Boy was this different

Rating: Null/10 (8 March 2010)

This movie was so unlike the original, and I don't mean just the extra 'u' and 'e' in the title words. For one thing, there was no black guy on the team. He was one of the best characters in the original, but I guess it would have been confusing for one of the Jewish-Americans to be black. Something like that would require a lot of explaining and would strain credibility.
I don't remember so much of the girl and the war hero from the original. As I recall, it followed the team and that's it, but the movie was great, although being a relatively low budget production, it suffered during some of the action sequences. This new movie by Quentin Tarrantino had plenty of budget, but chose a different direction for the story, springing from some of the basic story elements and making something more ambitious from it.
The introductory scenes for Landa and Emmanuelle were a bit long, longer than they really had to be, but thankfully, this was as indulgent as Tarrantino got in this movie. The rest of the movie began to weave together in crisper scenes, with dialogue that captured interest rather than leading the viewer into little eddies of vacant thought that would only get away from the main thread of the movie. Quentin steered us pretty well past lots of bits that might have been going on beside the main story.
However, while the director reined himself in a bit, Mr. Pitt overplayed far too much. I'm not sure why he wants so much to be a character actor, but from this outing he just doesn't have a feel for it. I could find better work in a workshop, but I guess there's a machinery behind the presence of stars in movies.
Overall, I got more excited about the direction of the movie as it went on, and I was very entertained by the climactic scene. It is definitely a movie I will want to watch again. Like much of Tarrantino's work, it has the semblance of layers in the dialogue and enough peculiarity to the perspectives in the scenes to make one enjoy watching it again as well. First, though, I'll have to go back and watch "The Inglorious Bastards" just to remind myself why I enjoyed that one too.