Inglourious Basterds Review

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I’m a little rusty on writing, as I haven’t done it in a while.  Hopefully this review will be sufficient anyway.

Quentin Tarantino has done it again.  For all you Tarantino fans, you have to see Inglourious Basterds.  If you’re into history you’ll also like it, though not because any of it is true (OK…so Hitler did exist, but that’s about as close to the truth as this movie gets).  This is where knowledge counts – the more you know about the Nazis and the Holocaust, the more you will enjoy this movie.  Plus, you get to witness the Nazis getting their asses handed to them.  Who wouldn’t enjoy that?

The movie takes place in both France and Germany.  In a nutshell, it’s a movie about two plots to kill Hitler in order to both gain revenge and end the war.  Brad Pitt (who I have come to no longer loathe since his performance in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) plays the American Lt. Aldo Raine, who forms a squad of Jewish men to help him kill Nazis.   This squad includes the man they called the Bear Jew, who beats Nazis to death with a baseball bat, and Hugo Stiglitz, imprisoned for his brutal ways of murdering Nazis and set free by the Basterds.  From there on, it just gets funnier and funnier.

What caught me off guard was that the main villain in this movie was not really Hitler (he’s sort of in the background of all of this, making few appearances), but a fictitious man named Col. Hans Landa also known as Jew Hunter.  He comes off as a pleasant, social man; but really, he’s insane.  Enough said.

So much about this movie makes you think.  Underneath the hilarity also lies the hypocrisy of man.  The Basterds heard how cruel the Nazis were and there response was to be cruel as means of revenge.  The fictitious character Hans Landa also serves the purpose of taking all of the Nazi cruelty and stereotypes and putting it into one character (and also not giving one character all the glory, as most historical movies falsely do).

As with all Tarantino movies, you can expect violence.  Aldo Raine assigns his Basterds to bring him one hundred Nazi scalps each, which they do.  You can expect some blood and you can expect some cruelty.  However, it's not all unnecessary (as some have described) and it is meant to add to the atmosphere of the film.  Despite all of this violence, it is not gory.  I can think specifically of only three scenes where I wish I had looked away sooner, but they were mild compared to some of the more graphic movies of today.  And the violence is necessary because of the time period that was being observed.  The Holocaust was violent.  The Nazis were violent.  And that violence triggered more violence.  Don't go into this movie expecting pink clouds and bunnies and people pulling flowers out of their ears.  It's relatively violent.

I will admit, when I saw the trailer for the film I was not interested in seeing it.  I love Tarantino, but the trailer did nothing for me.  After seeing it, my fiancé told me how great it was and how much he wished I would see it, so I did.  And I’m glad.  The movie is great (though nothing will ever beat Pulp Fiction, so don’t get TOO excited).  After seeing so many historical films that have been made so inaccurately in order to play on the audience’s emotions, it is very refreshing to see an “historical” movie that is not supposed to be even close to the truth.  It is sheer entertainment - a movie hasn't made me laugh that hard in quite a while.  I highly recommend this movie, though be prepared for A LOT of subtitles.

Oh...and will someone tell me why the HTML code is showing up in the middle of this review?