Quentin Tarantino is a bona fide genre aficionado. Over the course of his 30-year career, the former video store clerk turned world-renowned filmmaker has used his infectious passion for cinema at its most stylized and kooky to reinvent the gangster, crime, samurai, revenge, slasher, Western, and bounty hunter genres. Having spent his first 17 years as a writer-director making genre-bending hits like Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown, it didn’t come as much of a surprise when it was announced that his follow-up to 2007’s Death Proof was going to be a World War II thriller in the same vein as classics like The Dirty Dozen, The Great Escape, and The Guns of Navarone. Few could have ever imagined, though, just how thoroughly Tarantino would go on to reinvent the traditional Hollywood war epic.
The resulting film, 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, is — like all of Tarantino’s films — simultaneously a cluster of references and homages to a wide range of 20th-century thrillers both widely esteemed and not and a singular piece of work. It is a thriller of slick style and rock-and-roll verve, and it oozes with the same unbridled, shameless confidence that has long defined Tarantino’s work and persona. That confidence burns particularly bright in Inglourious Basterds‘ stunning finale, in which Tarantino does something that neither he nor anyone else had ever had the guts to do before: He rewrites history and, consequently, ensures that Inglourious Basterds‘ magic can never be touched or replicated. Fifteen years later, no film has managed to do either.
Setting the stage
Inglourious Basterds is divided — in typical Tarantino fashion — into multiple chapters. In its prologue, which may still rank as the single greatest scene of Tarantino’s career, a Nazi SS Officer named Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) interrogates a French farmer (Denis Ménochet) about the whereabouts of a once-local Jewish family. As Landa questions the man, the viewer becomes gradually aware through the Nazi’s pointed questions and a few well-timed cuts and camera pans on Tarantino’s part that the Jewish family in question is hiding in the crawlspace beneath the very room Landa is conducting his investigation in. The scene, as tense as any you’ll ever see, crescendos with an explosion of violence that is noteworthy not only in its unvarnished tragedy, but in the very un-Tarantino-like fact that the blood that’s spilled by Landa’s soldiers is only ever shown on the face of the Jewish family’s sole survivor, a terrified Shosanna Dreyfus (an impossibly great Mélanie Laurent).
In a later chapter, a 20-minute meeting between a famous German actress secretly working against the Nazis (Diane Kruger) and a group of undercover Allied mercenaries is upended by a cultural slip-up that spotlights just how well Tarantino is at making the most out of the tiniest of details. In another sequence, a dinner meeting between Shosanna and Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a Nazi soldier with a crush on her, becomes a horrifying, stomach-churning test for her when she comes face to face with some of the men most responsible for her people’s suffering. The scene, in a beautiful and heart-wrenching subversion of expectations, ends not with another Tarantino-esque burst of violence but a small, uncontrollable release of emotion from Laurent.
Careful carnage
In all of these scenes, Tarantino makes nary a single mistake. They are paced, edited, and blocked perfectly — as aesthetically beautiful as they are technically precise and economical. There is not a wasted shot in to be found in Inglourious Basterds, and Tarantino seems perpetually interested throughout the film in toying with his audience and testing just how long he can stretch each scene before it breaks. Were he any other filmmaker, such blatant manipulations and instances of creative indulgence would be grating.
However, he composes every scene so well that the ungodly length of some only makes the growing dread present in each all the more bone-rattling and unbearable. The film quickly becomes a succession of slow-burn scenes that follow the same satisfying, gripping cycle of tension and release. Rather than becoming repetitive, though, Inglourious Basterds becomes a symphony of unspoken danger and potential violence. While he may have a bloodthirsty reputation, Tarantino picks his moments of carnage carefully here.
There are few movies that are as brilliantly structured and full of so many remarkable scenes as Inglourious Basterds. The film’s sequences serve a greater purpose, though, than just the in-the-moment entertainment factor they provide. Altogether, they gradually jack viewers’ nerves up to a frenzied pitch and — even more powerfully — instill a sense of overarching dread in the pit of your stomach. The film’s two most effective and memorable sequences — its opening interrogation and midpoint rendezvous-gone-wrong — end in bloody disaster for the heroes involved. That fact, coupled with viewers’ knowledge of how World War II really ended (i.e., with Hitler ultimately escaping justice by killing himself), forces Inglourious Basterds‘ audience members to prepare themselves to see its heroes’ plans end in disaster. The movie’s climactic chapter, which follows Shosanna and the members of Inglourious Basterds‘ eponymous group as they try to kill Hitler and all the heads of the Third Reich at a film premiere, is packed with nerve-shredding tension for this very reason.
History isn’t made, it’s changed
As you watch both Laurent’s Shoshanna and Kruger’s Bridget Von Hammersmark meet early, tragic ends and two of the film’s self-appointed Basterds get captured by Waltz’s Hans, it’s impossible to not to feel a building sense of defeat. You are prepared to watch Landa, Hitler, and the rest of the film’s Nazis win. But that’s not what happens. Instead, Landa cuts a deal, Shoshanna’s theater successfully burns to the ground, and the still-free Basterds manage to pepper Hitler’s entire private viewing balcony with bullets. Tarantino literally tears Hitler to shreds while the righteous anger of Shoshanna’s entire people rages in the periphery of the frame. Tarantino, once again, finds a way to do his version of another film and still play by his own rules. He changes history and, in doing so, provides the ultimate relief to the 140 minutes of preceding tension. It’s a conclusion that uses viewers’ knowledge of the film’s setting and time period against them. It is, in other words, the ending that no one could have seen coming.
In the years since Inglourious Basterds was released, Tarantino has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to change history onscreen. In 2015’s The Hateful Eight, he even finds a way to both lampoon and defend his tendency to do so. Of all of the many, many curveballs that Tarantino has thrown over the past 32 years, though, few of them have hit with quite as much bulldozing initial force as Inglourious Basterds‘ last-minute deviation from recorded history. It only grows more impressive with each passing year, too, especially as Basterds‘ reputation continues to improve. It’s a creative decision that speaks to Tarantino’s unique brilliance. Here is a filmmaker who has spent his entire career looking back at and pulling from the movies and genres he loves, but what separates him from so many other, lesser cinematic imitators is his ability to always know when and how to push things just a little bit further than they’ve ever gone before.
In Inglourious Basterds, he got to make his own WWII thriller, but he didn’t stop there. He decided to give it the ending that so many others felt too restricted by real-life history to try, and the finished film is one that manages to feel unique even in an incredibly crowded genre. In the film’s final scene, Tarantino remarks (through Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine) that Inglourious Basterds “might just be my masterpiece.” The jury’s still out on that, but there’s no denying that it is — at the very least — a masterpiece, one of unrivaled ingenuity, power, and style. It’s a Quentin Tarantino film through and through, and it wears that title better than almost all the rest.
Inglourious Basterds is available to rent now on all major digital platforms.
