Overlord: A Review
On November 11th, Erin Fenton and Scott C. Reynolds went to see Overlord. These are their reviews.
When Erin sent me the Rotten Tomatoes reviews for Overlord I was overjoyed because I thought this movie would be overlooked by my friends and I’d have to see it alone. It’s not an overstatement to say I was over-the-top excited for this since seeing the first preview.
The opening sequence so deftly handles brings us to the front, peppering information into the scene like flak into the fuselage of a B-25. You’re right there with the 101, gathering as much intel as you can before you bail out of a burning Boeing and into the French countryside with only your training, your Ka-Bar, and your ration of early exposition.
From there, you expect to get to the church (an appropriate place to find zombies n’est-ce pas?) and into the zombie horror right away, but the movie stays painstakingly on-mission, telling us the many small stories of war in a French village, of the many wars confronting the remains of a French family, and of the horrors of plain-old-nothing-supernatural-just-fucking-terrible human beings being awful to other human beings.
As a writer, I couldn’t help but take lessons. They used everything. No stone placed that wasn’t later overturned. Chekhov’s whole goddamn props department. The uber-delayed gratification on the zombie element added depth and tension that you don’t get when we’re running from the undead at the end of act one. The war tropes were there, but they rarely felt tropey, because they were all earned by the character work, which was surprisingly deep for a movie like this.
Erin asked me after the movie what my nitpicks were, and I didn’t have any right away. I still don’t, really. Maybe I thought they could have used the sick aunt to better effect. Maybe there was a bit too much coincidence that helped our hero out as he entered the enemy stronghold. Maybe I thought it was a little more of a patchwork of pastiche than it should have been. But in truth, it was just entertaining the whole way through.
I’d by lying if I said I wasn’t afraid that a movie about Nazombies might be an overreach in the year of our Overlord two thousand eighteen, but if anything I was overwhelmed by just how committed it was to being a period war movie with a good dash of gory monster horror to complement the gory regular horror of actual war. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it was as if Resident Evil and Captain America had a baby that managed to overcome its genetics and rise to the rank of “good movie”.
Horror and Sci-fi, the line between which Overlord straddles, have always been genres that reflect the fear and conflict in society at large, and Overlord could have been forgiven for drawing too-overtly on Die Zeitgeist and being a message movie. In this time, in this sociopolitical climate of Nazism being resurrected (well, most people wanted to believe it was dead) and #MeToo and gute Männer mit Gewehren the movie could easily have overdone it and probably gotten away with it. But instead of the blitzkrieg, it opted to operate covertly, from behind enemy lines. There was definitely a message, but Overlord delivered it from squarely within its Steuerhaus: the right thing is worth doing, even if it conflicts with another right thing, and the greater good is important, but as a function of the individual good.
By the power vested in me by Congress and Medium, I award Overlord the rank of 4-star General.
Erin’s Review
The first ten minutes of Overlord focus on a plane of paratroopers. It quickly establishes relationships and then descends into a thrilling, bombastic action sequence that had my heart pumping with white-hot American blood. Why aren’t there more freaking awesome war movies? I thought. Then I remembered that I’ve never seen Saving Private Ryan and realized I’m not qualified to say a single thing about war movies.
But I have seen They Saved Hitler’s Brain, so I do think I’m qualified to judge a movie about Nazis turning French villagers into zombies. And I shall do so below, dear readers.
Scott and I shared a large popcorn. I think I ate most of it before we got through the first fifteen minutes, which was a disaster. We went to an AMC. I’ve been going to Regals a lot recently, so I was surprised to notice that I missed their corny Coca-Cola sponsored student films preceding the movie. AMC, Cinemark, take note. Every movie should start with a student film that’s really a Coke commercial. It puts us in the spirit.
I liked Overlord off the bat. I liked that the three leads included a black man and a woman. More historical movies should do color blind casting, who the fuck cares. I liked that even the characters who were blown up 20 minutes were lovable and specific. I liked that every prop that was introduced was neatly circled back to be relevant at a later point in the movie. I liked the message of All Nazis are Very Bad, literally every one, but also be careful of trusting Americans with too much power, guys. Every war movie should have that message.
But most of all, I liked Overlord’s version of a slow burn. For the first 45 minutes, you’d be forgiven for forgetting this was a horror movie at all. Yet there were jump scares — land mines, Nazis narrowly avoided, French snitches. We lived in a different type of horror. Maybe I can recommend this movie to my boyfriend who hates blood, I thought.
Then we got to the underground Nazi bunker.
Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Oh God, if you can’t stomach body horror you are out on Overlord. There’s all kinds of gross shit down there. I’m still haunted by a living human head attached to a bare spine. Of course the Nazis are experimenting on humans, and if our hero doesn’t escape, he’s next. The rest of the movie will continue to be disgusting flesh-fest with harrowing implications.
Now it’s time for a bummer.
Trigger warning: rape.
We find out that our heroine, French scrapper Chloe, has been sleeping with the Nazis to prevent them from taking her young brother to the experimentation rooms, and is narrowly saved from being raped again. It’s tough to see, and I don’t know how I feel about it. On the one hand, rape is one of the most common horrors of war and it doesn’t feel right to ignore that Chloe would experience different inherent horrors than our male soldiers. On the other hand, I think it comes dangerously close to being the woman in a fridge for our hero. Yet Chloe is an honest and complicated character in her own right, and her choice is presented as wrought and heart-breaking, yet entirely reasonable under unthinkable circumstances. I don’t have a verdict for this yet, and suspect I won’t for a while.
Triggers are now over.
The latter half of Overlord is an excellent B movie, bolstered by the time it spent investing in its characters and its stakes. I gasped out loud over and over. I cheered when the bad guys dropped. I had a great time. It’s not a coincidence I ate all that popcorn because Overlord is a popcorn meaning in the truest sense.
Also, I had a crush on this guy and this guy. They were very good and very hot. Grade A. If you aren’t squeamish, you gotta see.
