Review: Overlord (2018)

Overlord (2018)

Rated R for strong bloody violence, disturbing images, language, and brief sexual content

Score: 4 out of 5

Overlord is exactly the movie that is being sold by the trailers. Sure, some of the hype surrounding it has been connected to producer J. J. Abrams and his patented brand of "mystery box" storytelling, particularly rumors that it would be part of the Cloverfield series, but in truth, the only twist here is that he delivered exactly what was promised, nothing more and nothing less. And what was promised here was a badass, violent, pulpy action-horror war movie that feels like the closest anybody's come to bringing the Wolfenstein games to the big screen. It's not historically accurate in the slightest, but what it does instead is deliver on both the intensity of war as we imagine it and the sort of "men (and one woman) on a mission" war movie that was Hollywood's stock in trade for a couple of decades after World War II, goosed up here with a sci-fi twist involving Nazi mad science and rampaging monsters. It's a pure, unapologetic B-movie that was somehow given a real budget, a talented cast and crew, and a wide theatrical release instead of being thrown into the direct-to-video netherrealm, and I'm grateful for it, because that meant that I got to see a really awesome movie like this on the big screen.

The film starts the night before D-Day as a team of American paratroopers, or what's left of them after their plane is shredded by anti-air fire, lands outside a small town in Normandy, France. Sent to take out a radio tower at a church in anticipation of the landings of Operation Overlord come morning, the team gets way more than they bargained for when they find out that the Nazis are also using the church as the site of twisted, horrifying experiments involving a strange liquid found beneath it, one that, when combined with human blood, can reanimate the dead as unstoppable (albeit highly unstable and mad) super-soldiers. Teaming up with a local woman named Chloe whose aunt was mutilated by these experiments, the paratroopers set out to kick some Nazi ass and stop them from unleashing a nasty surprise on the arriving Allied forces.

The cast of characters here is small, but well-realized, with all of them feeling fleshed-out with colorful personalities such that I wanted to see them all make it -- even if I knew that, given the nature of this movie, only a handful would be getting out alive. Private Boyce, a black country boy from Louisiana who'd been called up for the draft three months ago, is the naive everyman of the group and the audience viewpoint character, a sharp contrast to the hardassed explosives expert Corporal Ford who had already fought in Italy and has been hardened by the conflict. (For the record, yes, I know that, in the segregated World War II-era military, Boyce would not have been part of a unit with white soldiers, but given what sort of movie this is, I'm more than happy to forgive this and other inaccuracies.) The sniper Tibbett is a boisterous New Yorker, Rosenfeld is a nervous kid who's afraid of what'll happen to him if the Nazis capture a GI with a name like his, and Chase is a civilian photojournalist embedded with the team who's in no way cut out for actual fighting. On the ground in France, Chloe provides for her family by scavenging, too concerned with protecting them to join the French Resistance but still chafing at the Nazi occupation and eager to join up with the Americans when they arrive in town, while the SS Corporal Wafner is the personification of everything that Chloe hates about the boches, an entitled bastard with a superiority complex who has forced Chloe into a sexual relationship with him lest her son be dragged off to the church to be experimented on. The characters are all broadly written and fairly two-dimensional on the page, but thanks to a cast of talented unknowns and TV actors (most notably Wyatt Russell as Ford, having turned out very much like his father Kurt) and a director in Julius Avery who knows how to get the most out of them, all of them felt far more fleshed-out thanks to the subtleties in their performances in between the shootouts and monster fights. It was thanks to them that, even when this film was in the midst of its quieter, dramatic moments, I was still as invested in the material as when the rifles and machine guns were blaring and the monsters were charging at the people firing them. Together, they build the core of what might seem like an outlandish story around a very old-fashioned Hollywood war movie structure, such that it still feels grounded in some semblance of reality even when it's getting violent.

And boy, does this movie get violent. It's here where those Wolfenstein comparisons are most appropriate, as while this film is light on genuine horror outside of a few moments (most notably when an emergency resuscitation using the Nazi serum goes horribly wrong), it absolutely relishes in wartime violence. Action scenes are loud, gripping, well-shot, and viciously intense, whether our protagonists are fighting human soldiers or more outwardly monstrous foes, and the special effects used to bring the latter to unlife are downright sickening -- in the best way. Combining practical gore effects with just enough CGI to paint over the seams on the more... dynamic moments, this movie is reminiscent of Re-Animator in how it approaches its undead, formerly-human creatures. One effect in particular, involving a man who doesn't let a silly thing like getting half his face blown off stop him, practically deserves a screen credit of its own for how much the movie focuses on it in its latter half. It is frankly amazing what this movie gets away with under an R rating, such that I felt like I should be watching this on my television after discovering it in the "new release" section on Netflix rather than seeing it on the silver screen. The filmmakers here, from director Julius Avery to the special effects team, were clearly relishing getting to make this sort of old-school war movie with thoroughly modern, Tarantino-grade violence, and it is a treat watching to see what ridiculous action and gore set pieces they come up with next. It never felt like it was winking at the audience and letting them know how ridiculous this all was, instead playing its story fairly straight with only some minor moments of levity, but what was happening on screen spoke for itself throughout: this is not a movie that you should be taking too seriously.

The Bottom Line

It may not be all that scary or deep, but it is an incredibly thrilling mix of a World War II action flick and a monster movie that nails its tone, its action, its characters, and its special effects with aplomb. You'll know as soon as you watch the trailer if this is the movie for you; if it is, then definitely see it.