Many movies have dramatized war, but World War II is the most depicted by a long shot. There are plenty of reasons for that, including a clear villain, huge stakes, and the large number of countries involved in the fight.
You would think, for that reason, though, that the setting would be getting a little bit stale. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds set out to do something new with a World War II movie, and it succeeded. The film, which tells a sprawling story set against the backdrop of the war, is maybe the best movie to watch on Netflix this September.
It features a bravura opening sequence
Although Tarantino was already one of America’s great filmmakers, the first 20 minutes of Inglourious Basterds really cemented that status. It also introduced American audiences to Christoph Waltz, who won an Oscar for his performance as Hans Landa.
The scene, which takes place on a French farm, follows Waltz as an SS officer who has been tasked with hunting down Jews in hiding. He believes the farmer he’s visiting is harboring Jews, and his goal is to find the Jews in hiding by any means necessary. It’s a beautiful, tense sequence filled with unease, and one that features a climax that will reverberate through the rest of the film.
It’s funnier than you might expect
After that opening sequence, the central characters in Inglourious Basterds change, and we learn that the title refers to an entirely fictional unit of Jewish American troops who have been tasked with hunting down and killing as many Nazis as they can.
While that leads to plenty of violence, it also leads to some great comedy, including some of the funniest work of Brad Pitt’s career to date. There are many World War II films that get at the horror of the Holocaust and of the battlefield itself. Inglourious Basterds is more irreverent, and that’s to its credit.
It’s gleefully ahistorical
Tarantino’s recent slate of films is fascinating because they are intentionally thumbing their nose at anyone who cares about what actually happened. The climax of Inglourious Basterds is all about an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler.
Crucially, though, Tarantino doesn’t feel super confined about what actually happened to Hitler. Instead, the entire movie seems to be offering a kind of catharsis where one never actually existed. It’s a bold, hugely controversial gambit, but one that might have resulted in the best movie of Tarantino’s entire career.
You can watch Inglourious Basterds on Netflix.
