It’s been hailed as a “masterpiece” and as the “most perfect” film of an iconic director who has one of the most impressive bodies of work in the history of cinema. And it’s currently streaming on Netflix — but you only have a few more days to see it before it disappears from the platform.
Inglorious Basterds has also been described as “insanely OTT” with “tension ramped up to almost unbearable levels in a volley of standout scenes”. It has been ranked among the 100 best films of all time, with only four war films ranking above it in the list from world-renowned film magazine Empire. Those films are Lawrence of Arabia, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List and Apocalypse Now.
But the 2009 film from Quentin Tarantion leaves Netflix on June 16 and your only options for seeing it after that date will be to pay on another streaming platform or subscribe to Amazon Prime Video. And you can be sure that it is worth the time to watch — it is 2.5 hours long but, judging by the near-unanimous reviews, every second is worth it. The film has a rating of 89% on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.4 out of 10 on IMDB.
The film stars Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Melanie Laurent and Diane Kruger. But it was an actor who was largely unknown at the time who stood out above all, sweeping the boards at stellar awards ceremonies after the film’s release.
Christoph Waltz won the Best Supporting Actor prize at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes and Baftas, to name just three, for his portrayal of Nazi SS officer Hans Landa. In fact, Tarantino said he might never had made the film if he had not “found someone as good as Christoph”. Critic Ed Koch, writing in The Atlantic, said Waltz’s performance is “the highlight of the film”, which is no mean feat considering some consider this film to be Tarantino’s “masterpiece”.
Writing on the BBC, Caryn James says this World War Two fantasy is also Tarantino’s “most perfectly realised work”. James wrote: “It is not as brashly startling as Reservoir Dogs, his first film, or as influential as the violent, funny, time-looping Pulp Fiction. But with its swoop through history, and its flawless ability to be at once a war movie and a homage to war movies, a comedy and a drama, Basterds is his most ambitious, most perfectly realised work.”
James also describes the action as being “as dramatic and as brutally satisfying as any Tarantino has made”.
Renowned film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 2009 before his death that Inglourious Basterds “is a big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that [Tarantino is] the real thing, a director of quixotic delights”. He adds: “For starters, he provides World War Two with a much-needed alternative ending.”
The film tells the story of two converging plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler at a Paris cinema. One is by a British-led operation carried out by a team of American soldiers led by Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine, while the other is by the owner of the French cinema, Shosanna Dreyfuss (Laurent), in revenge for the murder of her family by Landa and his troops. Raine, Dreyfuss and Landa are all iconic cinema characters.
The film was Tarantino’s seventh as a director and his highest-grossing to that point, until it was surpassed by Django Unchained in 2012, which also starred Waltz alongside Jamie Foxx and which, just like Inglorious Basterds, rewrote history.
Geoffrey Macnab writing in The Independent said the film was Tarantino’s “most entertaining and exhilarating effort since Pulp Fiction” while Jonathan Crocker writing for Little White Lies said it was “his most purely enjoyable film since Kill Bill Volume 1”.
The misspelling in the title of the film is, of course, deliberate. The title is inspired by a 1978 Italian war film called The Inglorious Bastards that follows a group of prisoners drafted into a special war mission in 1944. But Tarantino hasn’t been entirely clear as to why he did that. He has given various explanations, including that “that’s just the way you say it”, that it was “Quentin Tarantino spelling” and that it was a “a Basquiat-esque touch” in reference to an artist who deliberately misspelled in his work.
Inglorious Basterds is available on Netflix with a subscription until June 16, on Amazon Prime Video with a subscription, and on Google Play and Apple TV from £2.49.