Inglorious Basterds (2009)
Inglorious Basterds is director Quentin Tarantino’s sixth full length feature film, and perhaps his most ambitious, since it is a period film which puts him out of his usual pop-culture infused comfort zone. But it would be wrong to take this as a serious World War II flick – it is anything but – and under the hood it’s really Tarantino at his usual form of entertainment: a lot of talking, but not about anything in particular. Or, in other words, the main point of this film is not its plot / message (or lack thereof), but Tarantino’s love of cinema and the art of film-making. The fact that the plot happens to be about such a controversial topic is actually rather trivial (at least in my opinion) – Tarantino is not here to outdo Schindler’s List, but just to make a bloody entertaining (literally) film where lots and lots of Nazis get slaughtered. If you can accept this, you will probably enjoy yourself.
As usual, the film contains many many references and homages to films, from the opening scene that was certainly inspired by Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns to the use of Ennio Morricone’s music (one piece I quickly recalled as from The Battle of Algiers, which I’ve recently seen). The opening is especially noteworthy as a classic scene of tension building. It reminded me of the introduction of Angel Eyes (the Bad) in Leone’s classic The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and was essentially a western scene set in France.
The film’s strength, as that of most Tarantino films, is memorable individual scenes filled with long dialogues. The opening scene was certainly one, where the main antagonist, the evil SS Colonel Hans Landa, establishes his on-screen menace by first drinking milk and then massacring Jews. Landa is played by Christoph Waltz, who audiences will probably remember for some time to come, the same way Javier Bardem established himself through Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. It’s a role of inexplicably twisted evil, and audiences always remember these characters.
Besides the opening, an extended scene set in a French bar with around a dozen characters (half a dozen good guys, half a dozen bad guys) was even more enjoyable. Indeed, this scene which happens around the midway point of the film was the film’s climax for me. The essential ingredients that made it work was a great ensemble cast, a rich and often funny dialogue, surprise developments, and an abrupt and violent showdown.
Afterwards, however, the film was all downhill for me. I didn’t enjoy Brad Pitt’s character (as the lead protagonist, he was nowhere as interesting as Landa), and some of the plot developments in the end were too over-the-top for me. So by the end, I felt that Tarantino had created a film with interesting individual moments and characters, but which tied together was less than the sum of its parts. Sadly to say, this is not Pulp Fiction.
7/10