Review of Overlord (2018) by Hnestlyonthesly — 12 Oct 2019

Overlord is not interested in soaring monologues or patronizing speeches. There’s no peremptory reminders of particular the evils of the Nazis. Overlord is more interested in small moments of heroism and the banality of evil: the calm with which the officers hurl paratroopers out of a burning plane, the frustration of our protagonist during the torture scene, in which he is not successful in convincing the others to behave nobler, the disobeyed order.

When Overlord does moralize, it is through visuals. The monstrosity of human experimentation and the monsters it creates are gruesome visual metaphors for the Nazi’s moral depravity. The only time that there are moral conversations among our motley crew, those conversations remain unresolved at best. Our protagonist’s discomfort with the torture and the way in which the final boss scene requires both sides to use the evil serum does a nice job of showing an uncomfortable kind of equivalence. Our noble sacrifice assures protagonist, “Even our side shouldn’t have this kind of power.”.

As an period action film, Overlord does a good job of spreading the wealth among a diverse cast, but as a WW2 film it’s a little thin in the way of settings or historical context. Sometimes that makes it feel like successful magical realism and at other times it feels like a cheap escape room set, all attics and bunkers and dark sewers. I don’t know what could have been done differently, because the spare sets are kind of the point for a film that goes out of its way to peal away the veneer of glory from war, but the overall effect is a film that feels not quite realized.