The Gist: Quentin Tarantino experiments with War Propaganda.
Who’s in it: Brad Pitt. Sort of.
Who made it: IMDB is your geeky friend but the headline is this: It’s Tarantino.
So the trailer for Inglourious Basterds (Or ‘Custards’ as they said on Radio 5 Live yesterday) promises Brad Pitt on a comedic Nazi killing adventure in France. If that’s what you want to see, you’re going to be disappointed. Just like the trailers for Home Alone actually gave away all the funny jokes, so the trailers for Basterds reveal most of what is actually a small aspect of the overall film – the Basterds themselves.
The real film? Well, it’s War Propaganda, something Tarantino isn’t afraid of rubbing in your face. You want to see Hitler getting pwned? The whole Nazi machine getting horribly killed to death? Well, Tarantino’s going to deliver – but because he’s not a stupid hack like Joel Schumacher or Michael Bay, he’s going to make sure you know you’re no better than the Nazis who loved Nazi propaganda showing heroic exploits against the Allies if you laugh, if you enjoy it.
Like all Tarantino’s great films, it’s the characters and dialogue that sets his work apart – Basterds is no exception. The Nazis themselves are almost like villains from a Joss Whedon series – personable and charming on the surface, which makes them all the more creepy and threatening. Only Hitler is excluded from the ‘charming Nazi’ treatment, being portrayed, from the start, as an vain, angry, idiotic buffoon. The star is the deliciously evil SS guy known as the ‘Jew Hunter’ – the most charming and personable of them all, and yet the most terrifying too. Hitler excluded, Tarantino’s Nazis are chilling in a way you’ve never seen before.
As you’d expect from Tarantino the violence is brutal, and when it happens it’s shocking and sudden. That’s because most of the film is not violent at all. It’s long, long, long scenes of conversations interspersed with very occasional, very bloody, violence.
If I judge this film against what it’s advertised as, the film fails. These days film trailers are becoming increasingly misleading (or perhaps I’m just noticing it more), which I find depressing – they’ve successfully hidden the fact that this is a subtitle heavy film, that this is really mostly about a young jewish woman who escapes murder then stumbles on a way to get her revenge, that the Basterds hardly feature at all.
The way they’re selling this film is an issue because the film goes out of its way to mock a German propaganda flick that looks like what Basterds is sold to be. In other words, if you like the adverts and go to see it, and you reach the final act feeling a bit cheated, Tarantino’s going to mercilessly take the piss out of you until you squirm in your seat.
During the final act I said, “oh you clever bastard” out loud as the penny dropped. I loved Basterds. It may even be, as he suggests himself, his masterpiece.
This is the ultimate fuck you to people who think Americans can’t make decent World War II movies. Tarantino’s just proved you wrong.
