War of the A-listers ... Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds and Tom Cruise in Valkyrie
Every so often, two films about the exact same subject will get released within months of each other. Think Titanic, the 1997 James Cameron mega-hit and Titanic, the 1996 Catherine Zeta-Jones flop that nobody has ever seen. Or Carry On Columbus, the 1992 Rik Mayall vehicle and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, the 1992 Catherine Zeta-Jones film that nobody has ever seen.
- Inglourious Basterds
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 18
- Runtime: 152 mins
- Directors: Quentin Tarantino
- Cast: Brad Pitt, Christian Berkel, Christoph Waltz, Cloris Leachman, Daniel Bruhl, Diane Kruger, Eli Roth, Maggie Cheung, Melanie Laurent, Michael Fassbender, Mike Myers, Samuel L Jackson, Til Schweiger
The same thing happened this year, with the release of two films about wartime plots to kill Hitler - Tom Cruise's Valkyrie and Brad Pitt's Inglourious Basterds. This time it's a little more tricky to pick a winner, because both films were made by acclaimed directors, and both star cinematic icons.
That hasn't stopped Pitt from pouring oil on the fire by calling Valkyrie ridiculous in an interview with a German news weekly, while adding that "With 'Basterds', everything that can be said to this genre has been said. The film destroys every symbol. The work is done, end of story."
But is Pitt right? Is Valkyrie really more ridiculous than Inglourious Basterds? Let's find out ...
1. Cast
So Valkyrie stars Cruise and Inglourious Basterds stars Pitt. Clearly, although both Cruise and Pitt are famous to a ridiculous degree, only one of them believes that humanity was created when an alien blew up a volcano with a nuclear bomb. However, these are films that should really be judged on their rich supporting cast. Valkyrie, for instance, stars Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Terence Stamp, some of the greatest actors of their generation. And Inglourious Basterds stars the bloke from the American version of The Office and the director of Hostel: Part II. There's no contest, really.
Score: Inglourious Basterds, 1 - Valkyrie, 0
2. Historical accuracy
In terms of how many ridiculous liberties are taken with history, Inglourious Basterds is the clear winner here, too. Did Hitler and the rest of the Nazi elite really get blown up in a cinema? No. Was there really a band of Jewish soldiers who travelled around Germany scalping Nazis and carving swastikas into their foreheads? No.
Whereas Valkyrie was basically historically accurate. So accurate that everyone knew how it ended before it even started, and the journey to that point was colossally tedious.
Score: Inglourious Basterds, 2 - Valkyrie, 0
3. Miscellaneous ridiculousness
As much as Cruise's weird Californian-Nazi accent in Valkyrie was jarring and off-putting, it wasn't nearly as jarring and off-putting as Brad Pitt's weird, stilted, good-old-boy Tennessee accent in Inglourious Basterds, so it gets another point there. And Pitt's assumption that Inglourious Basterds is the last word in war movies because everything is destroyed at the end, is bewilderingly ridiculous. Would people stop making prehistoric films if someone released a movie called When Dinosaurs Explode? No they wouldn't. And Inglourious Basterds is spelt funny, too.
Final score - Inglourious Basterds, 5 - Valkyrie, 0.
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