On June 6, 1944 (D-Day), an American paratrooper squad intends to target and destroy a German radio tower located in an old French church, but their plane is shot down before they arrive. The squad is nearly wiped out with Cpl. Ford (Wyatt Russell, Everybody Wants Some!!), Pvt. Boyce (Jovan Adepo, Fences), Tibbet (John Magaro, The Big Short), and Chase (Iain De Caestecker, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) as the only survivors. They encounter a French civilian named Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier) and her 8-year-old brother Paul (Gianny Taufer) and learn that Chloe’s aunt is now horribly mutilated thanks to Nazi experiments occurring in the church. Boyce is able to sneak into the church unnoticed only to witness the nasty results of the horrific Nazi testing behind the church walls that mostly revolve around a vibrant serum that is capable of bringing soldiers back from the dead in a much more ferocious capacity.
Whether you end up enjoying Overlord or not, there’s no denying that it should be seen in IMAX. The war horror film is so incredibly loud and with J. J. Abrams being involved you can’t help but reminisce about how Super 8 completely conquered and utilized sound quality to its biggest advantage. Overlord opens with what is perhaps its most iconic sequence. That plane being ripped from the sky is so massively intense that your heart will begin to race and you’ll be breathing so hard that you think you’ll be hyperventilating. Everything being so noisy results in you feeling absolutely everything in your seat over the course of the film; the roaring airplane engines, deadly gunfire, nonstop explosions, and (later on in the film) heavy creaks in wooden floorboards. The sequence caps off with an impressive and dizzying free fall parachute sequence followed by the debilitating feeling of nearly drowning in submerging waters.
The film follows this up with a few other scenes that nearly live up to that glorious white-knuckled opening; Boyce injecting the serum into one of his own and attempting to outrun the devastation left behind by a detonated bomb while he’s still within the effects of the blast. The special effects, gore sequences, and the Nazi church experiments are Overlord’s other horror highlights. Wafner’s (Pilou Asbaek, Ghost in the Shell) bloody grin from the trailer where he’s missing a chunk of his face is an image that hauntingly shell-shocks your brain into remembering it forever. Boyce dreadfully discovering the disgusting results of Nazi experimentation capitalizes on the thrill of wandering around and attempting to survive in horror survival video games like Outlast and any classic monster or body horror cult film with practical effects.
The acting doesn’t go far enough to make a long-lasting impression. Jovan Adepo has this John Boyega quality to him, but is still in the polishing stages. Adepo is able to portray fear and panic to a masterful degree, but you simply don’t care about what he does when he opens his mouth. Wyatt Russell is a one-dimensional leader in the sense that he yells a lot and barks orders, but his character is fairly flat otherwise. John Magaro talks nonstop as Tibbet with his ability to rip on everyone else in his unit being his defining quality until he drops it for no good reason halfway through the film. Magaro talks trash about everyone, especially Boyce, but he becomes more and more soft as the violence and danger reach catastrophic levels.
Overlord spends a lot of time showcasing how impulsive and sympathetic Boyce is. It feels like over the course of the film Boyce is supposed to mature as a character, but he mostly acts on spontaneous urges without any planning or logic behind his actions and never changes that even by the end of the film. Why the film allows so many references to Chase’s photography hobby, Boyce’s pointless lucky charm, or Paul’s fascination with baseball is also a bit baffling since none of these little details lead to much of anything. How many times does Boyce need to be blown up anyway?
Overlord is a visual and audible ecstasy for horror fans. The film adds an even deeper layer of horror to what was already one of the most devastating wars in human history. The intense action sequences are jaw dropping and Overlord will likely be viewed as an explosive crowd-pleaser. However, the paper thin characters and stale acting leaves a lot to be desired. Overlord probably has more in common with 28 Days Later than the average zombie film since these aren’t zombies, but you should definitely look into the Dead Snow films if Nazi zombies are what you crave or Frankenstein’s Army if you want your World War II experimentation to be more like a steampunk version of Re-Animator.