This is historically based reviewing, not entirely opinion based

Rating: 10/10 (5 December 2013)

"Django Unchained" is a film that really is unchained. Its constant use of blood and violence is used as a form of entertainment, but not many people acknowledge this film as a real part of history. However strange this film is, with all of its oddities and extreme scenes and dialogue, it is a very good testament to how things were back then.
However, and that is a very large however, Mandingo fighting, or the practice of pitting 2 slaves against each other for their owner's entertainment, was largely false. David Blight, a professor at Yale's center for the study of slavery, has said that "One reason slave owners wouldn't have pitted their slaves against each other in such a way is strictly economic. Slavery was built upon money, and the fortune to be made for owners was in buying, selling, and working them, not in sending them out to fight at the risk of death." His logic makes a lot of sense to me, and unfortunately the entire film is based upon Mandingo fights existing in that time period.
However, other films such as "Mandingo" (1975) portray its existence, and its sequel has a sequence where an actual fight is had. However, Quentin Tarantino has said that his representation of Mandingo fighting was based upon the film "Mandingo" and its sequel, "Drum". This really discounts the legitimacy of Django Unchained's representations of the sport, as it is a secondary source of an already shaky film.
Another point to be considered is that a German man was living in the United States as a bounty hunter. During the 19th century, there was a large amount of migration from Germany to the US, for farming and commerce purposes. The film Django Unchained began in 1858, and from 1851-1890 alone, there were almost 1 Million German immigrants to the United States. This makes the main characters existence in the story highly plausible. One of the main concentrations of Germans was in Baltimore, where a large part of the story is held.
Overall, the film stretches the idea of plausibility, as most Tarantino films do, and does it while creating a significantly accurate image of the time period. While the main base of the story is not the most accurate, factually, it creates enough factual ideas around it for it to be forgiven.