One thing you can say about Overlord, out now on VOD and coming this week to 4K and Blu-ray: it certainly is…a movie. It has actors and sets and everything. It is not, as has been mentioned a few times by now, a Cloverfield-related movie, though it features the same sort of agonizing build-up to get to the interesting stuff (thanks, J.J. Abrams). It’s aggressively okay, if such a thing is possible: arguably so ignored at first that a defensive backlash over-praised it in response. But the domestic gross of $21 million seems about right, and the reported budget of $38 million a good $18 million more than should have been spent on a Nazi zombie movie with no stars.
If you skipped it in theaters, you probably made the right call, but if you want to see it at home, 4K is a good choice. Taking place within the span of approximately 24 hours, the movie spends its entire first half in the dark of night, which is where high dynamic range shines. Rather than irritatingly hiding all the action, the various shades of darkness that reveal themselves convey a depth that could hav3e been missed if your local theater wasn’t calibrated or focused just right.
Director Julius Avery (Son of a Gun) wants you to know war is horror, so a lot of the early stages of this men-on-a-mission World War II-set movie are devoted to bullets cutting bodies to shreds, planes crashing, falling men fighting against their parachutes to keep from drowning, and heightened shushing in the Nazi-besotted forest. But we’re here for real horror, and here’s the rub: it may make the horror-heads in the audience impatient. It’s comparable to From Dusk Till Dawn in the extent to which it’s one kind of R-rated movie for a while, and then when everyone finally gets where they were going it takes a crazy supernatural twist. If you can try to forget you went in expecting zombies and appreciate the stealth of it, you’ll fare better.
In fact, though Overlord has been compared to the Wolfenstein video games, mostly by people who haven’t seen it, it’s more akin to the first Resident Evil back in the day, which you go into expecting it’ll be a zombie-blasting game, then quickly realize the object is to sneak around a compound and find the hidden lab while avoiding the dead as much as possible. And indeed, these zombies are more like G-virus creations than most, formed as they are by glowing injections that can reanimate the dead and super-monster-power the living.
Avery initially does some very nice misdirection onboard that first military plane, wiping out as many characters that we expected to live as he does obvious cannon fodder. I won’t spoil much about who survives except to say that this isn’t one of those movies where race determines anything in that regard. As the young African-American soldier who’s anxious to take out some racist Aryans, Fences’ Jovan Adepo puts in a lead performance that should command some future attention, while Pilou Asbaek is reliably charismatic and dangerous as the evil German-who-isn’t-Christoph-Waltz-because-we-couldn’t-afford-him. (It’s a serious shame his Batou in Ghost in the Shell got lost under a slew of unrelated issues.)
In a behind-the-scenes documentary split into multiple parts, producer Abrams talks and shows up enough to show he was pretty hands on, and thinks the movie is comparable to the work of Rod Serling, which shows arguably only the most superficial understanding of Serling. Yes, war makes men into monsters. That’s a metaphor! And…?
Abrams also makes a great point about the color-blind casting: yes, paratroop squads would have been all-white in the actual war, but also…the actual war had no zombies. So if you’re changing one aspect of reality, why not more? One also appreciates the cast more when hearing them speak in their natural accents — I have seen every episode of Agents of SHIELD yet still had no idea Iain “Fitz” De Caestecker was in this until his natural Scottish came through.
Still, with all the talents involved, a more interesting than just-okay final project should have emerged. Had Overlord been even more Serling-style twisty, it would have been better. Had it simply indulged more zombie shooting carnage, it would also have been better. When you go to see a movie about undead Nazis, I’m thinking the last thing you want from those making the film is restraint.
