Perhaps not a movie review, more my thoughts on the film. As often, I'd suggest that the wonderful writers over at salon.com give a better review of Inglourious Basterds than I can. I'll assume the reader has seen the film as I'll refer to scenes and include lots of spoilers. That aside, let's go!
Inglourious Basterds contains great acting, great dialogue and a compelling story. Tarantino has not so much borrowed historical facts as incorporated the mythos of World War II into his film. Most of the Nazis - and almost all the Germans in the movie are Nazis - are portrayed in a similar light as they are in computer games like Castle Wolfenstein. This isn't an attempt to achieve a realistic depiction of events, rather the Nazis are deliberately used as a mechanism to embody a cartoonish good-vs-evil battle.
The Nazis that have the larger roles come across as almost universally unsympathetic. No tears are shed when they are slaughtered off brutally and individually, or on mass. The one bad-guy that Tarantino humanises is German war hero Fredrick Zoller (played by the likeable Daniel Brühl in his first non-German movie). Unfortunately, Tarantino doesn't allow the audience to preserve their sympathetic feelings for him. In his final scene he is revealed as a chauvinist and just as evil as all the others. To emphasize the point, he is shot and in his dying moments manages to kill off the movie's heroine.
Not that Tarantino has ever displayed any sentimentality towards his movies' characters, the good or evil. Similarly here, almost every major character is bumped off. Tellingly, the only significant character that survives is Brad Pitt. I must wonder whether Tarantino would have allowed this character to live if it had been played by anyone other than a star of Pitt's profile.
Brad Pitt does give a solid performance in the movie as Lt Aldo Raine. I have to wonder though whether another actor with less of a profile might have brought more to the role. Some of the scenes - in particularly, one where Lt Raine does an atrocious job of masquerading as an Italian film maker - seem overburdened by Brad Pitt's ego.
Other actors in the movie are superb. Christoph Waltz is breathtaking as Col. Hans Landa, the Nazi "Jew Hunter". He plays the role with subtlety and precision and his Best Actor award at Cannes is well deserved. It will be worth rewatching the film for Waltz's performance alone. Many of the best scenes in the movie are based around clever dialogue building a delicious, almost unbearable tension. Waltz carries these scenes seemingly effortlessly.
An aspect of Tarantino's movie making that I find less favourable is his compulsion to pay tribute to movies he loves. When done with a light touch, this can work well. The opening scene of Waltz interrogating a farmer and his family is masterful. It's easy to imagine a similar scene set on a ranch in the wild west rather than a farm in occupied France. In other parts of the film, genre injection is more clumsily handled. Several characters are introduced by flashing up their character's name in a yellow, stylised font. This is jarring for those sections of the film where Tarantino had otherwise immersed us in a WWII genre.
WWII is not a genre that Tarantino has worked with before. He largely handles it well. I particularly appreciated that the movie was acted in the language that the characters would have naturally spoken under the circumstances. This cosmopolitan mix of German, French, English and Italian is refreshing and brave for a Hollywood movie.
Some elements of the story of WWII came across to me as anachronisms. Lt Raine's gimmick of carving a Nazi scar into the foreheads of released German prisoners doesn't make much sense in context. Post WWII, with the defeat of the Nazis, the swastika became a symbol synonymous with evil. At the time though, it was representative of the Third Reich, one of the world's superpowers. For the Nazis, the swastika was a symbol of pride and national strength. How would Americans of today react if marines captured in Iraq or Afghanistan had the American flag tattooed on their forehead?
A similar anachronism was the willingness of Col. Landa to sabotage the German war effort. Before the D-Day invasion, the ultimate defeat of Germany was far from certain. Would a high ranking Colonel respected by his side as a hero really place such heavy odds on the Allies being triumphant?
The faults are really nit-picks though. Overall, Inglourious Basterds is one of the few Tarantino movies I've thoroughly enjoyed (Pulp Fiction being the other). Overlooking the scenes of wincing horror/violence, Tarantino has put his talents of pacing and dialogue to use to create a movie that establishes a new sub-genre in World War II films.
