Overlord (2018)

Directed by Billy Ray

Viewed in Theatre

 

For those of you who read the title and thought, “Overlord, what the hell is that?” Please let me explain. Overlord is a war horror film taking place during WWII that also happens to be a zombie movie. Yes, a Nazi zombie horror movie coming out in 2018. It feels a little dated, considering that zombies have been on the outs for years, and it seems that audiences agree, as the movie has not made much money domestically. Additionally, the trailers were less than stellar, not doing too much to really sell the movie to an audience that might be a little wary of a piece of genre fiction like this. With all of this in my head, I walked into the theatre, sat down and saw a movie that I surprisingly enjoyed. Before I get into the movie, I just want to appeal to to you directly: please, see this movie and support some original IP in this sea of remakes, reboots and sequels. Now, let’s get into Overlord.

Overlord is the wholesome story of how Nazis are evil and murdering them is okay. No, that wasn’t sarcasm, the Nazis in this movie are genuinely vile, shown very accurately as cruel and uncaring to the plights of the people in the village that they’ve set up shop in. To counter this, we meet our protagonists, a group of paratroopers sent in to take out a Nazi radio tower ahead of D-Day. Their mission starts off pretty rocky with their plane being shot down, the surviving soldiers manage to rendezvous in a small French village under Nazi control where the tower that they are there to destroy has been set up. It becomes apparent to the lead soldier, Ed Boyce, that there is something much more sinister going on in this town than just a radio tower.

So this story is pretty okay, nothing super exciting going on and pretty much everyone knows almost exactly what the plot structure of a movie like this is going to be. They get in town, learn about zombies, try to destroy zombies and stop Nazis. There aren’t really any major twists and turns, everything is pretty straightforward but that isn’t necessarily a problem. There’s a sort of throwback feeling to the story where we have the good guys who are good and the Nazis who are Nazis and the story just plays out from there. I guess the only twist here is the genre bending that happens when Boyce learns about the mad scientist lab and then we start seeing weird mad science stuff.

What makes all this work for me is the tone of the movie. It would have been easy to go in a more campy direction with this film, just explaining that the movie is about Nazi zombies is kind of silly, but everything is taken pretty seriously and that is what kept this moving smoothly for me. All the characters react believably to the horrors they’re seeing, they believe that this world is real and scary so I found it much easier to get invested than if this had just been a campy gorefest. It’s still a gorefest mind you, but one that takes itself seriously enough that all the outlandish elements seem appropriately outlandish and the tonal shift that happens feels appropriate rather than forced.

Our cast is a pretty standard array of military movie stock characters, there’s the grizzled veteran with a chip on his shoulder against the Nazis (understandable), the loud mouth cynical city guy who is full of himself and never shuts up, the wartime photographer who doesn’t understand the true horrors of war, the crafty local woman who seriously hates her some Nazis, and the green as grass protagonist defined by his gentle nature and strong sense of morality who is our protagonist, Ed Boyce. And yes, I will comment on this one time, the story is a bit revisionist in that the US Army is desegregated before it was actually desegregated. We know this because Boyce and his superior officer are black, but this isn’t a problem because I’m not looking for 100% historical accuracy in movies where the US is fighting Nazi Zombies in WWII. Even though I am a little dismissive of the stock nature of the characters, they’re all fine, having enough small bits of characterization to make them feel at least distinct. The performances were all good.. I quite liked Ed Boyce, especially because his own characterization as a staunchly moral person does drive big chunks of the plot. It’s a nice touch and I appreciated the mildly character driven events that happened as a result of that.

I briefly mentioned this earlier but this movie is a gorefest and once it gets going it REALLY gets going. That, coupled with the fact that the Nazis are super duper evil and not of the “there’s heroes on both sides” type, makes this movie a whole lot of fun. Seeing Nazis murdered in fun ways is one of the most family friendly forms of entertainment and I won’t try and hide how much I enjoyed seeing that happen in this movie. It is in fact so much fun to see Nazis killed that it may be to the movie’s detriment, because at one point the grizzled veteran is trying to interrogate (torture) a Nazi officer and I’m not sure if we’re supposed to feel like the grizzled veteran is going too far. It doesn’t help that the Nazi in question is also a rapist. The grizzled veteran could have given this Nazi a vasectomy with his teeth and I still would be pretty okay with what was happening.

Speaking of Nazis getting killed, the action is one of the best things here, sequences are for the most part well choreographed and planned so as to keep everything exciting and fast paced. Everything was very well paced overall, there were enough lulls between action sequences to calm down and breathe so there isn’t just constant climax. That actually may be one thing that is causing some disconnect with fans of zombie/gore stuff, I noticed that there was this guy in the row in front of mine who was of course interested in the action sequences, but pulled out his phone when dialogue and character building started. Maybe the movie played itself too straight as a war film for audiences like that, but I’m perfectly fine saying that I don’t care what someone thinks if they pull out their phone during the middle of an exciting movie.

Overall, I really enjoyed Overlord. It may be a bit formulaic for fans of genre fiction and a bit too out there for people who like period war movies but I rather liked the mashup and was able to enjoy it as a fun, exciting play on the well-worn WWII subgenre of films. Overlord isn’t a perfect movie, it could have done with some stronger characterization and a little more time spent with the mad scientist we see, who is underutilized, but it has more than enough going for it to merit a viewing. And just as a side note, it is very heartening to see some new IP but WHY would they release this in November? This was begging for an October release! Maybe they just didn’t want to compete with Halloween, but they got crushed by The Grinch, a movie which, I assume, has zero Nazi head explosions. What a shame.