Melanie Laurent was amazing in this. Never heard of her, but she stole every scene she was in. She has a seamless ability to play multiple objectives at once. It's truly a skill to have to hide, lie, and deceive your way through a movie, while still letting the audience observe all the conflicting emotions. After this, I'd watch her in anything.
As suspense, the film is brilliant. The construction of the scenes takes the lessons from Hitchcock's bomb under the table and ratchets that up several points.
Particularly, the rendezvous scene at the bar has a near-perfect arc to it. First, the viewer is told the meeting will be alone in a basement. The small space is problem one. Second, they are supposed to be alone. They show up, and there are Nazis. The audience knew there would be, of course. We're educated moviegoers, but this is classic suspense. We know; the characters do not.
The Nazis are a big problem, but it's diffused by the fact that the Nazis are just drunkards. Our heroes finally get away to conspire, and they get drinks. Close-up on the DRINKS. Okay, are the drinks poisoned? No, they're not. Back to conspiring, but the drunk Nazi is back. And he's questioning the Brit's German accent. Fortunately, this is diffused by the Brit pulling rank (from his fake uniform).
But there's a Major in the bar, who is not only a perfect linguist but also ranks higher than the Brit. An excuse is formulated. Does the Major buy it? Who knows, but he wants to sit down for drinks. Back-and-forth like this for a while until the Brit orders drinks. Drinks again? The way he orders drinks betrays him, paying off the initial drinks beat. So the Major has a gun pointed at the Brit. Now what? Well, turns out the Brit had a gun pointed at the Major since he sat down. A stand-off. Tarantino again plays with language, his favorite tool as a writer, and the Brit completely breaks his "role" as a German and speaks English. Eventually, the expertly-crafted scene reaches a fever pitch and explodes with violence.
Tarantino uses the classic Hitchcockian device to make every conversation worth hanging on every word.
"Bomb under the table" might as well be
"Jews under the floorboard."
As for the morality of the film, I believe Tarantino is making way more of a commentary on cinema than the ethics of war/war crimes, which really shouldn't be a surprise. World War II is the perfect avenue to do this.
What do we expect to learn from war films? From some of the morally repulsed posts or reviews, it would appear that nothing short of "all war has bad stuff happen, even no matter the justifiable causes that may or may not precede such a war." Um... that's okay, but it's pretty simplistic, and we really don't need a film to come out every few years to remind us of such.
Tarantino has given us the ultimate pay-off. Finally, delivered on a silver platter. In a movie theater no less. Is it the Aristotlean catharsis that we were looking for? Was it everything you dreamed of? Did you cheer? Or flinch? Or both? And if it's not everything we dreamed of, then what do we really want from a war film? Why do we keep remaking them? What do we hope to learn? What cathartic release are we providing or denying ourselves of when we go see movies where a bunch of people die and some soldiers and some civilians break arbitrary war crimes rules set up by the powers that declare the wars in the first place?
Tarantino has not offered the simplistic solution of "every war situation has those darn rule breakers." For as much as I liked
The Hurt Locker, the scene where
the higher-ranked officer denies medical attention to the dying Iraqi
felt so didactic and forced, that I was taken out of the universe of the film. Contrast this with the scene in
Inglourious Basterds where
Pitt's character is ready to hand over Waltz's character. What do we want to see happen there? Ask yourself that. What occurs is a war crime, but is it "wrong?" Waltz has already sold his soul to the Americans. Hitler will be killed. The war ended. If Pitt kills Waltz, the war still ends and revenge or justice, depending on your own personal beliefs, is had. If Pitt lets Waltz go, the war still ends but a mass murderer runs free. The decision has to be made then and there.
And Tarantino doesn't betray his characters by shoe-horning in morality for the audience to feel good about later. Are Pitt's actions revenge or justice? Does the fact that Waltz made a (self-serving) deal, but a deal nonetheless, matter? Pitt's actions surely constitute torture. If he didn't take those actions, it's not like Waltz would get a simple trial with a jury of his peers. The decision is in the moment, again a "war morality" not one of hindsight.
Tarantino's universe may operate under a revenge-seeking morality, or more likely a void filled only with moral nihilism, but this is probably more true to war than any post-mortem, 60 years after the fact. And knowing that historical films are always after the fact by necessity, Tarantino has crafted a universe that isn't held to the rules of history.
The construction of the narrative as a whole isn't flawless, as the two major plotlines don't appear to have an effect on if the other one goes off, but Tarantino has still offered something new with this film. His style and cleverness always carried his past films when they merely celebrated his love of cinema.
IG is not just a celebration of film, but a criticism of it and all it entails, from Goebbel's propaganda to Tarantino's postmodernity.