Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds has me flummoxed. I saw it a couple of weeks ago and I still can’t get it out of my head. Overlong, fractured, nihilistic and brutal, it’s not very cohesive and its narrative rambles all over the place. It treats its female characters poorly and its contempt for the rest of the players inside its rambling plot is without par.

Eli Roth and Brad Pitt in The Weinstein Company's Inglourious Basterds

But it is also spectacularly inventive, filled with signature bits from the Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill auteur unlike any he’s crafted before. Some of the performances, most notably Cannes award-winner Christoph Waltz and beautiful newcomer Mélanie Laurent, border on perfection, while Brad Pitt turns in a virtuoso piece of comedy that’s even better than his masterful work in the Coen’s Burn After Reading. The dialogue crackles with the type of electricity Tarantino consistently generates, everything leading to a crackerjack fantastical climax that’s so original and outlandish I almost can’t believe I witnessed it.

To put it simply, I am torn. So much so, I’m going again with a group of friends to see it again on opening night. I want to mull over its multifarious pieces a second time, want to saver its delectable bits and see if the more uncomfortable bits strike at me with the same force. I need to learn if this is indeed the spectacularly engaging mess I want to say it is or just a plain old mess with spectacular moments, the difference between the two so razor-thin a follicle of hair might actually be thicker.

Loosely inspired by Italian director Enzo Castellari’s 1978 film Inglorious Bastards, this long in coming WWII epic has nothing save its title to compare to that Dirty Dozen-like cult favorite. While both concern a company of men behind German lines, from that point on one has about as much to do with the other as oil with water or Britney Spears with a Harvard business degree. No, this is a Tarantino homage to Italian exploitation pulp cinema, nothing more (and certainly nothing less), and anyone expecting different probably has no business buying a ticket in the first place.

The short description is that the film follows a group of American soldiers, nicknamed ‘The Basterds,’ led by the bloodthirsty Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt). He wants his team of Jewish boys to kill Nazis in as brutal and in as repugnant a fashion as possible, his goal to scare the German soldiers so completely just the whisper of their name is enough to get an entire platoon to run for the hills in fear for their lives.

His opposite number, Col. Hans Landa (Waltz), is known for his ability to sniff out the Jews still hiding in occupied France. His skills for ferreting out the truth are legendary, while his ruthless way of dispatching traitors has made him the go-to guy for those in the upper echelons of the Third Reich. His chief mission at the moment is to stop The Basterds, and not even providing the security details for a major German movie premier in Paris will stop him from achieving that goal.

In the middle of it all is the mysterious Shosanna Dreyfus (Laurent). It is her theatre where said gala premier is going to take place, all the major Nazi leaders, including Hitler himself, scheduled to be in attendance. But she has a secret of her own, one Landa himself is responsible for, and if she has her way – and with a little unforeseen help from The Basterds – the fury of all the Jews will finally be unleashed upon an unsuspecting German movie audience.

First of all, I think Inglourious Basterds needs more Brad Pitt. He is a total hoot as Raine, his southern drawl so hysterically unorthodox I start giggling uncontrollably just thinking about it. More than that, though, is that the film comes alive in perversely magnetic ways every time he’s onscreen, something about both the character and the performance so sensational you can’t get enough of him.

The next thing you need to know is that The Basterds, for all their Nazi killing, are as repellant a group of movie soldiers as any I can ever recall coming across. Raine and his men take perverse glee in what it is they are doing, the constant scalping and bashing so ugly it chilled me to my core. Watching them work put a lump in my throat that would not leave, and even when I knew what they were doing was technically for the greater good that did not make a single second of it any more palatable.

The last thing is that Tarantino uses this fact about the Basterds to, of all things, humanize the German soldier in a way I don’t ever recall an American produced WWII film doing before. He shows their humanity, their commitment to cause and country, in a way that is fresh and original. There were times when I wasn’t just sad about the carnage being inflicted, I was actually sickened by it, their honor and humanity in direct contradiction to the unrepentant joy their enemy was taking in their dismemberment.

There is a vital point to be made and I do not want to be misunderstood: Just because Tarantino celebrates the honor of the German solider does not mean he honors a single solitary thing about the Nazi cause. In fact it is just the opposite. He makes sure right from the start to show their intentions as the abhorrent evil for which they are. But he juxtaposes that fact with the actions of the soldiers themselves, showing the duality that can live within a soul in a way that is both profound and sickening at the very same time.

At the end of the day I’m not entirely sure the director actually cares about any of this, however, instead choosing to unleash a torrential firestorm of Jewish wrath unlike any I’d ever imagined. The film morphs into a fantasy what-if scenario that blew my mind in two, characters the filmmaker had spent two hours meticulously crafting suddenly maliciously dispatched without a second thought, all in a maelstrom of extraordinary violence that’s as beautiful as it is repugnant.

So I am left with the conundrum. On many fronts, Inglourious Basterds is an unhinged diseased epic that made me feel I’d been covered in filth. On others, it is a startling blend of fantasy and fact that pushes boundaries and asks difficult questions I could never grow tired of pondering.

As a whole, I admit I am still not sure what else to say. What I do know is that I am going to go see it again, and the anticipation of that second viewing as I sit here and write this review has me salivating. That fact alone makes Tarantino’s latest foray into the world of pulp genre fiction worth a recommendation, the heated debates arguing its merits generated afterwards by those who listen to me even more so.