IN THEATRES: Overlord

A few days before the Normandy invasion in 1944, a group of American paratroopers are dropped behind enemy lines to knock out a radio tower in a small French village church. 

Their mission is difficult, but what they discover under the church could be of even greater consequence to both the incoming forces, and the rest of the world...

Rumoured to be the next Cloverfield movie, Overlord is thankfully free of any tangential universe-building. If you ever played the Wolfenstein games or enjoyed the Dead Snow movies (or, if you really obscure, are a fan of the 1977 horror movie Shock Waves), this might be a little familiar. A fun blend of men-on-a-mission film and zombie thriller, Overlord feels like an idea that should have been made 10 times already.

While it is a studio release, Overlord feels rather contained - in a good way. The lack of a big budget is a benefit - director Julius Avery shoots the action close, with the invasion force glimpsed through windows. Boyce's fall to earth is accomplished in a series of tight mid-shots, with the camera anchored to his POV as he struggles to pull his chute. And once the paratroopers are on the ground, the action is more limited - most of the major scenes are set in the attic of a house in the village, where the paratroopers plan their next move while SS patrol the streets outside.

While the movie is exactly as advertised, it is also more understated, and not as much of a roller-coaster as the trailers make out. Overlord's forte is really slow-building dread and claustrophobia, rather than jump scares.

And while the characters are pretty stock, the performances are decent. In the lead, Jovan Adepo plays Boyce, a green paratrooper who has to step up after he stumbles upon what the Nazis are up to. One interesting wrinkle to his character is how no reference is made to the fact that he is black. Considering the state of the US military at the time (President Truman desegregated the military by executive order after the war was over), it feels bizarre to ignore it completely.

Wyatt Russell plays Ford, the veteran of the team, and is chiefly notable for looking and sounding exactly like his dad (Kurt). Watching him gruffly emphasise the importance of the mission, it is hard not to think of The Thing, Escape from New York or Big Trouble in Little China.

My big gripe with the movie is that it's not more than what it is. It's a horror-action movie with Nazis in WWII, and that's about it.

None of the characters are that interesting, and the action - while staged well - is not that exciting.

The big problem with Overlord is that the supernatural threat is not that scary. An army of immortal killers is cool, but we don't get a real grasp of what they are, and the examples we do see are pretty bland (and are stopped fairly easily). Contemporary movie monsters are really lacking, both visually and in terms of characterisation.

By contrast, the Nazi soldiers are terrifying. It probably helps that they come with a real historical context that does not require much explanation, but the movie is at its best when it is about four exhausted paratroopers hiding from the Germans in the attic while they interrogate its owners in the living room below. By comparison, the zombies just fall flat.

Indeed, because the architecture of the movie is so familiar, you could take out the un-dead super soldiers and it would still work.

The zombie threat only really connects when the main Nazi villain (Pilou Asbæk) injects himself with the agent that creates the un-dead, and turns into an unstoppable killing machine. This finale is undermined by the fact that it ends up being another fight scene between two immortal characters who cannot die. 

In the end, Overlord is a solid programmer - nothing more, nothing less. The colourless monsters and neutral approach to race are just the most obvious aspects of a movie that should be more than a cool logline.

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