World War II has been covered so extensively on film by so many gifted directors — and some hacks — that any true originality in the genre was mined long ago. Quentin Tarantino found a way around all the worn plots with this audacious strategy in his intentionally misspelled Inglourious Basterds: he wrote his own version of the war. 
That’s right, he just made stuff up. That should be sacrilege to history, especially since WWII is hallowed ground even 60-plus years after its end. But Tarantino gets away with it — he gets away with everything — because his film provides a catharsis that the war itself could not provide. In his version of events, the war ends after a rag-tag group of Jewish Americans stage a mass execution of German high command in a little French movie theater. Film buffs should have fun with that movie theater part. Only Tarantino, a noted film buff, could stage a gunfight in a projection booth. Only Tarantino could kill Hitler with in an inferno fueled by nitrate film stock. Only Tarantino would have a movie critic parachute into Nazi-occupied Europe to help end the war. Full of likeable every-guy heroes, menacing German villains, seductive femme fatales, fully-dressed locations and sets, exquisite costumes of square-shouldered Gestapo overcoats and tatty American tank tops and fatigues, and a variety of languages (German, French, Italian, English), Inglourious Basterds is, for the most part, your run-of-the-mill World War II movie. But Tarantino filters the story through his movie-loving brain to produce this mish-mash of cocaine-induced hyper-stylized film homages. The title may refer to its heroes, a troop of vigilante soldiers who have no higher command to answer to, but it also refers to the bastardization of other film genres to tell its story.
It’s been widely reported that Tarantino wanted to merge a classic war movie with an epic Spaghetti Western. At one point the film was going to be called Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France, an allusion to the famous cowboy opera by Sergio Leone, an obvious influence here. Remarkably, almost inexplicably, QT accomplishes this Frankenstein-like assembly and then gives it the juice it needs to stomp through Kraut-occupied France in one of the most daring films of the year. Daring because you must adopt a new WWII history and also because impatient Tarantino fans will likely be challenged as the dialogue proves to be painstakingly, yet pleasantly, prosperous and the violence is shortlived, albeit quite gory when it does finally turn up in a head-smashing homerun derby.The first scene could easily be right from a Leone film: a French farmer hosts an unannounced SS officer during his search for Jews in the countryside. They talk slowly, carefully. The Nazi is given milk. They smoke from pipes. The tension builds. They’re playing chess with their dialogue. A couple minutes stretches into a dozen. The officer is smart. The farmer is trapped. By the time the Nazi asks, “Are you hiding Jews in this house?” the man has tears streaming down his face. Like Leone, Tarantino allows dialogue to serve as suspense.
Not all of the dialogue is as flowery, though. Consider Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the leader of the Basterds, a group of American troopers sent into France to scalp Nazis first and ask questions … well, never. Raine talks like he learned English from a drill instructor: “You probably heard we ain’t in the prisoner-takin’ business. We in the killin’ Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin’.” Each word is nearly grunted, but he grunts to an unheard rhythm, and Pitt grins from behind the character, a stone-cold killer reduced to lovable miscreant if only because history has allowed us to hate Nazis as much as him. Raine’s patrol includes a bat-wielding slugger nicknamed the Bear Jew, and German defector Hugo Stiglitz, who’s introduced in a Blaxploitation style so bold his name should include exclamation marks. The Basterds roam the countryside, tallying up notches on the butts of their Garands, Thompsons and, in the case of the Bear Jew, his bloody Louisville Slugger. A British general eventually concocts a plan to assassinate a number of high-value German officials — we know their names: Goebbels, Bormann, Hitler — as they debut a new propaganda film showing the Third Reich flourishing. The movie, of course, is some kind of Leni Riefenstahl parody involving a German sharpshooter who single-handedly kills upwards of 300 GIs.
I will let you discover where it goes from there, and trust me when I say that Tarantino will not hesitate doing anything. His movies are exciting in that way: they can go in any direction, and they’re bound by no formula. Tarantino movies are also hilarious, and this one is no exception. I will say that there are some wonderful performances by Diane Kruger, as a German double agent Bridget von Hammersmark, and French actress Mélanie Laurent, who has a wonderful scene set to the anachronistic music of David Bowie’s “Cat People.”
German actor Christopher Waltz should be a shoe-in for an acting nomination this year for his role as Col. Hans Landa, the officer from the first scene and many others like it. His dialogue is prepared so meticulously, with reverence to the needs of the movie and of the character, yet he explodes from the pressed Nazi uniform. He’s one of the most demented characters created this year, and somehow also one of the most electric and captivating. Pipe-smoking Landa, the Basterds, the exploding cinema … the imagery, almost iconic in stature, will likely remind people of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One, another original WWII film. In one of the more perversely metaphorical scenes from that film, a woman gives birth inside a bombed-out tank, bullet belts serving as stirrups. Basterds attempts another coup on the genre with potent images, punchy dialogue and this punk energy that only Tarantino can produce.
Inglourious Basterds is the most originally entertaining film of the year, and it earns it with every scene.
