Very interesting to watch. Not the movie - but the audience.

Rating: 6/10 (31 August 2009)

Two dimensions of this movie are discussed frequently: Its entertainment value and its political correctness.
Related to the first: The movie has some good elements – including the first scene, the use of multiple languages, as well as the acting of Christoph Waltz. For Tarantino fans, there are several additional typical features and for movie fans in general, there are lots of links to other movies. Personally, I'm not interested in these. Beyond this, I found the movie to be rather lengthy.
More importantly, there are two interpretations of the movie's moral and its political correctness.
Standpoint 1) (Similar to what I've read in some critical article about the movie). Tarantino is comparable to a porn producer. A porn builds up some story as an excuse to show sex. Tarantino builds up his stories as an excuse to show the maximum amount of violence accepted by the audience, without making any statement or revealing some deep moral or truth. If that's the case, Tarantino uses some of the most terrible part of history just to show "porn". Whether slaughtering Nazis is politically correct or not is one question. Whether illustrating the revenge fantasies of Jews (as which the movie can be regarded according to actress Eli Roth) in this way is politically correct or not, the other.
Standpoint 2) Rather than a movie, Tarantino produced a giant socio-psychological experiment. In making us (the audience) feel content about any cruelty or indignity done to anyone wearing a swastika, he makes us have the same inhuman perspective the Nazis had. This standpoint is supported in particular by the positive way Nazis are depicted as compared to the basterds. In one scene, the basterds – after having killed and scalped dozens of Nazis – offer freedom to a Nazi officer for betraying another unit of Nazis and telling the basterds about their position. The officer – threatened with torturous death – remains loyal and is killed cruelly with a baseball bat. The basterds cheer, of course – and so does the audience. Throughout the whole movie, the cruelty of the basterds' actions (against Nazis, as well as against their allies), seems to outweigh the cruelty of Nazis' actions. In two other scenes, the basterds' incompetence in speaking foreign languages (first German, then Italian) gets some of them killed and reveals their plans to the multilingual and intelligent SS officer Hans Landa. On a higher level, even the acting of the basterds (with their leader portrayed by superstar Brad Pitt showing one of his worst performances) proves to be more than outperformed by Hans Landa (little known Austrian Christoph Waltz). Finally, even the title of the movie does not – as one might expect – refer to the Nazis, but rather to the group of revenge seeking Jews, Americans and defected Germans.
In summary, without being exposed to a lot of negative actions by Nazis (relative to the basterds), the audience justifies whatever cruelty to anyone with a swastika, just as the Nazis made their followers justify inhumanities by the (self-invented) evil inside anyone wearing a Yellow Star. If we are pro Nazi slaughtering, how about torturing (self-declared) enemies of the Western world in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo? How about assuming some other standpoint and arresting gays, disobedient women or oppositional journalists? Looking at some of his past movies, I doubt that Tarantino regards the movie from this perspective but rather (again) produced porn. Still: Go and watch the audience.