OVERLORD: Zombies & Nazis & Bombs, Oh My!

Autumn is here, which means cinemas around the world are increasingly filled with films seemingly engineered in studio laboratories to be Oscar bait. This, of course, typically involves a war movie or two, as it’s been proven that Academy voters cannot resist the potent combination of high stakes, personal drama, and historical trappings. However, the new World War II movie Overlord, directed by Julius Avery and produced by J.J. Abrams, is not Oscar bait – and thank goodness for that.

A horror hybrid about a group of Allied soldiers who encounter Nazi scientists attempting to create an undead army for the Fuhrer, Overlord is far more full-blooded than the stiff-upper-lip sagas we typically see in theaters this time of year. It’s not going to win any Oscars, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a super enjoyable watch. After all, are there any antagonists easier to root against in a film than people who are already dead and people who are Nazis? Really, it’s a killer combination – pun not entirely intended.

Living Hell

Ed Boyce (Jovan Adepo, best known for his poignant turn as Denzel Washington’s much-maligned son in Fences) is an American soldier fresh out of boot camp who finds himself on board a plane heading to France on the eve of D-Day. His airborne company’s mission? To destroy a Nazi radio tower on top of a church in a small French town so that the Allies can provide air support for the invasion.

Alas, the mission goes awry almost instantly as the plane is brought down and most of the soldiers killed or captured. The only survivors? Boyce, naive war photographer Chase (Iain De Caestecker of Agents of SHIELD), snarky sniper Tibbet (John Magaro), and explosions expert Ford (Wyatt Russell, a dead ringer for his father Kurt circa Escape from New York).

A hardened veteran of the war who was previously stationed in Italy, Ford refuses to give up on the mission despite the unfavorable odds. So, the soldiers sneak into town and hole up with a tough young French woman named Chloe (Mathilde Olliver) while they attempt to come up with a plan to blow the radio tower to smithereens before their deadline of six in the morning. However, there are more obstacles than just the Nazis patrolling the town day and night.

Turns out, in the church below the radio tower is a secret Nazi lab, where villagers have been taken and subjected to torturous experiments. The goal of the experiments? To create an army of undead soldiers who will be able to keep on fighting even after being bombarded with bullets. After all, as the sinister Wafner (Pilou Asbæk of Game of Thrones) puts it, “A thousand-year Reich needs thousand-year soldiers.”

Dead Man’s Party

Overlord starts with a bang – the firefight that brings down the company’s plane – and doesn’t slow down from there; it’s nigh unto two hours of nonstop mayhem. The script by Billy Ray (Captain Phillips) and Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) isn’t exactly long on character development, but it features some solid storytelling, gives the audience just enough to become properly invested in the characters, and throws in an anti-torture message for good measure – not what one typically expects from such a brash B-movie.

As played by Adepo, Boyce is a delightfully likable hero, filled with a quiet and empathetic bravery that is at first sneered at by his fellow soldiers but eventually earns him their undying respect. The contrast between Boyce, someone who freed a mouse that had snuck into camp instead of killing it as his commanding officer ordered, and Ford, a world-weary soldier who is willing to do anything, even torture, to defeat the enemy, provides an underlying layer of human tension that keeps the story grounded in the reality of war even as the unreality of the situation at hand becomes all too clear.

Let’s be real, though, if you’re thinking about seeing Overlord, you’re not doing it for the human drama — that’s just a wholly unnecessary but much-appreciated bonus. You’re doing it because you want to see a bunch of good guys fighting a bunch of bad guys fighting a bunch of zombies created by the bad guys. And let me tell you, on that front, Overlord delivers all of the blood-soaked bombast promised in the film’s trailers, with zombies being incinerated by blowtorch just one of the many highlights.

The main villain in Overlord, as played by Asbæk, is properly evil and chews enough scenery – even after part of his jaw gets blown clear off – to be mistaken for a Michael Shannon character, which is really the highest praise I can give any movie villain. The zombies themselves are appropriately disturbing creatures, all slick grey skin and taut muscles and ravenous rage; they’re inhuman enough for you to take great satisfaction every time one meets a nasty end (same with the Nazis, to be honest). And what happens to regular humans when they happen to inject the sickeningly orange Nazi serum that is used to create these monsters…well, you’ll have to see the movie to find out, but I assure you, it’s positively horrifying.

Overlord: Conclusion

Altogether, Overlord is exactly what you would want and expect a movie about zombies created by Nazis to be: a deranged, disgusting delight.

What do you think? Does Overlord sound like a proper B-movie escape from the A-list movie season? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Overlord was released in the UK on November 7, 2018 and in the U.S. on November 9, 2018. You can find more international release dates here.

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