‘Inglourious Basterds’ in 4K: Reflections on Tarantino’s Last Great Movie

Last week, Inglourious Basterds was released in 4K for the first time, offering up a fuller remastered take on Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 WWII grindhouse epic. Though the film has lived on, thanks mostly to anti-Nazi memes bolstered in big part by the election of 2016 – it didn’t quite become the cultural sticking point like Django Unchained or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood did.

While Inglourious Basterds is by no means a forgotten movie, seeing it for the first time since its theatrical release has stirred up quite a few thoughts.

It’s a War Movie That’s Horny for Westerns

Knowing where Tarantino’s trajectory would take him after this movie certainly helps make this clear, but my god there are endless homages to the American Western throughout, and they’re not subtle. For example, when the Basterds have a handful of German prisoners, the long, slow stares and spaghetti western scores, it shows his gaze into another genre that he fully committed to with 2012’s Django as well as The Hateful Eight in 2015.

It Fully Commits to Tarantino’s Alternate Universe

Way back before the screen cut from black in Reservoir Dogs‘ earliest screening, Tarantino’s obsession — and hence his characters’ obsession — with pop culture references became the cornerstone of his work. It wasn’t until Basterds that we’re given the first indication as to why. Rewriting history where Adolph Hitler is killed due to a pair of overlapping assassination attempts is one thing, but for it to take place in a movie palace from the days of yonder gave us all that reference-heavy machismo a definitive origin story.

Its Trailers Were a Fantastic Bait-and-Switch

Along with 70s-heavy pop culture references, Tarantino’s films have always thrived on the tension that any character, regardless of how top-billed the actor was, could be killed off at any moment; his penchant for scrambling the timelines notwithstanding. That’s Janet Leigh getting killed in Psycho halfway through but spread out over two-plus hours. Over and over.

That kind of high-stakes drama is one of Basterds strong points, and given that the story takes place against the backdrop of war-torn Europe, there’s no shortage of opportunity. The movie doubled down, however, relegating Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine to a secondary character while Melanie Laurent’s Shosanna Dreyfus took center stage. On the Nazi side of things, Daniel Brühl’s Fredrick Zoller had a bigger impact shaping the story than a scene-stealing Christoph Waltz did as the cartoonishly villainous Hans Landa.

And if the bait-and-switch of the main characters wasn’t enough of a curveball, most of the movie is in French or German. And you would not believe how many people could not stop bitching about having to read a few subtitles during its theatrical run. Like reading is some massive chore.

It Really is Tarantino’s Masterpiece — and His Last Truly Great Movie

There’s something that’s felt off about QT movies since Basterds, and it’s pretty easy to pinpoint the reason is the death of his longtime editor, Sally Menke, in 2010. Django undoubtedly suffered from the marketing giving away too much of the movie, but also suffered from over-indulgent, out-of-place references that existed seemingly for their own sake. Sure, Basterds cast Mike Myers. But Django had its eponymous character dressed as Austin Powers.

Similarly, The Hateful Eight boasts a three-plus-hour runtime but still manages to need an extended narrated sequence to fill in its storytelling gaps, and Hollywood has a story in its similarly lengthy excursion somewhere, it’s just no one like Menke was around to try and actually find it. And sure, Basterds has obtuse moments of narration, it recklessly deviates from its five-chapter structure, and spends its time gazing lovingly at the Western genre, but it’s a war movie that’s both wholly original and chocked full of homages, right down to lifting its ’70s grindhouse title. It’s mercilessly tense, self-indulgent, subversive, clumsy, and indisputably a masterpiece.

Inglourious Basterds is currently available on 4K, Blu-ray, and digital.