Info about the movie
Title: Inglourious Basterds
Year: 2009
Genre: Drama, War
Duration: 153 minutes
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When I went to the cinema, I went in with very high expectations. After seeing the trailers for this movie, I have been eagerly waiting for it for months. It turned out that the movie was nothing like the trailers at all. On one hand this was a bit of a letdown, on the other hand this was a pleasant surprise.
The movie opened with a rather long scene involving Hans Landa doing his SS-job on a small farm in France. You could feel a lot of tension in this scene and the end of it was quite satisfying in my opinion. This scene was also pretty much the ONLY background-story that you get in this movie. All new characters that are introduced after this scene just seemed to 'be there'. Of course they have their reasons to be where they are, but those reasons weren't really worked out. As a result, a lot of characters came over as caricatures. None of them really had a complex personality. Some viewers might not like that, but I wasn't really bothered by it. You didn't need to think much about who is who and who did what.
After the first scene you get to see the Basterds for the first time. This was definitely one of my favourite scenes from this movie. This was what I expected the movie would be like. We see the Basterds doing their job, which is 'striking fear into the heart of the Nazi's'. Of course this goes in a very violent and cruel way. I loved it.
The point where this movie felt like a letdown was the full hour of dialogue after dialogue without any action at all that followed the former scenes. I know Quentin Tarentino is really good with writing brilliant, funny and clever dialogues, but I had a feeling they weren't so interesting in this movie. So from the first Basterd scene until the big night at the cinema, I was getting pretty bored and disappointed to be honest. There weren't many scenes with the Basterds either. It was mostly focused on the story of Shoushanna and her struggles with the high officers of the nazi army and them allowing her to show Goebels movie in her cinema. Hans Landa also played a big role in all this. But the Basters mostly operated on the background, which was too bad. I would've loved to see more of them. Especially more of their methods to scare the Nazi's.
From the start of chapter 5, the big night in the cinema, the movie got way better though. The pace seemed to pick up and you could see all the story-lines coming together, like in a real spaghetti-western. The scene opened very nicely with David Bowie's Cat People playing loudly as Shoushanna was preparing herself for the big night. The ending of the big night was just awesome, as in really awesome. The final scenes with Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) and Hans Landa ended in a hilarious way. It was the first time I ever heard an audience applauding in a cinema when the credits started rolling.
The acting in this movie was pretty good, even though most of the cast was pretty unknown to me. Especially Hans Landa was superb. He really stood out most between all the other actors. This guy was able to speak four different languages fluently and still managed to act well in all of them. Which is a very difficult thing to do I've heard. I wouldn't be surprised if Christoph Waltz got an Oscar for this role, honestly.
The soundtrack of this movie was also really good. Cat People was awesome as I already mentioned. A lot of the other music was composed by Ennio Morricone. The man who also took care of most music in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West (also Spaghetti Westerns). I really love his work and he does another great job here.
Overall I think this movie is probably the best movie of this year (so far at least). If you're a Quentin Tarentino fan and don't have trouble sitting through an hour of dialogue, then I think you're gonna like this movie.
