Some recurring moments in movies will never get old. There’s a certain thrill from watching a superhero swoop in at the last second to save a life, a Disney character sing an impossibly high note, or two long-lost lovers finally get together. But none of those compares to the greatest joy in cinema: seeing Nazis bite the dust in new, inventive, and sometimes painful, ways.
Produced by J.J. Abrams -- but not, as initially rumored, part of his Cloverfield franchise -- and directed by Julius Avery, the World War II horror film Overlord delivers a heaping helping of creative Nazi deaths, a spectacle that eclipses any of its flaws.
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Jovan Adepo stars as Boyce, an untested paratrooper whose platoon is ordered on the eve of D-Day to parachute behind enemy lines in German-occupied France. Alongside him are the hilarious John Magaro, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. co-star Iain De Caestecker, and team leader Wyatt Russell. In a tense, jaw-dropping opening sequence, the plane is bombarded by bullets and explosions, forcing the team to jump early, and only a few soldiers survive. Their mission is to destroy a German radio tower outside of Normandy, but when the soldiers reach their target, they discover it hides a dark secret.
They team with a French villager, played by Mathilde Ollivier, to launch an undercover assault on the tower, which is built on an old church. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know that, in this secret base, the Nazis are performing human experiments, creating twisted creatures. It’s the same premise as dozens of other stories, including countless Captain America comics and the Wolfenstein video games, yet a great cast and a sense of fun keep manage to keep it engaging throughout the 110-minute runtime.
The first glimpses into the hell of the Nazi laboratories are the film’s most shocking moment. Go in as blind as possible — the surprise of seeing everything Avery’s twisted mind has conjured is half the experience. The moment is handled surprisingly well, despite signaling a stark tone shift. It never veers into the mean-spirited, using these torturous experiments to build up the Nazis as a special kind of evil rather than to celebrate the grotesque.
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Russell, who's the spitting image of his father Kurt, has a line he repeats throughout Overlord. In justifying the ways he brutalizes his enemies, he says the Allies have to be as rotten as the Nazis in order to win the war. But as Avery exposes his characters to the (literally) eye-popping horrors of Nazi experiments, Russell’s devotion to his motto begins to erode.
The first hour or so is an enjoyable enough thriller with light elements of body horror, but in the final 45 minutes, Overlord really hits its stride. As the soldiers mount an all-out assault, it almost feels like a Wolfenstein movie; in this superior act, the squad tosses out one-liners like B.J. Blazkowicz, massacring foes with glee. All sense of decency is thrown out the window as Avery forces the audience to bathe in guts and gore, which will undoubtedly put some viewers off of the movie.
Although audiences have seen moments similar to this final act in the Call of Duty series’ Nazi zombies modes or in the beloved 2009 Norwegian splatter film Dead Snow, there’s a certain charm to Overlord that makes it worth seeing. Seldom has such a fun piece of cinematic trash had such excellent production value, boasting the visual excellence of a modern blockbuster but the reckless abandon for bodily destruction typically reserved for releases played in specialty theaters after midnight. The film’s splatter-fest of a climax is a risk, especially considering it’s the first R-rated film from Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions, but it pays off.
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While Overlord's bloody third act is easily the most entertaining, it’s also where screenwriters Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith run into their greatest problem: the film’s muddled morality. Jovan Adepo’s lead character refuses to hurt anyone unnecessarily, clashing with Russell’s insistence on meeting the Nazis at their level. It’s an unexpectedly timely discussion, that draws upon a question from modern political debate: Is it OK to punch Nazis? The problem with Overlord is that it seems to side with Adepo’s character, which feels wildly contradictory to the body count the movie tallies. Maybe the argument is that the American soldiers were justified, but it’s just a weird look to tell a story in which the protagonists learn not to resort to immoral methods of warfare, capped off by 45 minutes of Nazis meeting their bloody deaths. The film probably would have been better off ignoring the question entirely, allowing the characters to wipe out the villains with impunity because, well, they’re Nazis.
Not a masterpiece by any means, Overlord is an extremely fun ride from start to finish. It’s trash in the best of ways: packed with tension, body horror and blood-soaked images of history’s worst villains meeting their ends.
Directed by Julius Avery from a script by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith, Overlord stars Jovan Adepo, John Magno, Wyatt Russell, Bokeem Woodbine, Pilou Asbaek, Jacob Anderson and Iain De Caestecker. The film screened at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, ahead of wide release on Nov. 9.