Overlord

★★★★

No spoilers, but the movie doesn’t really have any twists

During World War II, a group of paratroopers are on a mission behind enemy lines to blow up a German radio tower, unbeknownst that the Nazis are conducting strange experiments in a secret lab below it.

Overlord is a good war movie. It takes itself pretty seriously on that front. If this had been based on true accounts of the experiences of paratroopers during the war, this would have been a very decent one. But since this was marketed as a horror movie, it’s no spoiler that our heroes will face off a few monstrosities conjured up by the aforementioned laboratory. The problem with this movie is that there were too little of the horror elements. This isn’t the Wolfenstein movie adaptation you were waiting for. If you removed that element entirely from the film, it still works perfectly as a war film. According to IMDb, the original script actually had more horror action, but they toned it down in the script rewrite.

Don’t get me wrong, the film is really well put together, even the horror parts. Nice VFX and practical effects. It is relentlessly thrilling and nerve-wrecking. There are a few really cool long takes that predates Sam Mendes’ 1917. The acting performances were pretty good, and you can tell that director Julius Avery knows what he’s doing. My big gripe was that the pay-off in the end wasn’t satisfying enough and felt too small-scale.

After the movie ended, I was wondering who the “overlord” was because he never appears or was mentioned about. Thanks to IMDb trivia, it’s actually the real-life code name for the Battle of Normandy. Sorry, spoilers if you haven’t seen world history.

Some familiar faces here. Wyatt Russell plays the co-lead and leader of the squad. You’ve seen him as John Walker in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Bokeem Woodbine is a character actor that you’ve seen in a lot of movies like The Rock and Spider-Man: Homecoming and he has a small role here. I was surprised to see Joseph “Eddie Munson” Quinn from Stranger Things 4, but don’t too excited as he only has a few lines. Pilou Asbæk, who is Batou in the live action Ghost in the Shell, is the big baddie. The protagonist is actually played by Jovan Adepo, who has been in Denzel Washington’s Fences, the Watchmen series and the recent mini series adaptation of The Stand. I read that there were other actors from Game of Thrones, but I haven’t seen that show, so I don’t know who they are.

Originally published on my Facebook page, here.