Quentin Tarantino delivers another epic.
Brad Pitt teams up with Quentin Tarantino for his latest flight of fancy.
“Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France…” is how Quentin Tarantino opens his most recent blockbuster with his own take on history. Using his proven formula for greatness, Tarantino whips up a movie with a completely unique storyline that draws the viewer in from the first scene. Both the leading and the supporting characters are unique and each plays an important role. With dialogue that is rich, but not boring, and his signature splash of sporadic violence, Tarantino paints a picture of a gritty yet refreshing alternate reality. Warning: this movie is not for the squeamish. Chock full of coarse language and graphic fighting, Inglourious will send shivers down the spines of some, but impress others. Fans of Tarantino are sure to love this film, while those who aren’t, well, you get the idea.
The plot follows an elite team of Jewish-American soldiers who drop into Nazi occupied France to, as Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) so wonderfully puts it, “Kill some Naht-zees.” These half-crazed soldiers carve a swath of bodies through the Nazi ranks, and instill fear into their enemies. Yet the movie does not focus on the allied soldiers, alone. In fact, the film opens to terrifyingly wicked SS Colonel Hans Lander, played by Hollywood newcomer Cristoph Waltz, politely questioning a farmer about the whereabouts of hidden Jews. Waltz deserves a reward for his performance, as I have never seen a villain who radiates pure evil from every pore like Waltz does. The Colonel is polite, cultured, and sophisticated, yet every scene he is in the viewer is put on edge.
After his questioning of the farmer, Lander, nicknamed the Jew Hunter, discovers there are Jews hiding under the floorboards of the farmer’s house. Lander orders his men to open fire on the townsfolk below, slaughtering all but one young woman who escapes. This young Jewish woman, named Shoshanna, plays a large part in the story.
Four years after her escape, Shoshanna is running a movie theater in France under the pseudonym of Mademoiselle Mimmeux. One fateful evening, she runs into a German soldier named Frederick Zoller. While Shoshanna exudes hatred towards all Nazis, Zoller chooses to ignore her bitterness. Instead, he continues to be a polite, innocent, faceless Nazi, until Shoshanna discovers that he is a war hero who killed nearly two hundred American soldiers in a sniper tower. The reason he is in France? Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s right hand man, has made a movie about the event, with Zoller playing himself. The movie is to premiere at the Ritz, and every Nazi bigwig is to attend.
So where do a team of Nazi killing soldiers, a Jewish runaway, a war hero, and a SS Colonel all tie together? At the premiere of the movie, of course. Hence, Operation Kino, an Allied plot to take out every single Nazi leader, is born, and the hand selected team are the ones to take the job. However, when Zoller insists that the movie is moved to Shoshanna’s smaller theater, Shoshanna and her employee Marcel hatch their own plan to burn the theater to the ground with the Nazis inside. Just when you thought the plot couldn’t get any thicker, Hitler himself decides to attend the premiere, and Colonel Lander is chosen as his security chief. Only Quentin Tarantino could set four seemingly unrelated plotlines on a collision course for one of the most intense finales I’ve ever seen.
The moment I sat down in the theater, popcorn in hand, and the movie started, I was immediately captured by the story. I expected the first scene to be full of yelling drill instructors and crazy vendettas, and so I was pleasantly surprised to see the fiendish Colonel Lander. Like always, Tarantino stuffs as much dialogue into his movies as he possibly can. However, as I mentioned before, the constant speaking is far from mundane. Tarantino uses the perfect combination of witty one-liners, banter, and even monologue to liven up his scenes…dialogue, followed by bursts of erratic gory violence, that is.
Pitt and his band of Nazi-killin’-machines are the main characters, yet they seem to get only half the amount of screen time. I was surprised, and while it turned out to be better than I had thought, I was ready for the next chapter soon after. The movie seems to focus on slow areas, but while at first the movie seems to drag on, it slowly builds up the suspense until it explodes violently.
The greatest aspect of the film is that Tarantino takes one of the most important and widely known wars, and turns it into his own glorified plaything. None of it is possible, or even plausible, yet this pure piece of fiction is so entertaining that I can’t find anything wrong with it. I highly recommend seeing Inglourious Basterds, as it is one of the most exciting and satisfying movies I’ve seen all year.
