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Director: Quentin Tarantino
Release Date: August 21, 2009
Rating: R for strong graphic violence, language and brief sexuality.
After seeing Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds last night, I felt ill. I'm not supposed to voice a negative opinion about a Nazi-killing movie, but no matter how hard I try, I can't like this movie. Glorifying violence has been something that's been prevalent in our society for years now with the likes of Rambo and even Tarantino's Kill Bill. But there is a stark difference between the violence displayed in these movies versus Inglourious Basterds.
Throughout the movie Nazis are killed. This is nothing new and movies have continued to advance their ability to portray the horrors of war. Yet instead of Allied troops storming the beaches of Normandy in a bloody struggle for France's liberation or Russian soldiers and citizens fighting for their lives in Stalingrad, this movie showed unarmed men and women being bludgeoned with baseball bats, shot, mutilated, strangled, and burned to death. If the same acts were performed by Germans on Americans, the audience would be horrified, but at 'Basterds, they cheered. Anthony Hopkins can rip the face off of someone and the audience cringes, but Brad Pitt carves a swastika into the forehead of a German and the crowd claps. This act is horrifying, but somehow it is justified because of the person it is being performed on. The audience seems to forget that once a soldier is unarmed, he ceases to be a "god damned Nazi" and he is now a POW. Treating these men in this manner is wrong regardless of what they did beforehand. What's worse is these acts were not performed by people getting caught up in the moment. Instead, these were done deliberately by men who relished their work.
During World War II, the Germans and Russians fought a war of annihilation against each other. POWs on both sides were treated poorly and rarely made it home alive after the war. What made the Western Allies different from the Nazi Germans or the Communist Russians was how they waged the war. Acts like killing and mutilating POWs were not allowed and severely punished. Brad Pitt's character joked that the most that would happen to him was getting "chewed out." Interestingly enough, the Allied POWs captured on the Western Front were treated much differently than those on the Eastern Front. For example, 3,000,000 Russian POWs died in captivity versus just over 2,000 American POWs. Why bring up this fact? Because the Germans, or "god damned Nazis", did not treat American and British POWs as gruesomely as Tarantino's Basterds treated Germans in this film.
Then there's the lack of any credible history. Some names may be familiar, but that is it. In 1944, Hitler was holed up in one of his bunkers waging an all-out war while Goebbels was begging for permission to force German citizens into the war effort. Yet in this film, the two of them are traveling to Paris to leisurely watch a propaganda film as though the war isn't outside their door (Hitler visited Paris once in 1940 and never again). Hitler is sporting his Nazi Party uniform that he stopped wearing on September 1, 1939. Tarantino's Hitler and Goebbels are reminiscent of old propaganda cartoons with their outrageous characteristics overwhelming the viewer. And let's not forget that all Germans were bad people who killed the Jews! Portraying Germans in this light may make it easier for people to deal with the death and destruction of the war, but it does not help them understand it. But they're all Nazis, so to hell with them, right?
There are some redeeming aspects of the film. Tarantino's character development comes through strong as he creates some great villains and heroes, but it falls short with the most important people in the story. Goebbels, his wife, and Hitler are over the top and hardly believable. Most of the Basterds are little more than killing machines with zero personality. Brad Pitt's character is funny for a few one-liners, but his fake Tennessee accent drags on throughout the film.
Inglourious Basterds is a blood lust film that does little to bring any understanding to the Second World War. It goes beyond celebrating violence and crosses over into rejoicing in pain and gore. The majority of those killed in this film are unarmed people who apparently deserve to die simply because they're Nazis. Killing in war is not something to be relished or rejoiced. It is an act performed by men who do it out of necessity. There is no mutilation performed in war except by men who are later disdained by historians. This is a movie that needs to be condemned for its rewriting of history and complete lack of morality. |
