"This Is Our Greatest Achievement. With It, We Create Super-Nazis; A Thousand Year Army And It's Thousand Year Soldiers..."
Mixing together a plethora of talented filmmakers, Overlord, the latest from Son of a Gun director, Julius Avery, sees the combined forces of producer J. J. Abrams (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and screenwriter, Billy Ray (Captain Phillips) for a live-action R-rated adaptation of an idea originally coined by both Abrams and Ray and then polished over by The Revenant screenwriter, Mark L. Smith. Whilst not strictly groundbreaking within a world fascinated with the notion of Nazi zombies as made famous by the hugely popular Call of Duty video game franchise as well as the 2009 Norwegian horror, Dead Snow, Ray's script sees a band of American brothers on the eve of D-Day drop into the heart of German occupied France in order to destroy a radio tower situated within the confines of a remote village under siege by murderous Nazi soldiers who all fall under the wing of Pilou Asbæk's (Game of Thrones) villainous and horrendously vile, Captain Wafner. Whilst it is easy to suggest Overlord is essentially Saving Private Ryan meets 28 Days Later, the genetic combination is surprisingly accurate, and with Avery attempting to prove that even the scariest of monsters fail to come close to the horrors of Nazi rule during the second world war, the Australian's latest is a ripe, over the top and extravagantly violent B-movie which although slips occasionally in trying to balance horror with history, is still a thoroughly entertaining slice of monster mayhem.
With an opening act which attempts to embody the horrifying uncertainty of warfare, Overlord begins by dropping the audience head first into one of the loudest set pieces of the year, eerily evoking the sound of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk by bombarding the senses with gunshots, hysterical mayhem and the screams of young soldiers being senselessly massacred by the unseen threat of the Nazi war machine which hovers below them. As soon as the key characters become grounded however, the central heroic group led by Wyatt Russell's (Everybody Wants Some!!) eerily cold and focused team leader, find themselves in dangerous territory, and whilst they swiftly become housed by Mathilde Ollivier's feisty French prisoner in an effort to save them all from certain death, the first hour or so focuses much more on the war aspect of the tale then I would have expected, portraying a Nazi regime with no care for humanity whatsoever as our band of heroes slowly come across the secret experiments operating in the same church in which their mission target awaits. With the moral compass of the movie led by the good hearted and rookie presence of Jovan Adepo's (Fences) Boyce, his performance is one of the few shining lights of optimism in a movie riddled with gruelling nihilism, whether it be a jump scare reminiscent of the infamous shock set piece from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive or particular narrative decisions reminiscent of a similar mode of torture used in Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Overlord is a truly nasty movie, albeit in the good sense, and whilst come the concluding act the screenplay falls into horror genre conventions and becomes increasingly predictable, Avery's latest is a mightily enjoyable monster mash with levels of gore rarely seen in movies which make it onto the big screen.
