Code of Justice in boot camp. Then he accumulated medals for excellent military skills while serving with several units. A pre-war sophisticated man-about-town, during the war he consistently played the rarely-neat, partly out-of uniform, private soldier, and thus avoided any promotion to a rank higher than Staff Corporal, so that his Jewish heritage wouldn’t be discovered in a background check.
When he was pressured to go to Officer’s Candidate School, he deliberately committed a courts martial offense. He survived a trial in which he could have gotten the death penalty, coming out of it with three weeks of detention, delayed, because he knew the Code of Military Justice. He had made himself too good to push around and too incorrigible to promote. (Acting this way, he won the German Iron Cross twice, the Italian Croce de Guerra, and a chest-full of campaign badges.)
He estimated that 10% of the army were snitches for the Gestapo. So to survive, and because replacements so often quickly died, he made very few friends.
In the post-war de-Nazification process carried out by the Allies, he was “held harmless”; not guilty of any blame for the war, even though he was a skillful and decorated soldier in the wrong, German army.
9,000,000 German soldiers didn’t survive. Most of them were draftees, just like my friend.