Five-Legged Iguana

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2019

Candidate #14

OVERLORD

(September 2018)

“This is war, ja? People die in many unfortunate ways.”

In a world where the trailer, one sheets, and other marketing material for Overlord did not exist, you’d be forgiven if you thought that for its roughly first half, the film was merely a specimen of the contemporary World War II film**, with its narrative lens filtered through the blood and grit of the “War is Hell” aesthetic (as opposed to the glorified nature of conflict in old school WWII cinema).

There’s a fleeting glimpse of a “sick” woman and a passing mention of “tar” with “some kind of a power” at about the 30 minute mark, but it’s only at nearly its halfway point that it takes the in-your-face plunge into a strain of pulp horror tragically rooted in the real life atrocities of Nazi medical experimentation.

It’s that plunge that gives Julius Avery’s sophomore feature (from a screenplay by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith***) leave to gradually show its true colors.

“Does somebody wanna tell me what the f*ck is going on here?!”

True, there’s a healthy amount of action in Overlord, but it’s again that pulp horror portion of its cinematic DNA that makes it prime ¡Qué horror! material.

Think of it as the genre-infused prequel**** to Saving Private Ryan, where we get to see a mission that was instrumental in paving the way for Tom Hanks and company to storm Omaha Beach.

What’s also notable about Overlord are the brief moments it takes to subvert old school WWII cinema.

“… the Nazis are rotten sons’ a b!tches! And rotten sons’ a b!tches will do anything they have to to destroy everything that is good in this world!

“That is why we have to be just as rotten as they are!”

It’s the kind of film that casts Wyatt Russell in a role that would be the film’s nominal lead if this were an old school Hollywood WWII film, as a man of action and few words, a character that gets the job done, whose driving motivation is the capital M-“Mission.”

A character that brooks no deviations from the Mission, and is willing to unleash violence to achieve his goals, an exemplar for the ideal of the all-American can-do brand of machismo that was the stock-in-trade of the WWII cinema of yore.

Given the way the narrative unfolds, you can virtually see where the character arc of Russell’s Corporal Ford will end up.

There’s also a moment that involves Grey Worm himself, Jacob Anderson.

It’s a moment that brutally punctuates that, in the end, no amount of words can encapsulate the horrors of war, where any individual soldier is not a person with hopes and dreams, but rather just grist for the mill, expendable units ready to be jotted down as an “acceptable loss” on the road to victory.

The script also ensures the only prominent female in the narrative (Mathilde Ollivier) gets her own Moment or two, as she endeavors to help the American soldiers complete their all-important Mission.

“A Thousand-Year Reich needs thousand-year soldiers.”

But in the end, of course, this is not meant to be an accurate depiction of World War II, nor a complete deconstruction of WWII cinema, nor an existential war movie in the vein of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

This is a more or less straightforward war movie that’s got action and some horror mixed into it. It’s genre infused cinema produced by J.J. Abrams, so settle in for a wild and bumpy ride.

“How does it feel, the blood of Eternity flowing through your veins?”

**  Granted, of course, that you were willing to suspend your disbelief long enough to accept the possibility of a desegregated military unit four years before President Truman signed Executive Order 9981.

*** Billy Ray (to whom a Story By credit is also given) co-wrote the screenplay for E. Elias Merhige’s Suspect Zero, while Mark L. Smith penned the script for Nimrod Antal’s Vacancy.

**** Because, hey, as proven by everything from Batman (the wrapping-up Gotham and the upcoming Pennyworth) to Breaking Bad (Better Call Saul) to The Big Bang Theory (Young Sheldon) to Game of Thrones to Star Wars, prequels are apparently the new sequel…

(Overlord OS’ courtesy of impawards.com.)