“That’s a bingo!” - Colonel Hans Landa a.k.a. The Jew Hunter
Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 war film starring Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Mélanie Laurent, and Christoph Waltz, and directed by my all-time favorite director Quentin Tarantino. Set back in WWII in Nazi-occupied France, the film tells two different stories about revenge against the Third Reich. One of these stories is about a Jewish woman who creates a new life for herself under a new name and sets up a plan to kill the Nazi colonel who killed her family. The other story follows the journey of The Basterds, a group of Jewish-American soldiers who have one goal in mind that they intend to achieve: kill as many Nazis as possible.
I shared this movie with my father the other night, and needless to say, he loved it. My father and I have bonded over many different movies together, but Quentin Tarantino movies are usually the ones that we have the most fun watching and talking about. This film is no exception. This is a movie that if you don’t mind violence in films, you will have an absolute blast with. I feel like this is a movie that - like all of Tarantino’s works - is timeless. This film will never become dated.
One of the things that makes this movie so great is the script. The rapidfire back and forth dialogue really adds to the tension and suspense of the film, and Brad Pitt’s lines and the way he delivers them makes the film endlessly quotable and fun. The acting is fantastic, especially on the part of Pitt and Christoph Waltz. The setting is really cool, and the cinematography is particularly effective. As usual, like all other Tarantino films, the music is also gorgeous in every way.
Something that you just have to mention when talking about this film is how drastically they changed the history of the time period. Without getting into spoilers, I will say that there are some major events that happen in this movie that obviously did not happen in real life. But that’s one of my favorite elements of the film. Tarantino created an alternate universe just for the movie, and it totally works. It may bug historians a bit, but it’s not meant to be historically accurate, it’s meant to be a fictional story asking what would happen had things turned out differently. And quite honestly, I love the direction it took.
I shared this movie with my father the other night, and needless to say, he loved it. My father and I have bonded over many different movies together, but Quentin Tarantino movies are usually the ones that we have the most fun watching and talking about. This film is no exception. This is a movie that if you don’t mind violence in films, you will have an absolute blast with. I feel like this is a movie that - like all of Tarantino’s works - is timeless. This film will never become dated.
One of the things that makes this movie so great is the script. The rapidfire back and forth dialogue really adds to the tension and suspense of the film, and Brad Pitt’s lines and the way he delivers them makes the film endlessly quotable and fun. The acting is fantastic, especially on the part of Pitt and Christoph Waltz. The setting is really cool, and the cinematography is particularly effective. As usual, like all other Tarantino films, the music is also gorgeous in every way.
Something that you just have to mention when talking about this film is how drastically they changed the history of the time period. Without getting into spoilers, I will say that there are some major events that happen in this movie that obviously did not happen in real life. But that’s one of my favorite elements of the film. Tarantino created an alternate universe just for the movie, and it totally works. It may bug historians a bit, but it’s not meant to be historically accurate, it’s meant to be a fictional story asking what would happen had things turned out differently. And quite honestly, I love the direction it took.
When it comes to flaws with this film, I really only have one. There is a scene with Mike Myers in which we are introduced to Michael Fassbender’s character Lt. Archie Hicox (who is interestingly enough the great-great grandson of Tim Roth’s character from Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, English Pete Hicox, a.k.a. Oswaldo Mobray). This scene did not need to be quite as long as it was, and it dragged just a tad too much for my liking. That is really my only drawback to this movie.
This movie is fantastic in every way, and it is yet another piece of evidence proving that Quentin Tarantino is a master of cinema. I love this film, and I strongly recommend it to fans of war films, snappy dialogue, great acting, memorable characters, and awesome music. Inglourious Basterds is a modern classic that deserves to be watched again and again.
Rating: R
Grade: A
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