Inglorious Bastards review by Ali

Inglorious Bastards Review

Quentin Tarnatino, is the first director I know that made a spin-off of world war 2 history into a   2½-hour, four-language epic., Inglorious Basterds, is an alternative history of World War II from the writer-director of Pulp Fiction. As with all of his work, Tarnatino creates several different characters with several different storylines that merge fantastically together, but the amazing part is how they merge and sometimes crash and burn in the end.

The film moves between French, German and English dialogue and takes us through five chapters. First, in 1941, we see a Nazi, Colonel Hans Landa (played by Austrian Christoph Waltz), known as ‘The Jew Hunter’, discover and kill a Jewish family in France; only the youngest daughter gets away.

Then we’re introduced to the ‘basterds’, a gang of eight Jewish-American soldiers who, while deep undercover, roam Nazi-occupied France, murdering German soldiers and collecting their scalps. They’re led by a Tennessee hillbilly boy, played by Pitt, whose change of English accent shows Pitt’s calibre as an actor. Pitt is lively but he disappears for a long time and is upstaged by Waltz, who gives a teasing turn of sly comedy and cruel charm. His scenes are the film’s best. For the film’s final chapters, we leap to Paris in 1944, where the two stories collide.

The girl who fled the Nazis, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) is now running a cinema which plays films by directed by Germans, because of the German occupation at the time. A Nazi private, Frederick (Daniel Brühl), takes a shine to her, which lands him a nasty ending. Shoshanna cinema is to host Fredrick’s film about his gun-toting heroics being immortalised in a film produced by Goebbels a big-time German director, who decides that Shoshanna’s cinema is perfect for the premiere. Shoshanna and the ‘basterds’ decide that the screening is their chance to strike and this is the epic scene where all of the characters plots combine together for a brilliant ending.

Although Tarintino’s signature of a bit over the top blood and gore is seen all over this film, it’s not much of a deterrence, because of the good writing skills seen in the plot and the perfect acting especially by Christoph waltz who speaks in 4 dialogues throughout the film. I give this movie a well deserved 4/5 stars.