Review: Movie - Inglourious Basterds - 2009

Inglorious Basterds

To call Tarantino an “ecletic” filmmaker would perhaps be the understatement of this brand new millennium. Let’s take a quick recap: “Reservoir Dogs”, “Pulp Fiction”, “Kill Bill” volumes 1 & 2. Those titles I just mentioned are just the short end of a long list of achievements credited to this academy award winning director. “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” won us over with their witty dialogues and mean-street poetic justice, the Kill Bill volumes awed us with perfectly choreographed fight...Read more scenes and almost R-rated violence. So what’s new about Tarantino’s latest entry: “Inglorious Basterds”? The answer: alternate history. Take a well known historical event (the Second World War in this case), add some cleverly designed characters and rewrite history. This seems to have been Tarantino’s recipe for his latest picture. Let me explain: Tarantino’s latest work takes us back to Nazi Occupied France, back when the war wasn’t looking to bad for the Germans. Very early on in the story, we are introduced to Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his troupe of New Yorker ruffians. Their mission: to be inserted behind enemy lines and to terrorize the Nazis by scalping their heads, beating their brains in with baseball bats, etc, you get the idea. But don’t get me wrong, this film is not a mindless tour of violence. Tarantino has always had a knack for reconciling explicit violence with meaningful, non-linear story lines. This is where the alternate history comes in: Lt. Raine and his gang’s exploits lead them to a collision course with the Fuhrer himself and a rewriting of the Second World War’s ending. The relatively unknown male performer Christopher Waltz does a fantastic job in his role as S.S. Officer Hans Landa and in the opening scene we learn why his character was given the grizzly monicker “Jew Hunter”. A word of warning, this is not the type of movie you would want to take your family to watch, unless your family consists of a pack of over-eighteen testosterone charged members of the male species. The graphic violence would be too much for the faint hearted. That having been said, I can honestly say that I would not mind watching this movie a third time. Yes, I have already seen it twice.

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