Inglorious Basterds
- Jun 11
- 2 min read
I remember my father trying to watch Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan when it came out in 1998. Soon after it started, he turned it off. The opening sequence of the D-Day invasion at Normandy was too much for him. As a World War II vet, he found it too violent. Too real. Too historically accurate in its depiction of the slaughter of human life that happened that day.
A full-tilt fantasy about how movies fought the war and saved the world.
For anyone with a similar reaction to the blunt-force reality of Spielberg’s war masterpiece, then the 2009 film Inglorious Basterds, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, might be a perfect alternative. Where Private Ryan is about the allied forces fighting the Nazis, The Basterds is a full-tilt fantasy about how movies fought the war and saved the world.
Tarantino’s love of cinema enriches every frame of every movie he makes: from his use of classic music scores from other films—most notably music by composer Ennio Morricone—to characters and storylines that often reverberate with inspiration from other films. Inglorious Basterds absolutely brims with that aesthetic. While the title is borrowed from a B war movie of the same name made in 1978, the Basterds storyline also resonates with influence from the 1967 classic The Dirty Dozen. That film—also one of my all-time favorites—deals with a group of convicted military prisoners who are recruited for a dangerous mission against the Nazis behind enemy lines.
In Tarantino’s version, the Basterds are on a similar mission. Led by actor Brad Pitt as Lieutenant Aldo Raine, an iron-jawed war hero with a southern twang, his rag tag group of “basterd” soldiers are on a mission in German-occupied France to hunt and scalp as many Nazis as possible. Yes, I said scalp. Meanwhile, a cultured, terrifying Nazi colonel named Hans Landa—wonderfully played by Christoph Waltz—is on the hunt for any Jews in hiding. One young Jewish woman named Shosanna Dreyfuss—portrayed by Melanie Laurent—miraculously escapes as Landa murders her family and flees to Paris where she takes a new identity and runs a movie theatre that only shows German films. Having her theatre marquee advertising a film by the infamous, real-life German film director and actress Leni Riefenstahl is a wonderful, spot-on touch.
Tarantino masterfully weaves together these and other storylines in a memorable set piece where he stages a bold, highly exaggerated finale in the Parisian cinema that shows just how he thinks the war against the Third Reich should have gone; a finale that portrays movies as an explosively powerful force in a world gone to hell.
Yes, like Saving Private Ryan, Inglorious Basterds is incredibly violent. It’s also darkly comic—a gleefully audacious and fanciful take on World War II that I’m sure my father would have enjoyed.
With a cast that also includes Michael Fassbender and Diane Kruger, I give Inglorious Basterds a wildly entertaining four out of four-stars.
