Inglourious Basterds

I think I've been misled by false advertising around this film. Both the title and the trailer point toward it being a movie about the 'basterds', a gang of Americans/Jews/Germans brutally killing Nazis in occupied France. In fact, it is hardly about them at all. I would actually find it difficult to say who this film is about. It is hard to like any of the characters, or see them as the drive of the plot. None of them are full or rounded. We don't get to see more than one side of them, and as a result have little sympathy for them (not that Tarantino gives us much chance to). This is of course not a historically accurate occupied France, but a second-hand one based on war movies from the 40s and onwards. It's a transposition of Tarantino's style to a different period, which I think undermines the style itself. The film might be said to be more correctly about Christoph Waltz's character, the 'Jew Hunter', or Melanie Laurent's Jewish cinema owner, but it is hardly followed through. It feels like a film that was good in the writing stage, but got edited out of itself. Eventually, it becomes a plot to trap and then kill the Nazi elite in a cinema in Paris, but this feels tagged on to a random straggle of events with no purpose. More worrying is that there were several repeats of elements from Tarantino's earlier films - are these deliberate, or mistakes, or lazy repetition? If this film was by an unknown first time director, I'd probably have a very different opinion of it, and that's exactly the point. Tarantino's films come with such high expectations that you can't help but feel disappointed. There is brilliant acting (Waltz is considered a good bet for an Oscar), and good music, but scenes go on for too long, characters are laboriously introduced then disappear, and although the ending was interesting, when the credits started to roll I felt generally unimpressed and empty about the experience.