Review Detail

I have to admit that I only watched this edit because the fan editor kindly asked me to review it. 'Inglourious Basterds' happens to be one of my favorite films of all time, which already makes me cringe at the idea of messing with it. Also I don't really see the point of shortening a movie down to one hour just for the sake of it.

Nevertheless I enjoyed this different retelling of a familiar story. The audio-mix is truly outstanding, especially the way the music moves into the background (most notably in the first two acts). Nice title-animations in the beginning, and decent music replacements overall. I don't regard the replacements improvements, but I was rather amused with the song added to the bashing scene with the Bear-Jew haha. Well done. And being a fan of the Floyd I truly loved the finale, great idea and again a perfect soundmix. But like other reviewers already pointed out: some of the songs felt a bit unnecessary or even out of place.

Another thing I really liked was the omission of the overlong name-guessing scene in the basement - the only flaw in the masterpiece. I wonder if it wouldn't have been possible to insert a shot between she shot of the German lieutenant drinking and the subsequent shot saying that he's had enough - to solve the continuity error. Apart from that, all other cuts are flawlessly executed. There are a lot of big and short omissions, and I only noticed them because I know the original by heart.

My least favorite part of this cut is probably the lunch scene with Emanuelle and Landa. In the original, it's (another) brilliant scene, but it doesn't really work without the weight of the original opening scene. The short black-and-white flashback that substitutes it doesn't provide that weight, no matter how well that sequence is edited. It's simply too short to make a real impression. But than again, the goal of this edit was of course to do it all in 60 minutes, and there's a lot going on in the original movie to be condensed into such a narrow timeframe.

So despite this I did enjoy this cut for what it aims to achieve, and I think the fan editor made the most of it, despite all limitations of the conceptual goal.