The Shadow Over Overlord

Overlord is good.

Actually, it’s more than good. It’s great. Although not entirely original, it has appeared at a time where the remake has pushed its way to the forefront of horror cinema. With the influx of unnecessary horror remakes and canon-jumping franchise sequels as of late, Overlord brings with it elements most notably found in video games and strange fiction while giving a generous nod to horror films of the past without cashing in on the name and likeness.

The timing of Overlord’s release couldn’t have been more perfect as the WWII-set film premiered Veteran's Day weekend.

Operation Overlord: D-Day is upon us and without air support, the Invasion Of Normandy is dead in the water (pun possibly intended). American paratroopers, including Boyce (Jovan Adepo), Tibbet (hysterically played by John Magaro), and Rosenfeld (Dominic Applewhite) led by Cpl. Ford (Wyatt Russell-son of genre legend Kurt Russell) are shot down mid-flight and haphazardly drop behind enemy lines to seek and destroy a radio transmitter behind a heavily fortified church in a small French village.

As our heroes make their way to the village, they are met with French civilian Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier) and they soon are made aware of the terrifying Nazi experiments conducted in an underground lab beneath the church led by SS Captain Wafner (the brilliant Pilou Asbæk of Game of Thrones fame) and his scientist Dr. Schmidt (Erich Redman). Making their way within the walls of the compound, the heavily outgunned men uncover the sinister plot to create the super soldiers for the Third Reich’s 1000 year reign.

Bad Robot’s first R-Rated film is rich in realistic gore with plenty of action to pad out the 1h 48m runtime. And although director Julius Avery takes his foot off the gas during the middle of the film and the pace decelerates, he gives us time to get to know the characters while subsequently dropping in a few social-political gems to remind us of the era we find our troopers in.

When lead trooper, Pvt. Ed Boyce has a quiet sit down with Chloe, they begin talking of Boyce’s childhood home of Louisiana. When Chloe asks if there is war in the States as well, Boyce replies, “Not like this.”

We can easily see that Boyce not only knows the struggles of being a black man in the military but also what it is like to be a black man back home in America.

Furthermore, as the mission goes on, the soldiers become increasingly aware that the experiments they’ve stumbled upon should be coveted by no power, Allied or Axis alike.

The fresh-faced cast of Overlord work extremely well together, with Wyatt Russell (Ford) fully seizing his role of leader and overall ass kicker of the group. Following his performance up with Adepo’s (Boyce) caring and honorable outlook during war and the frenetic comic relief of John Magaro’s Tibbet, each soldier adds a dense layer to the seized village where no palette of personality exists.

It must be inferred that this film owes much to two important elements of the film and video game variety.

There are those that feel Overlord is the closest we will ever get to a film adaptation of the popular videogame Castle Wolfenstein where...“Nazis are constructing a plan…which oversees resurrecting the dead…using them for their own advantage to win World War II against the Allied power.”

The basic premise of SS zombies and the American trooper’s sent to blow up the facility are ripped straight from the game script of Wolfenstein, yet the how's and the why's necessarily are not. That’s where the work of Master of Weird Fiction H.P. Lovercraft comes into play.

The film lends a gainful call out to Lovecraft’s original story Herbert West-Reanimator. From the syringe-filled “reagent” to the physical resurrection of the dead, Overlord gives us a nice glimpse of what Dr. West’s work would’ve looked like during WWII. We also get a nice predecessor to Reanimator villain Dr. Carl Hill in the form of SS Captain Wafner…but I will leave it at that for fear of spoiler.

Despite some Under-Lording in pace and unneeded scene changes, Overlord comes in as the action/horror film we need at a time where original ideas tend to fall by the wayside in favor of the money grabbing remakes and unneeded “sequels” being churned out by production companies big and small.

The film does extremely well with what some may consider a “fairly generic plotline”, yet its ability to blend taut action sequences mixed with the foreboding horror of “science gone wrong” is absolutely worth skipping the next CGI-laden super hero movie or unfaithful reproduction of horror films of the past.