*WARNING: At least one definite Inglourious Basterds spoiler and I get a bit rambly towards the end*
 
I often find the mark of a great movie is that after watching it, I feel changed. Films like The Matrix, Battle Royale and Fight Club all had a big effect on me when I first saw them roughly a scary decade ago. While not exactly the deepest movies of all time, after watching them, they make me consider my place in the world, how it effects me and vice versa. With Inglourious Basterds, this is the first time a bad movie has ever had an effect on me like this.
 
When I came out of the cinema on Friday, besides being angry that I lost a coin toss and ended up watching a Tarantino film instead of (500) Days of Summer, I realised I was now sympathetic to the Nazis. Now, I want you to know that I know Inglourious Basterds is a fantasy movie and pretty much nothing in that film actually occured in real life but it still made me question the way in which we view the Nazis as history's stock villains.
 
Take the film's big bad guy and final boss, SS Colonel Hans Landa: He's incredibly intelligent, charming, dashing and as a detective is probably the best since (or is this before?) Columbo. In his position in the Third Reich as The Jew Hunter, he excelled at his job, as perfectly demonstrated in Chapter One but later on in the movie, he shows that he has no interest in the Nazi party and is willing to let the higher ups die if it means he ends the war, saves millions of lives and deservedly takes the credit. While watching the film, I was rooting for Landa. I wanted him to win. To me, he was the hero. A Nazi hero.
 
And then you have the Nation's Pride, Frederick Zoller. A Nazi sniper who iced so many Yankees that his position as Private means he must have definitely prestiged at least once and now, the star of what would have been a huge hit in the alternate 1944. Pinned down and facing insurmountable odds, he did what any good soldier fighting for his country would do and stood his ground. When we see him in the film, Zoller is definitely a war hero, beloved by his fellow soldiers and adored in his homeland. Then he meets the lovely Shosanna and tried to win her heart. Not by being the macho motherfucker he had every right to be but by being a pretty cool guy who knew his movie trivia. While this seemed like an obvious showhorn of Tarantino's movie knowledge into the picture, it made Zoller seem like a down to Earth kind of guy and it's only when he has Goebbels attention does he turn into the macho motherfucker, but even then, he just seemed a bit bewildered by his newfound fame. Towards the end of the film, he gets killed by Shosanna but not before firing back and laying some Reichsmackdown of his own. It seems I was the only one in the cinema who seemed happy about this with the couple next to me looking kind of bewildered why I was so pleased. To me, Zoller was a really nice guy. A really nice Nazi.
 
Compare those two to the film's intended heroes: The Basterds. Most notably Lt. Aldo Raine: A retarded huckleberry who was presumably sent on a suicide mission because he was foolish enough to get clocked smuggling moonshine through Hicksville, TN. Why are we meant to root for this guy? As a disturbing trend in popular culture, because he's stupid and talks in a funny voice, we're meant to like him. Then we have 'The Bear Jew' played so badly by Eli Roth that now I can confirm he belongs on neither side of the camera. During the finale, he takes such delight in gunning down the relatively innocent and already trapped, burning and suffocating German officials that when you combine this with his love of smacking already captured Nazi soldiers in the head until there's nothing but bits that he manages to be the biggest villain in a movie that also stars Adolf Hitler.
 
When I compare those two Nazis to the two Americans, Landa and Zoller are people i'd much rather be fighting with than the suicidally stupid pair of Basterds and yet we're meant to hate them simply because they wear that sharp Nazi uniform. It just strikes me as pathetic that we're meant to hate the Nazi characters for just being Nazis and root for the Jews because they're Jews. I studied the Nazis at GCSE, AS and A2 levels in high school so while i'm not amazingly well versed in what they did during WWII, I have a very good idea and events like Kristallnacht all the way up to The Final Solution are deplorable and, for lack of a better word, evil but trying to brand every Nazi as being deplorable and evil is the kind of jingoism that modern society is fighting against on a daily basis.
 
I think it's even more weird that the reverse is allowed to happen. Because the Jews were the victims here that we're meant to sympathise with them by default and assume that they are all good and that in the movie, their revenge mission isn't evil. The movie's producer, Lawrence Bender, described the movie as a 'fucking Jewish wet dream' which, to further blur the lines between fiction and reality, seems far more evil in its intent than the Nazis original stand point when you consider that they were trying to restore Germany back to its position as a major European power after being withered by The Great Depression, WWI and the resulting Treaty of Versaille. If The Basterds really were heroes, would they not focus on saving Jewish lives rather than taking pleasure in killin' Nazis?
 
After all this writing, I think i've come to the decision that Inglourious Basterds is definitely a bad film, Tarantino is a bad film director but deep within this bloated mess is something great and it might not even be something Tarantino expected to create but his movie points out the audience as hypocrites. Hypocrites who relish the death of soldiers with mothers, fathers, wives and children all because they were on the losing side.
 
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer.