You Must See It for Yourself

Rating: 9/10 (23 August 2009)

Inglourious Basterds (R, 2:33) — Other: Miscellaneous, biggie, original
If you've seen the trailers for this movie, you probably already know it stars Brad Pitt as WW2 US Army Lt. Aldo Raine and is about "killin' Nattsies". So why is it showing up in a review of SF&F flix? Because it's a member of that odd tribe, the alternative history, which has one foot in sci-fi, another foot in fantasy, and a 3rd foot trying to shake free of the ball-and-chain of mimetic fiction. Such critters are often like a puzzle, where the trick is to figure out where and why the fictional version diverged from real life. (See, for example, pretty much anything by Harry Turtledove.) Basterds, however, is from Quentin Tarantino, so the word "often" (and also "usual", "ordinary", "conventional", "humdrum", "expected", etc.) can be dispensed with before you ever set foot in the theater.
To cut straight to the bottom line, it's another frakkin' masterpiece written and directed by the most original and audacious filmmaker working today.
Does it follow a conventional structure? What did I just say about "conventional" ANYTHING? No, of course it doesn't. For starters, nominal hero Pitt appears in less than half the movie. Most of the other actors in what is very much an ensemble performance you probably haven't heard of at all. They are all uniformly excellent.
You might be expecting ("expecting"? ah ah ah!) a violent action movie, and there are indeed some graphically grisly bits, not for the squeamish, but much of the film's generous 2:33 running time is devoted to verbal cat-and-mouse games between really intelligent, articulate, resourceful, insightful, amoral, and deadly serious adversaries.
To vastly oversimplify the plot, the 3rd Reich's #2 guy, Dr. Josef Goebbels, fancies himself not only a patron of all the arts but also an artist in his own right, and he has written, produced, and directed a film called Nation's Pride, which stars Wehrmacht war hero Pvt. Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl) as himself, depicting his solo sniper defense of a lone bell tower against an attacking force of a thousand Yankees. Since it's shortly after D-Day, Goebbels thinks it would buck up morale and be a smashing propaganda coup if the film were premiered in occupied Paris, in a gala attended by many members of the German high command.
Raine's "inglourious basterds", a behind-enemy-lines guerrilla band composed almost entirely of Allied Jews with a taste for exemplary (and hopefully demoralizing) cruelty, determine to take advantage of this concentration of enemy brass to do some serious killin'. The same thot occurs to cinema owner "Emmanuelle Mimeux" (Melanie Laurent), who is secretly Shoshanna Dreyfus, sole survivor of the massacre of her Jewish family. That massacre was conducted by Col. Hans Landa (a brilliant performance by Cristoph Waltz), who never really got a good look at Shoshanna and so doesn't recognize her when he shows up to scope out her theater for security purposes. You can bet she knows who HE is, tho.
The 2 separate anti-Nazi plots run afoul of each other. Nothing works out as planned. For anybody. More than that I will not say. You must see it for yourself. No, really, you must.