Disappointing at best

Rating: 1/10 (18 February 2016)

I do not consider myself a fan of Quentin Tarantino, namely because I find the constant overworked theme of revenge pointless and classless, not to mention the overkill of gore mundane. But I do tend to watch his movies because, I guess, the subject matter of them always appears to be interesting and possibly different, almost as if I'm trying to like him as hard as I can.
I loved Django, and it got me thinking I could like another. I turned to this movie and I feel compelled to record my confused reaction.
Character depth and development is almost totally nonexistent in this film. The viewer is left feeling inclined to side with the basterds only because of the overwhelming bias the film shoves at you. You kind of feel like you're not sure, though. The characters, even (especially?) the main ones do things for seemingly no reason (Why did Hans violently attack Bridget at the cinema but spare the fleeing Jew at the beginning of the movie, or imply that he knew who Soshanna was when they saw one another again but apparently didn't?) or they don't do things at all. I challenge anyone to name one character with depth. Reading other reviews, it seems most pick Hans, but I'd have to disagree. Him wittingly questioning people for an unnecessary amount of time is the basic extent of his role. The closest thing we have is Soshanna, because we feel sympathy for her as we saw her family murdered during the first scene. Aside from that, not one character holds any significance. Not Soshanna's lover, not Raine, not Hans, not Bridget. As a fan of Brad Pitt, I really wanted to like his character and cheer him on but I again found myself confused. He was so stiff and anticlimactic as a leader. I liked the line about how it isn't okay with him that Nazis get to take their uniform off at the end of the day so he has to permanently mark them as evil, but that's probably the only positive thing I can say in regards to character or meaning. I was very offput when suddenly Bridget became a main character because I and the rest of the audience didn't know her, was wondering where the hell she came from, and felt like I was being flung around the room with each unfolding event.
The plot needed a basis. Nobody's motivation was ever clear, no part of the story really made any sense. Unnecessary emphasis and focus was put on details that ended up amounting to nothing (the Jew bear, a black man working as the projectionist, 100 scalps of Nazis we never heard about again, why the hell Bridget was involved and why she was risking her life to help the anti-Nazi group??) Hitler and most of Germany's government and soldiers going out for a movie at some no name cinema about a German man shooting 300 people? These are just examples but there are countless more....
I can't help but feel like this movie would be hugely insulting to a person who served in this war, to history itself, to anyone who stands for a cause.
This only goes to prove that QT isn't all he's hyped up to be at all. Django is still the only likable movie under his belt, especially if you think about the Kill Bill series (shudders.)