Inglourious Basterds review
Beware of spoilers for Inglourious Basterds.
Nazi's - The National Socialist Party has always made fantastic villains in feature films for the most obvious reason. Nazi's weren't created by comic book writers, they weren't created by a genius novelist, and no, they were not created by George Lucas when writing Indiana Jones - they were living breathing villains in the world and for a short time existed as a major power on Earth. Told you something you didn't know, did I? In all seriousness, I personally have always found that movies that had the Nazi party as the main villains, Raiders of the Lost Ark for example, have always been great movies. They projected everything that it was needed to be evil. That, and I love watching movie characters killin' Nazi's.
Quentin Tarantino is notorious for his brand of filmmaking, something we should all be aware of by now, and when teamed up with someone like Brad Pitt, you'd think Inglourious Basterds would be nothing less than a kick-ass movie with ridiculous and cliche moments that only make crowds love the film. That's so with this, however, don't go into this movie thinking your about to see an action move because the truth is, your not. Inglourious Basterds is a character driven film more than anything else and a good one at that, for the content that is there I still found a few things disappointing but not enough though to make me turn my head.
"Nazi occupied France; A young Jewish refugee Shosanna Dreyfus witnesses the slaughter of her family by Colonel Hans Landa. Narrowly escaping with her life, she plots her revenge several years later when German war hero Fredrick Zoller quickly takes an interest in her and arranges an illustrious movie premiere at the theater she now runs. With the promise of every major Nazi officer in attendance, the event catches the attention of the "Basterds", a group of Jewish-American guerrilla soldiers led by the ruthless Lt. Aldo Raine. As the relentless executioners advance and the conspiring young girl's plans are set in motion, their paths will cross for a fateful evening that will shake the very annals of history." [IMDB]
Written and directed by Quentin Taratino, Brad Pitt stars as Lt. Aldo Raine, Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa, Diane Kruger as Bridget von Hammersmark, Til Schweiger as Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz, Eli Roth as Sgt. Donny Donowitz, Melanie Laurent as Shosanna Dreyfus, Daniel Bruhl as Fredrick Zoller, and several other rounding out this entertaining cast.
Going in to this film I expected a couple of things, none of which turned into a reality. For starters, I figured the film would focus primarily on the Basterds themselves but it doesn't - it's a film that has several different group of characters which the film focused on creating its narrative which all comes together towards the climax of the film. Secondly, I expected this film to be an action film overall but it isn't. As I mentioned above, it's a character driven film with long takes of dialog building scenes each having its own climax leading up to the films overall climax. Both of those things, although unexpected, don't cause the film to be bad especially since the acting in this is phenomenal. Brad Pitt, granted he's great in every film, once again does a great job playing this new character of his, Aldo Raine, a tough US soldier. This may not make sense to most of you but Pitt's portrayal of Raine reminded me a lot of Sarg from Red vs. Blue which makes the character all the more special in my opinion.
The whole cast deserves great credit for their performances but one in particular deserves praise as after seeing this, I believe actor Christoph Waltz deserves an Oscar nomination as SS Colonel Hans Landa, the films main villain. Some of the great villains in the past decade have many different villainous virtues but some of the most fun are the polite villains - villains that are so evil but in a nice way as if they try to make someone comfortable before they kill them brutally. Most of Waltz's performance comes from Tarantino's amazing dialog as both dialog and delivery create some of the most entertaining scenes. This performance alone by Waltz is the key element when recommending this film to those considering it.
Although this film was promoted as an action film, wrongly by the Weinstein Company in my opinion, it is limited during the two and a half hours. Even still, rest assured that what little action there is, it's awesome and brutal! With the risk of giving all the goods away, that's all I'll say.
That in itself, however, is one of my biggest problems with the film. The title is Inglourious Basterds - the pitch is killing Nazi's. This is a two and a half hour picture and the Basterds are in this film for probably less than an hour which is extremely aggravating. In part, that's Tarantino's fault when writing this by putting so much content in this film, even though the content is all good but again, the film is called Inglourious Basterds. That would be like taking a movie titled Indiana Jones and telling the story of his long lost son and not the titled character, ... oh wait, they did that already. That was a bad example. You get the idea. Luckily for Tarantino, his dialog for every scene was interesting enough to keep me entertained, but I would have rather seen a film about Brad Pitt leading his Basterds killing Nazi's scene after scene.
Here's the problem when trying to sell this to those considering this film; if your expecting an action movie and don't want to hear a lot of talking, don't see this film. At least wait for it on DVD because there is a lot of talking, and I mean a lot. This film is driven solely on dialog in very long scenes and set pieces that a lot of mainstream audience members might find very annoying and boring. On the flip side, if your a Tarantino fan or a movie fan, as in watching art, then you'll probably enjoy Inglourious Basterds. For me, I definitely liked it, I loved Waltz as Hans Landa but I probably won't see it again, at least for a while, because two and a half hours of talking isn't exactly what I'd call a fun time. On that note, while trying to be fair, Inglourious Basterds is still a very good film, with great dialog, amazing performances, with Tarantino's flavor giving this film a solid 7 out of 10.
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I agree with you 100%
As do I. It was a good movie, and I liked the Shosanna plot, and I loved Col. Landa as the villain, but far too much time was spent on Shosanna and Zoller, when all I wanted was to get back to the Basterds.
I read somewhere that this was originally supposed to be a mini-series, and a friend talked him into doing it in a film instead. If thats true, that would explain most of the weaknesses of the film, as all the plots could have gotten the proper attention in mini-series format, and been paced better.
@ Barachiel, that actually makes a lot more sense now when I think back to the film. A lot of it would have made for a good HBO series.
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