"Say 'auf Wiedersehen' to your Nazi balls. "
Inglourious Basterds (2009) is Quentin Tarantino’s unique WWII epic about language and revenge. The film simultaneously follows Lt. Aldo Raine and his group of Nazi hunting Jewish American soldiers called "The Basterds" and Shoshana a French Jew who barely escapes death at the hands of the Nazi SS and sees and opportunity to exact revenge on the National Socialist German Worker's Party.
I really like how Quentin Tarantino, who is known for his dialogue filled with pop culture references, uses pop culture to his advantage in this film. The characters in this film still talk about pop culture in a very Tarantino fashion, but they talk about actors, movies, music and even historical events that were important and hot topics during the time this is supposed to take place. I think this is very interesting and super smart of Tarantino, and not many other writers could actually pull something like this off in a film.
I believe this film is proof Quentin Tarantino finally settling into his own way of storytelling that works for him. This film stops with clever attempts to reinvent how to tell a film story with different formats, instead with this one he kind of makes up his own quirky way to tell a story. The majority of this film is actually straight linear storytelling, but through clever editing (and some other small tricks) Tarantino cuts away in the middle of a scene or action to explain anything further than the linear story can tell. This is evident more than anything in the sudden interrupting flashback/voice over to explain Hugo Stiglitz, the German soldier who went AWOL and killed 13 Nazi officers. It's stylish and still better than random exposition. Kill Bill (2003, 2004) did this also, to a much lesser degree actually (on top of the mixed-up-chapter nonlinear storytelling) in Volume 1 it cut away to set up a lot of the story while the Bride was trying to 'wiggle her big toe' and in Volume 2 it cut away to explain the Pai Mei flashback while she's stuck in a coffin buried alive. And now, retrospectively, I can see Django Unchained (2012) did this for all of its nonlinear cuts, essentially it's just a stylish and very streamlined way to do a flashback and relate relevant exposition or backstory.
My biggest problem with this film is it doesn't feel like one film, instead it feels like a bunch of separate incidents that are loosely connected. The film is essentially telling two different stories moving forward about about the same thing. For my taste I would have liked to see these two stories crossover more, because as it is side characters cross over and (a couple) events cross over from one story to the other but otherwise they're pretty much completely separate stories. There's actually some kind of humor in the fact that they both climb to basically the same climax and never actually cross [though I liked this better in True Romance (1993) where they actually crossed at the end,] and maybe that's what he was going for, but to me this feels incredibly like a serial TV show with a bunch of different characters moving forward and doing different things than a movie that is nicely interconnected.
Also adding to the feel of a TV show, there's too many characters in this film for my taste. This just makes it so that there's a lot of different things going on in this movie that we have to keep track of, I really didn't even appreciate how much is actually really going on in this film until subsequent viewings. Now a majority of the characters come from the fact that he's telling two separate stories, the antagonists (thankfully) carry over in both stories but each has its own set of protagonists and then halfway through we add even more with the advent of "Operation Kino." I've got to ask why the heck there's so many Basterds? It's fine we show 9 Basterds at the beginning of the film (some of which actually never do anything!), and then we add in the German Stiglitz (that's 10) and then we add the two foreign British agents in Operation Kino. I'm not a fan of useless characters or characters who's sole purpose is to die. At least why couldn't we just start with less soldiers in the Basterds to begin with? And all these protagonists are just for one story of the two in this film.
There's also a couple times the film's characters switch language kind of sloppily for convenience more than anything else. The first one is in the opening sequence, and I always find myself asking would a French dairy farmer really actually be proficient at speaking English during this time? This is somewhat excusable because it's in the very beginning of the film (where coincidences slide) and it sets up the language switching and how it will be used for the rest of the film, but I gotta wonder if it would have been easier and more historically possible if they instead switched over to German? Another time that I noticed this is in the pub shootout the German soldier Wilhelm (who is there celebrating the birth of his son) switches to English, this is solely to accommodate the fact that Aldo Raine shouldn't be able to speak anything else, and we wanted him in this scene even though he had another German-speaking Basterd up top. This convenience is pretty well swept under the rug with a "you speak English pretty well for a German soldier." and an "I know... [lets move along.]" Kinda sloppy, not going to lie but hey at least they addressed it?
When I heard the Quentin Tarantino was working on a World War II war film, I was a little disappointed. I personally don't care much for war films and just assumed this film would be a reason-less gorefest (funny how it actually turned out to be one of his tamer films gore-wise). Instead Tarantino decided to shoot the film like a spaghetti western, and I think that is simply genius. I'd never seen anything like that before, and to combine two seemingly completely different genres in one like this is (in my opinion) absolutely brilliant. Think about it, does this film seem like any other war films you've seen before? No. Tarantino used a majority of western music, had the cinematography mimic that of (primarily spaghetti) westerns, and even put in a lot of little nods to westerns story-wise like dynamite and even throwing in a very dramatic Mexican standoff! The result is very smart, interesting and super unique.
This film, like many other Tarantino films, has an absolutely amazing cast. I'm super glad that Tarantino decided to use some foreign actors in the foreign parts because Christoph Waltz really makes this film for me, I just think he's simply amazing as "the Jew hunter" Colonel Hans Landa. But Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Mélanie Laurent, Diane Kruger and Daniel Brühl all have very awesome and memorable roles in this film also, the acting is just great all around.
But my favorite thing about this film is the use of language. Unlike countless American films that use a cheap dubbing of sorts on the script level and subbing in say English in place of German (and maybe adding in an accent) when characters are in other countries, this film doesn't and as a result uses Language to build suspense for the characters in the story. This story takes place in Nazi-occupied France, there's Germans walking around in France and most of our protagonists are American, the film takes this even further by adding in British soldiers and a brief stint of Italian too as the plot develops. The film has a series of sequences (at least 3?) that are interrogations and a character's knowledge and use of language is a key factor in each of these conversations. Also the way that Tarantino masterfully divulges a little information about who knows what in each conversation adds so much suspense not only for the characters but also the viewer who is right there with characters during these sequences, trying to figure out how much each character really knows.
Inglourious Basterds (2009) is something new for Tarantino but also a return to great form too. Highly recommend it. 5/5 Stars.
Happy watching!
Want more Tarantino goodness? Check back all month for my Tribute to Tarantino in honor of his latest film Django Unchained (2012).
Go back to Tarantino's first film with Reservoir Dogs (1992), check out the first script he wrote (but didn't direct) True Romance (1993), The smash hit that really put him on the map Pulp Fiction (1994), another film written by him but in the hands of another director From Dusk till Dawn (1996), his blaxploitation-influenced crime film Jackie Brown (1997, The two part revenge epic Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) or his tribute to grindhouse cinmea Death Proof (2007).
Even though I've gone through every film he's directed, I've got more films planned all month so be sure to check back!
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