I went to see Inglourious Basterds and I was surprised to have very much enjoyed it.
Not for the squeamish, but the whole feel of the movie is so over the top that the violence, for once, didn’t bother me. Probably because I didn’t engage with any of the characters. Couldn’t care less if they lived or died. But that’s not to say I wasn’t interested in what happened to them.
It was a complex, interwoven little plot sequence. It wasn’t really about the Basterds, a crack squad of Americans operating in France with the sole aim of putting terror into the hearts of the Nazis. It certainly wasn’t about the bungling British, though the scene with Churchill and Mike Meyers as a nancy British high commanding officer was surreal and quite one of the most memorable pieces of the film. It was, to an extent, about the Jewish girl who escaped from the Nazis early on, and plotted her revenge later. It wasn’t about the young German soldier who rather fancied her, but who turned out to be a prat, like all the rest.
For me it was mostly about the marvellous German Jew Hunter, a clever, clever detective who did some clever, clever detectoring that lead to a satisfying conclusion.
The characters were two dimensional to the point of being parodies (particularly the British, but then, Brad Pitt as the leader of the Basterds was pretty ridiculous too – he’s turning into another Johnny Depp, I haven’t seen him play a character with any, well, character, for ages, if ever, but he plays the larger than life and twice as silly ones with aplomb). The staging, the lighting, the costumes and the makeup were perfect, as you’d expect from Tarantino. You can even forgive him writing over the scene and using arrows to point out notable people in the German high command (Goerring, Borman etc). And the somewhat affected spelling of the film title. Heck, he’s Quentin Tarantino, he can do what he likes.
As a native German speaker I enjoyed the authentically spoken German. There is a lot of German and French (and even a little Italian) spoken in the movie and subtitles are used extensively. I enjoy hearing other languages spoken and so this was a plus for me.
I’m probably not selling this well, but for the movie to work, I believe it had to be somewhat unbelievable. This could have been just another grim, gut wrenching war movie, but it wasn’t. It really was about a whole bunch of pretty unpleasant people who, by and large, got what they deserved. Go and see it!