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 mainly hit all of the above criteria. With under-the-radar terror films like Devil, The Reef, and Frozen (not the Disney Frozen), it had enough of the horror (seriously, see the ski-lift movie Frozen). I was initially worried about that year’s comedies, but The Other Guys, Date Night, and Get Him to the Greek checked this checkbox. And then there were incredible movies like True Grit and The Kids Are All Right that would have made most of the year’s Top 10 List. The final category of a great movie year is one that completely flew 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 a surprise audience and critics hitting 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 was critical to the invasion of France by the Allied Powers as it was vital in preventing the Germans from communicating with one another. This would allow the Allied planes to swoop in more quickly 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 characters who manage to survive after para-trooping into a body of water before swimming to land include 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 was other than to let us know that this is all very real. The four men we have left seem to be the only ones from their crew who survived. 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 much about Aunt Simone except she is extremely ill. There is a reveal later that she is sick 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. He is making the dead come back to life after injecting them with some 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, these supervillains don’t lumber around with the one goal of finding survival food. 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.

Our four heroes (five when you include Chloe, who knows how to operate heavy weapons herself) have quite the battle ahead. 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, which you could take seriously, to this frightening yet entertaining monster flick. What’s weird 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 pretty hysterical (not in the funny kind of way, but in the berzerk kind of way). But Avery 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 incredible movie about spelunkers encountering these monsters in the depths of caves.

I liked the comparison because only a few people have 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 to see how it was so successful. Overlord is a one-time watch film, not one you must rush out and see. If it pops up on your suggestion of available streaming movies, 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)
79%

C+

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