Any great movie years needs a variety of different types of movies. First, you have to have massive heavyweights during Oscar season. Second, you need to have a handful of movies excluded from contention simply because there isn’t enough room. These would be movies that, during a normal, might not just be considered for a nomination but might win some. These are movies that when you look at your Top 10 list at the end of the year and don’t see that film’s title make you scratch your head until you see the list of titles there instead, and then you say to yourself, “Okay, that makes sense.” Third, I think a great movie year needs to have at least one memorable comedy and one memorable horror as well. I am not a huge documentary guy (I like them but don’t see them in the theater and don’t review them). I often refer to 2010 as being the best year for movies in my lifetime. It hit, mostly, all of the above criteria. With under-the-radar terror films like Devil, The Reef, and Frozen…and I’m not talking about the Elsa and Anna Frozen, it had enough of the horror (seriously, see the ski-lift movie called Frozen). I was worried about the comedies of that year at first, but The Other Guys, Date Night, and Get Him to the Greek checked this checkbox. And then there were amazing movies like True Grit and The Kids Are All Right that would have made most year’s Top 10 List. The final category of a great movie year is being hit by great movies that flew completely under the radar. 2010 had both Rabbit Hole and Love and Other Drugs to fight that category. 2018 has at least one of those under the radar gems with the surprise audience and critic hit Overlord.
Set in 1944 on the eve of the D Day invasion, a team of paratroopers has a single mission. It is to descend into a Nazi-occupied French village to destroy a radio transmitter that sits atop a fortified church and does so in a single night. The elimination of the tower is critical to the invasion of France by the Allied Powers as it is key in preventing the Germans from communicating with one another. This would allow the Allied planes to swoop in more easily and fire down on their target. We have a team of about 12-15 that we meet in the airplane, but discussing all of them, including their hardcore leader Sergeant Eldson (Bokeen Woodbine – Spider-Man: Homecoming, Devil), are these guys don’t live past the first 15 minutes. Our cast of characters who manage to survive after para-trooping into a body of water before swimming to land includes our hero Private Ed Boyce (Jovan Adepo – Fences, mother!). He quickly reunites with Corporal Ford (Wyatt Russell – Cold In July, 22 Jump Street) and fellow privates Tibbet (John Magaro – The Finest Hours, The Big Short), Chase (Iain De Caestecker – Shell, Lost River), and Dawson (Jacob Anderson – Game of Thrones Grey Worm) who is blown up rather quickly by a land mine. I’m not sure what the point of this was other than to let us know that this is all very real. It seems that the four men we have left are the only ones from their crew who survived to this point. We do see some of the company’s dead paratroopers who are hanging from trees. Quietly they continue through the woods towards the town, where they spot and capture a French woman named Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier). It takes a lot of time, and Boyce speaks to Chloe in French before fully trusting the men and understanding English. She hates the Germans as much as the Americans do, especially after the German invasion of the village.
After explaining their mission to Chloe, she agrees to house the four men in her attic. She lives in her small village house with her younger brother Paul and Aunt Simone. We know Paul likes baseball. He carries a ball and glove everywhere. We don’t learn too much about Aunt Simone other than she is extremely ill. It is revealed later that she is ill in the sense of the word that you wouldn’t normally associate with sickness. She has boils all over her face and looks far less than human. Each night German Captain Wafner (Pilou Absaek – Ghost in the Shell, HBO’s Game Of Thrones’ Euron Greyjoy) patrols the village with his men. We see Wafner and his men take a man and a woman out and execute them. It’s what Chloe said had happened to her parents, and we see it live to make Wafner even more of a miscreant. He has also taken a liking to the beautiful Chloe and seems to have his way with her sexually whenever he wants, despite her repulsion of the man. As if we needed to dislike a German Nazi more, director Julius Avery (Son of a Gun) provides it.
In any case, in the bowels of this armed church (Erich Redman – Captain America: The First Avenger, The Danish Girl). He is conducting some pretty horrific experiments in this basement-turned laboratory. Basically, he is making the dead come back to life after injecting them with some kind of serum, in the form of horrific-looking superior soldiers that are a mesh of something you might see from The Walking Dead and Frankenstein. But make no mistake about it, these supervillains don’t lumber around with the one goal of finding survival food, these genetically altered monsters are just that…monsters. And once whatever mixture Dr. Schmidt has concocted is administered to the dead, they don’t just become super strong war beasts. Instead, they become nearly impossible to kill again. As one German Nazi puts it, it will help the German regime reign for the next 1000 years.
It goes without saying that our four heroes (five when you include Chloe, who knows how to operate heavy weapons herself) have quite the battle ahead of them. Not only will they have to destroy the tower on top of this church and fight off numerous Nazi soldiers in the process. Now, they will have to fight these super creatures that are nearly impossible to kill. Implausible? Of course. Fun and worth the ride? Absolutely. Overlord quickly changes from this movie that you could take seriously to this frightening yet entertaining monster flick. What’s weird to me is that I would hate a movie like this nine times out of ten. I would destroy it up and down during a critique. But this film worked for me because it never became too goofy. Yes, there is a point where one of the characters mentioned above is stuck with the serum, and what happens to him becomes quite hysterical (not in the funny kind of way, but in the berzerk kind of way). But Avery clearly lays in front for us is good versus evil, heroes versus villains, Americans versus Nazis. And it all works. And I’m not entirely sure why. I read another review in which the writer referred to The Descent, an absolutely incredible movie about spelunkers who encounter these monsters in the depths of caves. I liked the comparison because hardly anyone has heard of The Descent, and here he is comparing Overlord to it. Would I watch Overlord again? I watched The Descent again. Would I see Overlord 2? I went and saw The Descent 2. With that said, Overlord is not The Descent. The Descent was a one-of-a-kind B horror film that worked on so many levels that it makes you want to watch it again so that you can see how it was so successful. Overlord is a one-time watch film and not one that you need to rush out and see. If it pops up on your suggestion of Netflix movies to watch, I’d say get out your popcorn and soda and give it a chance.
Plot 7.5/10
Character Development 6.5/10
Character Chemistry 7/10
Acting 6.5/10
Screenplay 8.5/10
Directing 7.5/10
Cinematography 9.5/10
Sound 9/10
Hook and Reel 10/10
Universal Relevance 7/10 (a stretch at 7…)
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