Greetings Loved Ones! Liu Is The Name, And Views Are My Game.
Upon its release in 2009, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards was met with critical acclaim and box office boom. The film–which tells the story of two plots to assassinate Hitler, one made by a young French Jewish cinema proprietor, the other by a team of Jewish-American soldiers—was nominated for numerous awards, and made an Oscar winner and international star out of Austrian actor Christoph Waltz.
At the time of its release, my parents and I were just getting settled in our new home after spending five years in Germany. I had loved every minute of my time overseas, and I was eager to share my experiences with anyone who would listen. Unfortunately, these dreams never came to fruition. Instead of showing interest, or even curiosity, at the fact that I grew up in another country and spoke another language, other children mocked and harassed me–particularly of the accent that I’d acquired over the years. They called me horrible names like Nazi and Jew-Killer, and claimed that the Holocaust was my fault. Just a few problems with that theory; one, I’m about seventy years too young to have been there; two, I’m not even German: and three, I have a grandfather and a great uncle who both fought for the Allies. Of course, when I pointed these facts out to my tormentors, it did nothing to stop them. If anything, it just made things worse.
My anguish reached an all time high when Inglorious Bastards hit the theaters. Now, whenever children called me Nazi, they did it with Brad Pitt’s absurdly strong Southern accent, and they threatened to call upon Donny “The Bear Jew” Donnowitz to “take his big bat” and “beat my ass to death with it.” Needless to say, I had no desire to see the movie after that. In fact, I promised myself right then and there that I would never watch it.
Fast forward four years–I’m eighteen, slightly more mature, and have decided to break my own oath. I figure now I’m old enough to get through the film without getting too upset. I tell myself that, even if I don’t like it, at least now I can use details from the picture to support my dislike.
Well, I’ve seen Inglorious Bastards, and what I have to say about the movie is this. It’s certainly not the worst thing to have ever hit the big screen. As an action film, it’s entertaining and reasonably well acted. It’s also shot primarily in French and German–a fact that I, as a die-hard fan of foreign-language films, was pleased to discover. Better yet is the fact that Daniel Brühl, one of my favorite actors from my years in Germany, is featured in it.
Beyond these small positive features, however, the film still flops. The first issue I had with this film is that it is gratuitously violent. Now, I bet some of you are thinking, “Well, it’s a war movie. What do you expect?” But you see, unlike other violent war films, like Glory and Saving Private Ryan, this violence has no greater purpose. Inglorious Bastards is violent simply for the sake of being violent. Within this nearly three hour picture, several people are scalped, some have swastikas carved on their foreheads, one gentleman gets his brains bashed out, and another gets his balls shot off at point blank. Unless you have a strong stomach, I doubt you can take the carnage that unfolds before the camera.
The second thing I didn’t like about this picture was that, for a movie, which claims to be a Jew-empowering revenge fantasy, it is incredibly lacking in Jewish content. Other Holocaust and World War 2 films include at least a minimal exploration of the beautiful religion that was persecuted by the Nazis, but not this one. You’ll find no recitations in Hebrew, references to the Talmud, or descriptions of traditions observed on the High Holidays in this picture. Instead, the film’s Jewish characters–many of whom are portrayed by Christian actors–are shown as sadistic psychopaths dealing out horrendous punishments to their German prisoners, many of whom don’t even express anti-Semitic views. The one positive aspect of this lack of attention to Jewish culture is the fact that Jewish stereotypes and racial epithets are largely avoided.
The third issue I had with the movie is that the plot is too absurd to take seriously. A truly great film is one that is able to make a fictional world seem real, so, Inglorious Bastards is anything but a great film. It contradicts history in so many ways, and is populated by so many two dimensional characters that, eventually, you’re forced to throw up your hands and say “What the hell?”
Let me give you an example. The movie revolves around a group of Jewish-American soldiers who have been given orders to collect 100 Nazi scalps each. Their leader, Lieutenant Aldo Reine (Brad Pitt) claims that all Germans are “the foot-soldiers of a Jew-hating, masse-murdering maniac who need to be destroyed.” First of all, that statement just isn’t true. Many Germans only joined the Nazi Party because they had no choice, and many more did everything in their power to undermine Hitler’s anti-Semitic regime. If you don’t believe me, look up the heroic actions of such Germans as Oskar Schindler, Wilm Hosenfeld, Claus Von Stauffenberg and Heinz Drossel. Secondly, this film is set in 1943, two whole years before any of the Allied Powers knew about the Death Camps, so how exactly would Reine know that Hitler was “mass-murdering?” Besides, all historical evidence indicates that, even if the Allies had known about the Fuehrer’s “final solution,” they probably wouldn’t have taken any steps to stop it. Many people in Britain, France, Russia and the United States shared the Nazi’s anti-Semitic views. In the years before the war, they largely ignored the stories of destruction and pogrom that reached them. A perfect example of their indifference to the plight of the Jews is the 1939 voyage of the Saint Louis, where President Roosevelt denied a German ship filled with Jewish refugees entrance to the United States. In the real world, the Allies didn’t care enough about the well being of the Jews to organize an elite unit of soldiers to avenge them.
Another example of the film’s lack of attention to reality is the ease with which the protagonists bring down the entire German government. They do this by having all the Nazi high command gather in a movie theater in Paris to watch a propaganda film, and then burn them to a crisp and riddle them with machine-gun fire. First of all, never, and I mean never, would every high-ranking member of the German government, Military, Gestapo, SS, and Ministry of Propaganda decide to meet at one place and one time. Anyone with common sense can see that coming together in a big group and having little to no security is just plain stupid. Say what you like about the Nazis, but they definitely weren’t THAT stupid. Also, why would these Bigwigs go all the way to France just to watch a movie? If ever all these higher-ups were to meet in one place (which they never would) a far more likely place would be Berlin. Another thing–why would the film’s protagonists decide to kill off EVERY member of the German government? In the movie, they make it out as though doing this will bring about an immediate end to the war. I hate to disappoint any audience member who might have believed this but, in the real world, doing that would have had the exact opposite effect. When we toppled Saddam Hussein in the early 2000s, we also dissolved the Ba’ath Party and the pre-existing Iraqi government. This created a power vacuum and generated extreme instability in the region. If, as the film portrays it, the entire Nazi government had been executed in one fell swoop, there would have been no one left to order the remaining German troops to surrender, no one left to negotiate with the Allies, and no one left to discontinue the Concentration camps. This just goes to show you that, despite everything that movies like this try to tell you, violence really isn’t the answer. Anyway, it is instances like this, instances in which there is a blatant lack of attention to reality in the film, that seriously decreased my enjoyment of it.
The fourth and final reason that this film failed in my opinion is the fact that it lacks any likable characters. I can only enjoy a movie where there are people in it that are relatable, and Inglorious Bastards lacks any such people. In Inglorious Bastards, the “good-guys” are redneck American soldiers who scalp people for fun, and the “bad-guys” are Nazis. Who am I supposed to side with? In fact, the only remotely likable character in the entire picture is a German Sergeant named Wilhelm, and he’s only featured in one scene where, you guessed it, he gets killed. I don’t know about you, but I can’t endure an ultra-violent, three-hour war movie without having at least one character to sympathize with.
On average I would give this movie a rating of 5 out of 10. It’s action-packed and well acted, but it’s also emotionally flat and too unrealistic to take seriously. Unless you’ve got a thing for historically inaccurate war flicks that feature 70s style soundtracks, I wouldn’t recommend it. But, hey, that’s just me. If you actually enjoyed the film, and would like to engage me in a debate, by all means, do so. All right! That’s’ all for today. See you!
Nathan Liu
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