Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
So for some dumb reason, we have to deal with Nazis again.
Yup, just when you thought Indiana Jones had shown the last of those dipshits out the door, now we have white supremacist assholes treated like a political group that need to be heard out and debated, rather than a stain on the world that needs to be chased off with pitchforks and torches.
If we have to deal with this particular subset of hateful idiocy once more, at least we have Overlord to help offset some of that stress, giving us waves and waves of this supposed master race and gleefully slaughtering them by the dozens.
Conceived by JJ Abrams, written by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith, and directed by Julius Avery, Overlord mashes the familiar men-on-a-mission World War II set-up together with a supernatural horror twist, turning the Nazis into literally inhuman monsters for our heroes to blast and burn.
Our POV character through this madness is the kind-hearted Private Boyce (Jovan Adepo), who begins the movie being chucked out of a plane as part of the paramilitary wing of the D-Day invasion. Boyce’s unit, led by the taciturn explosives expert Corporal Ford (Wyatt Russell), is charged with blowing up a Nazi radio tower that will compromise the invasion plan. But when the men arrive in the tiny French village, they discover that the Germans have been concocting something otherworldly in their efforts to ensure the Reich’s immortality.
Does Overlord bring these two distinct flavors in such a way that they taste better together, or end up as another lumbering monstrosity?
Next Week’s Pick
This may come as a shock, but when he’s not spouting off hot-takes about comic book movies, Martin Scorsese actually also makes films. Some of which are actually considered pretty good!
Mean Streets, available via Netflix Instant is not his first film, but it was the film which put him and a young actor by the name of Robert de Niro on the map in a major way, beginning one of the great cinematic partnerships. By all accounts, the duo’s latest collaboration, The Irishman, is intended as the punctuation mark on a story that began with Mean Streets. So join us in two weeks, as we return to where to the start to better understand the end.
Would you like to be a guest in the next’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight on Thursday, 12/5!
Our Guests
Chris Chipman:
Overlord is just an incredibly badass flick. From the opening sequence, a horrifying parachute sequence behind enemy lines on the eve of D-Day, the movie shows it is not messing around nor is it some PG-13 affair. It also looks great for having such a modest budget of 38 million. The opening moments wonderfully set up the tone and atmosphere of the film.
The movie that follows uses takes this set-up, which does an amazing job of setting up the period and look of some of the best WWII movies out there, and slowly unravels a nasty little genre flick that works so well due to time spent with its characters and intelligent world-building. The eventual reveal of what is going on is far from original, but the polish and commitment from all involved really makes Overlord shine.
There is also some legendary scene chewing being done by Pilou Asbæk as Wafner, the SS general in charge. Early on in the film he commands every scene he is in until finally getting to go all out in the third act as the film’s big bad. This one isn’t to be missed, especially if you are looking for an old fashioned genre mashup. (@TheChippa)
Brendan Agnew (The Norman Nerd):
I like “men on a mission” movies and I like movies with gnarly monsters and I *really* like movies where the A #1 goal is “fightin’ Nazis,” so Overlord and I get on just fine.
I feel like another couple passes at the script coulda yielded something great, but from the opening sequence, Overlord establishes a tone just exaggerated enough for the Nazi zombie science lab stuff to work, but also grounded and gritty enough that the prickly bonds between Boyce, Ford, Talbott, and the rest of the airborne soldiers dropped into France to take out a German radio tower ahead of Normandy to also play. Overlord has some delightfully clean act breaks, appropriately gooey effects, Mathilde Ollivier rocking a flamethrower, and a finale that’s basically Captain America: The First Avenger meets Return of the Living Dead, and it all works.
Overlord is so competent at marching through these beats cleanly and functionally that it makes its occasional misstep feel even more unfortunate (they originally had more planned with Chloe’s, right?), but it’s an uncomplicated good time in a specific genre lane that gets very little play in anything approaching big movies.
And, if nothing else, is worth it to watch a Wyatt Russell prove that he is definitely Kurt’s kid. (@BLCAgnew)
The Team
Overlord is certainly handsome enough, with a look and aesthetic that are hard to argue with. And it continues the ongoing integration of film narratives with video game rhythms, deployed so successfully in other Bad Robot projects like Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane. So there’s a lot to like here and I certainly would not categorize this as a ‘bad’ movie. I like it quite a bit.
But it’s just never all that fun, and that’s a kiss of death for fare this inherently pulpy. The film’s last act finally becomes the rip-roaring blast I was hoping for the whole time. Between the Nazis trying to sexually assault the female lead, and the needless sojourn into a debate over the ethics of torture, Overlord works to keep things as grim as possible. That’s not ‘wrong’ per se, but I don’t go to see the movie with Nazi Zombies in the hopes of being reminded of the grim reality of war and the murky moral grey area between combatants. I’m there to have fun, and Overlord’s steadfast commitment to being very little fun outside of a couple outrageous gore moments and then its final stretch, does get wearying.
Russell has the right sneering energy for his anti-hero, and Asbæk is clearly having a blast tearing into the scenery as a grandstanding villain, but by and large Overlord strikes me as a solid idea on paper that never quite lives up to its potential. (@TheTrueBrendanF)
With liberal helpings of suspense, war action, zombie horror, sci-fi weirdness, and killin’ Nazis, Overlord is a genre mashup with plenty to sink your teeth into. As much, if not more, of the suspense comes from the infiltration and combat elements as the horror, and there’s an effective sense of escalation that comes from that recipe. Overall, it plays as a fun and well-made action-horror spectacle, if nothing more.
This is noticeably a WWII horror jam influenced by video games (specifically, the Wolfenstein series). I was hoping for a big slick version of Richard Raaphorst’s Frankenstein’s Army, but it’s more of a big, slick version of Outpost. Whereas Raaphorst’s low-budget indie looked cheap but went absolutely crazy with awesome monsters, Overlord is more balanced with a traditional war movie that goes in a similar direction, but keeps things more grounded. That’s not necessarily a criticism, but it would’ve been cool to see that bigger budget go into some gnarlier monsters. (@Austin Vashaw)
Next week’s pick: