Overlord is very like itself, in that something which ought to have been dead years ago has lurched to life because people are meddling with things they don’t understand. This is not something which ought to work, and yet, rather crazily it does. Mostly, it’s because it’s not messing around. The Allied characters are walking cliches but the actors lean right into it and make them work. The Nazis have no redeeming features, which jars in today’s world of antiheroes and shades of grey, and then you think to yourself; hang on, these are actual Nazis doing hideous experiments on innocent people. By this stage, anyone with a higher impulse would have shot himself out of sheer embarassment.
And yes, you’re going to sit there in the early going thinking things like “Hang on, there weren’t any racially integrated units in the 1944 US Army.” or “How would an aircraft be flying in daylight over the Allied invasion fleet ahead of doing a night paradrop?” Snap out of it. We’re about to watch Nazi zombies. If ever there was a time to remind yourself it’s just a movie, this is it.
And yes, you’re going to be reminded that this is a job where JJ Abrams had an input. The McGuffin involves red goop, just as damn near everything in JJ Abrams' world seems to do. What are you going to do? JJ gonna JJ.
The important question is, does it work? Well, the projector threw a rod at my showing, which pretty much wrecked the last act; we kept seeing bits of the ending out of sequence as the projectionist gamely wrestled with the software and tried to get things back on the rails. But that didn’t ruin anything which went before, and I’d say if you got a straight run at it, it would just be simple fun from one end to the other. Shane Black could do a lot worse than take a look at Overlord and see how you can throw together a “motley crew of military screw-ups take on monsters” movie. The paratroop platoon gets cut down to a manageable number of stereotypes in jig time until there’s just four soldiers struggling to figure out how they’re going to blow up a radio jamming station before the sun comes up.
It’s not gonna be easy, and that’s before they realise that the radio jamming station’s on top of a hell-mouth and they’ve got to deal with Nazis and Nazi zombies just to get to the station. Good thing they’ve got luck, a plucky French villager and a corporal who’s killed half of Italy to tell them what to do. Corporal Ford’s the best thing in the movie, 100 proof cool from the moment he tells the platoon photographer to get out of his face til the moment that he throws the head Nazi’s SS cigarette lighter back in his face. Everyone else on the Allied side is likeable, but Ford is the size the movie really needs.
So, there you go. Things can still surprise you. I wouldn’t have said you could make a cross between Where Eagles Dare and Frankenstein as anything other than a spoof, but Overlord showed me that you can drag those things out of the 1970s and play them straight, and it will still work. Just keep it simple, hire a cast that respects the tone, and get on with it.
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