I have not yet figured Quentin Tarantino out, and I think that's probably what he's going for.  Inglorious Basterds had been a film geek rumor for so long that I honestly never thought we'd see it.  Tarantion's WWII 'men on a mission' film was supposed to happen right after Kill Bill but somehow Death Proof got in the way.  I can't complain as I loved the whole Grindhouse experience in the theater, but I have to admit that I was anxious to see what Tarantino would do with a war movie.

As it turns out, he made a movie set during WWII and featuring a team of men on mission, but the film actually dances around both of those key components.  There is relatively little of the mission in the film, and there's not a single battle scene except for the stuff that makes up the film within the film.  I went into Inglorious Basterds expecting to see Tarantino's love letter to The Dirty Dozen and instead I got something quite a bit more substantial than his typical talky homage.  Just when I thought that this was going to be Kill Bill in Nazi occupied France, it turns out that the film is really much more cerebral than that. 

In a lot of ways, Basterds is more about the director's love of movies than it is about his love of a particular type of film.  The film's climax where its various character threads all come together takes place appropriately in a cinema, and if Tarantino isn't making an overt statement about the power of film, he is at least hinting at it.  I loved the revisionist history and the film's embrace of the suave, maniacal villain, the macho soldiers, and the tough survivor of tragedy bent on revenge.  Maybe one reason that the movie doesn't actually focus that much on the titular Basterds is that Tarantino figures we've seen that story before--the men go off on their mission and we go off to see what's happening at the cinema around the corner.  It's an odd way to put the plot together, but the chapter breaks and the big leaps forward in time make it work.  The few tense scenes are incredibly tense without being horrifying, and the movie always left me wondering what kind of vile act was lurking around the corner. 

When all of that came together I could tell that this was a film that only Tarantino could make.  It's not full of over-the-top action or buried in overly-clever dialogue, but it's still unmistakable as his.  I think Tarantino has made movies that are more fun or that invite more repeat viewings, but Inglorious Basterds might just be the film that brings his unique vision to the screen most clearly.  Pulp Fiction inspired a wave of imitators, but this movie is so much his own that I don't think people will even be able to figure out the trick to how it works well enough to try to copy it.