Charlot was wondering where to post his view of this movie so I've taken the liberty copying it here:

"Charlot
Slacker
Posted 18 October 2009 10:44 AM Hide Post
I'm also not sure where best to post this:

Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds': Cathartic Potential for Personality Development

A truly modern myth, 'Inglourious Basterds' is a dispenser of archetypes on a par with
'Spycatcher' and 'Star Wars'; this has apparently been overlooked by film buffs, who can easily get sidetracked by the selfconscious film references and moments of sheer virtuosity that abound in the movie.

In dreams or Greek tragedy, no symbol is too extreme, because we are meant to be
permanently affected at a deeper level. The limitless violence throughout 'Basterds' and
the final purifying apocalypse in the Paris cinema offer a release from well-meaning
educational attempts to explain Nazi and Second-World-War history and, more, an
emotional counterweight to long-repressed horrific memories. In this sense the film is deeply moral, because it furnishes us with remarkable projection fields in the characters and the action, potentially leading to our transformation and growth.

(Spoiler alert) Start with the denouement: bearing in mind that mythic death is always able to be interpreted as the collapse of the power exerted by unconscious forces over our conscious personalities, the conflagration in the cinema allows us to recognise - and reject - the control that negative, stultifying elements may have had over us. The deaths, even Hitler's, are not personalised, but the cumulative effect is shattering. The internalised demons have lost their power. Over the mayhem, in the film sequence made by the owner of the cinema, laughs the Eternal Feminine, reminding us how male bloodlust throughout history has completely neglected the compassionate component that the female archetype can provide. Her death signifies the (potential) integration of that element into the conscious.

The unbearable tension built up in the long sequences of cat-and-mouse verbal exchange in the first scene in the dairy farmer's cabin and the later scenes in the café and the tavern
compel us to become emotionally involved, opening us up to the possibility of an identification with one of the characters as a representation of an urge inherent in our own make-up. The composure evinced by the Parisian heroine (despite the danger she is in) is
a call to us all to find calm under stress. The poisonous charm and way with words of the
SS Colonel compel us to remember occasions where we may have acted in a similar way,
though without the shocking effects of his actions. The vanity of the young sniper who shot over two hundred individuals and was rewarded by a gruesome film glorifying his exploits can cause us through identification to examine the true motives for our own actions...

Film is not required always to represent reality. It has become in this instance the
contemporary equivalent of opera or Greek drama."

You post is heavy on the intellect and difficult to read in places but it goes further into the psyche of film that almost any post I've come across.

While reading it thoughts of another movie came to mind that was more traditional but effective in its exploration of the multifaceted personality of enemies at war:

Enemy at the Gates (2001)