Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) is not a war film in the traditional sense. It’s an alternate history set in Nazi-occupied France, built around two separate plots to kill Hitler, both converging on the same Paris cinema. The film runs nearly two and a half hours across five chapters. Released in August 2009, it grossed over $320 million worldwide and earned eight Academy Award nominations. Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor, a role Tarantino himself once feared might be unplayable, and had already taken Best Actor at Cannes when the film premiered there.
One plot follows a band of Jewish-American soldiers dropped into France with orders to terrorize the Nazi occupation, each one owing their commander a hundred Nazi scalps. The other follows a young Jewish woman in Paris who survived a massacre and now runs a cinema under a false name. These two storylines never really know about each other, but they end up aimed at the same night, the same building, and the same audience. What holds it all together, and haunts nearly every scene, is the man both stories are built around avoiding.
Landa Hunts the Dreyfuses
The film opens on a French dairy farm under Nazi occupation. The Lapadite family lives there, and one day a group of Nazi soldiers shows up at their door. The head of the household, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), quickly sends his wife and children inside. Leading the soldiers is a Colonel named Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). After a while, they make their way into the house. Landa is a remarkably cool, unruffled man, not a hot-tempered bone in his body, but make no mistake, he’s ruthless, especially when it comes to Jews. They call him the Jew Hunter, and for good reason.
Landa gets down to business with Lapadite. He’s heard that there are still Jewish families hiding in the area, though several have already been captured. His records point to one family still unaccounted for, the Dreyfuses, and since they reportedly lived nearby, Landa asks Lapadite about them directly. Lapadite says rumor has it the Dreyfuses fled to Spain for safety. Landa doesn’t buy it for a second. He’s been at this long enough to read people like a book, and he can tell when someone’s lying to his face.
As it turns out, Lapadite has indeed been hiding the Dreyfus family beneath the floorboards of his own home, but he doesn’t give that up easily. Landa keeps pressing, peeling back one layer at a time, until Lapadite finally breaks and admits the truth. Moments later, Landa sends his men inside, points out where the family is hiding under the floor, and orders them to open fire. Only Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) manages to escape from the family. She bolts across the field in a full panic. Landa draws his pistol and takes aim, but then something strange happens and he deliberately lets her go.
The Basterds Earn Their Name
Years later, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is running a military briefing. He goes by Aldo the Apache, a nickname rooted in his descent from the mountain man Jim Bridger and his Apache-style approach to guerrilla warfare. He’s gathered eight Jewish-American soldiers and is sending them behind enemy lines in France with one mission: kill Nazis and, ultimately, take out Hitler (Martin Wuttke) himself. This crew is known as the Basterds. Aldo makes his expectations crystal clear, his men are to show absolutely no mercy, and they each owe him a hundred Nazi scalps. No exceptions.
Over in Berlin, Hitler is in a rage. Word has reached him that Aldo’s group ambushed and wiped out an entire unit of his soldiers. He’s furious, going off on Aldo and his Jewish squad, demanding answers. Then a call comes in and it turns out one man survived the massacre, brought in to give his account. He reports that only one of them made it out alive. Elsewhere, Aldo and his men have three Nazi prisoners on their hands. While some of the Basterds take care of business elsewhere, Aldo focuses on interrogating Sergeant Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel), trying to get convoy locations and other useful intel.
During the interrogation, Aldo takes his time introducing each of his men to Werner one by one. Most names get no reaction. But when he gets to Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), something shifts. Werner confirms that every soldier in the German army knows who Stiglitz is, and yeah, he would, because Stiglitz is a German sergeant who turned on his own army and killed thirteen Gestapo officers before he was captured and sent to Berlin to be made an example of. The Basterds broke him out of prison before he could get there, and Aldo recruited him on the spot. That’s exactly why his name carries so much weight.
Werner respectfully refuses to cooperate, telling Aldo that giving up information would make him a traitor to his country. Aldo explains, with equal calm, that refusing will get him torn apart by his own men. Werner still won’t budge, so one of Aldo’s guys, Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), nicknamed the Bear Jew for the brutality he brings to a baseball bat, steps out from the shadows and goes to work on the sergeant.
When Aldo moves on to the next prisoner, that soldier makes a run for it and ends up dead. The last one, visibly shaking and out of options, gives up the convoy information. Before letting him go, Aldo and his men leave him with a little parting gift, a swastika carved into his forehead. That way, when he faces Hitler, it’ll be obvious he wasn’t simply released, so he won’t be executed as a collaborator.
A New Name, Old Enemies
In Paris, Shosanna is now running a cinema under a false identity, going by the name Emmanuelle Mimieux. That same cinema, it turns out, is being eyed as the venue for the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film. Shosanna has a new life, but the hatred she carries for the Nazis hasn’t gone anywhere. Enter Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), a Nazi soldier with a not-so-subtle crush on Shosanna. After their first encounter he keeps finding excuses to talk to her, turning on the charm at every opportunity.
The next day he’s still at it, even though she barely gives him the time of day. What Shosanna doesn’t yet realize is that Zoller is no ordinary soldier. He’s famous, and he’s about to become the star of a Nazi propaganda film. Once she figures that out, she’s deeply uncomfortable. Then Zoller drops that the film is a Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) production, and Shosanna’s mood crashes instantly. Goebbels, the Nazis’ infamous propaganda minister, just hearing that name dredges up memories she’d rather leave buried, memories of what they did to her family.
Not long after, while she’s working on the cinema, Nazi officers show up and essentially escort her to an event where Goebbels himself is present. Zoller is there too, apparently he’s the one who pushed for Shosanna’s cinema to host the film’s premiere. Goebbels isn’t fully sold yet and wants to inspect the place before committing. Zoller keeps lobbying for it. Then Shosanna looks up and sees Colonel Hans Landa walk in. The man who slaughtered her entire family.
She freezes, and her mind goes blank. Landa, for his part, doesn’t seem to recognize her. Back then he never got a clear look at her face before letting her run. He introduces himself warmly, even references the dairy farm where her family used to live. But here’s the thing: you have to wonder if Landa already knows exactly who she is. The man reads people for a living, and he’s probing the entire conversation with surgical precision. When he finally leaves, Shosanna breaks down in tears.
Meanwhile, Goebbels tours the theater and decides it’s the right venue. With that settled, Shosanna hatches her plan to burn the place down during the premiere. With the top Nazi brass, Hitler included, all under one roof, it’s the perfect opportunity. Her projectionist Marcel (Jacky Ido), who is also her partner, will help her pull it off.
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The Tavern Mission Falls Apart
The story then moves to a briefing room, where we learn the British are sending in Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender). Before the war, Hicox was a film critic who wrote extensively about German cinema and had even published two books on the subject, which made him the obvious choice for a mission that required someone who could pass as German from the inside out. His mission is to travel to France and link up with the Basterds. The plan involves meeting a German actress named Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), who is secretly working as a British spy.
The meeting is set for an underground tavern called La Louisiane. Aldo has a bad feeling about the location and says so, but Archie talks him into it. Part of the team heads in while Aldo and a few others hang back to monitor the situation from outside. The moment the team steps inside, it’s clear something is very wrong. The place is crawling with Nazi soldiers, completely contrary to what von Hammersmark had promised. She’s already there waiting, surrounded by troops who are, of all things, celebrating the birth of one of their comrades’ children. Archie, Stiglitz, and Wicki have no choice but to sit down and play it cool.
They do manage to pick up one critical piece of intel. Goebbels has moved the premiere location from the Reich to Shosanna’s cinema. But then one of the soldiers starts getting nosy. Archie snaps at him, and that’s when the cracks start to show. His accent sounds off, not quite right to the German ear. Sitting nearby, a Gestapo officer named Dieter Hellstrom (August Diehl) has been listening carefully and picks up on it. The deeper the conversation goes, the worse it gets. Archie ultimately blows his own cover, and Hellstrom knows.
There’s no walking away from this, so either everyone starts shooting or nobody leaves, and it ends in a firefight. The only Nazi left standing is Sergeant Wilhelm (Alexander Fehling), and a standoff breaks out between him and Aldo’s men outside. Wilhelm agrees to let von Hammersmark go in exchange for his own release, but von Hammersmark shoots him dead before he can expose her. She survives the firefight but took a bullet in the leg from Hellstrom. Aldo hauls her off to a local veterinary clinic to interrogate her and treat the wound.
At the clinic, Aldo pushes von Hammersmark hard, demanding to know whether she set them up. She denies it. The real answer, it turns out, is that Archie gave himself away when he ordered three drinks but held up the wrong fingers. In Germany, people count starting with the thumb, so three means thumb, index, and middle finger. Archie held up his index, middle, and ring finger instead, the way a British person naturally would, and Hellstrom caught it instantly.
With Wicki, Stiglitz, and Archie all dead, the only German speakers on the team, Aldo has to get creative. He needs to get into the premiere, but his two remaining men, Donny and Omar (Omar Doom), speak no German at all. They settle on Italian as a cover, reasoning that Germany and Italy are allies, so it’s at least plausible. Meanwhile, Landa arrives at the tavern and does what he does best. He picks through the scene methodically and walks away with two key pieces of evidence, a shoe belonging to von Hammersmark and a napkin with her autograph on it. Apparently before the shooting started, she’d signed it for one of the soldiers whose baby had just been born. That’s all Landa needs to know she’s a traitor.
Landa Plays His Own Game
The day of the premiere finally arrives. Stolz der Nation, Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda film, screening in front of an audience packed with high-ranking Nazi officials, including Hitler himself. Shosanna is ready, and Landa is there too, moving like a man playing a game three steps ahead of everyone else. He makes a point of greeting von Hammersmark, who is now wearing a leg cast, and the look on his face says he already knows exactly how that happened.
Landa then crosses paths with Aldo and his men, who are posing as Italians. Landa almost certainly sees right through the disguise, he knows the Basterds too well, but he plays along for his own reasons. Donny and Omar slip inside and spot Goebbels and Martin Bormann in the crowd, then take their seats. The timer on the bomb strapped to their legs is already running.
Back in a side room, Landa pulls von Hammersmark aside for a private conversation. He goes through the motions of asking questions before finally dropping the act and strangling her. Then he orders his men to grab Aldo, who is immediately jumped and dragged outside with a bag over his head. Aldo is driven to a remote location, where he finds Utivitch, another one of his men, already in custody. Landa tells Aldo he knows everything, the whole operation, and specifically that Donny and Omar are inside right now with a bomb. He holds that over Aldo’s head, dangling the threat of tipping off the soldiers inside.
And then Landa does something completely unexpected. He wants to make a deal, with the man who is, by all accounts, his sworn enemy. It seems Landa has seen the writing on the wall. The Nazis are finished, and he has no intention of going down with them or standing trial as a war criminal. He asks Aldo to get a high-ranking American officer on the line and arrange his formal surrender.
Back at the cinema, everything is in motion. Marcel and Shosanna are ready to go. Donny and Omar have confirmed Hitler is in the building. Landa, meanwhile, is on the phone with what sounds like a senior American military official. He explains that he’s been working undercover, embedded as a Nazi colonel, feeding information from the inside, and he’s even already planted a bomb under the seats. Aldo is ordered by his superiors to take Landa and the radio operator to the American front line, where Landa will officially surrender.
The Cinema Burns, No Survivors
The film is rolling inside the theater. Hitler and Goebbels are loving every minute of it. But Zoller, sitting in the crowd, doesn’t like the idea of Shosanna being alone in the projection booth and goes up to check on her. Once inside, he finally says what he’s been holding back, telling her how he feels. Shosanna has never wanted anything to do with him, and the rejection pushes him over the edge. Thinking fast, she tells him to lock the door and then shoots him.
She watches him bleeding out on the floor, and despite everything, despite the fact that she never wanted anything to do with him, something in her hesitates. She moves toward him, perhaps out of pity, perhaps instinct. It’s the last decision she makes. Zoller, still barely alive, raises his gun and shoots her. They both die there in the projection booth, together.
The film keeps playing. Then it switches to a pre-recorded message from Shosanna herself, projected onto the screen, where she looks the audience dead in the eye and tells them that a Jew is about to have her revenge. Marcel locks the auditorium doors, trapping everyone inside, then sets the cinema on fire. The crowd scatters in a panic with nowhere to go. Donny and Omar storm Hitler’s private box and gun him and Goebbels down directly. Marcel dies in the blaze he started. And then the bombs strapped to Donny and Omar go off, tearing the whole building apart. Nobody gets out.
Cut to the front lines, where Landa officially surrenders to Aldo and Utivich and hands over everything as agreed. Aldo tells Utivich to cuff Landa, then shoots the radio operator, Herman, breaking that part of the deal. Landa protests, but Aldo shrugs it off. But Aldo isn’t the kind of man to let something like this end cleanly. He takes out his knife and carves a swastika into Landa’s forehead. Looking at his work, he calls it his masterpiece. And that’s where the film ends.
