12 Brilliant Movies That Completely Lied What They Were About

8. Inglourious Basterds

The Lie: For non-Tarantino fans (they apparently exist), Inglourious Basterds was sold heavily on its ultra-violence and comical tone, combined with a healthy dose of jingoism and "Let's slaughter the Nazis!" grandstanding. For Tarantino fans, it was marketed like another Kill Bill, a fairly shallow but gleefully entertaining gorefest set during World War II.

The Reality: Basterds is actually much talkier and less action-orientated than Kill Bill, but that's just one way the movie defied the expected. Even though on the surface it seems to be a bout of wish fulfillment on the collective part of the Allies, the film is also a deep-rooted critique of violence in cinema and the nature of propaganda. The most compelling comparison is the brutal violence inflicted upon Nazis throughout the film: on the "good" side, there's The Bear Jew's (Eli Roth) baseball bat assault, the scalpings, and of course, Hitler getting riddled with machine gun bullets as hundreds of Nazi officers burn to death inside the smoldering cinema.

The audience is seemingly encouraged to laugh or take some cathartic joy away from these moments, when in reality, these situations are precisely reflective of the Nazi's propaganda movie shown in the film, Nation's Pride, where the German audience members cheer and holler for the death of American soldiers, which the actual audience is encouraged to find disgusting and distasteful. In effect Tarantino gets to make a film that has its cake and eat it too: it unleashes a glut of "satisfying" violence while also passing comment on our collective fascination with it, in turn providing himself with a thoughtful defense should anyone criticise the film for glorifying violence.