Frankly, I’m not 100% sure the 2018 D-Day film Overlord is a zombie film. But, given all that encompasses how-zombies-come-to-be in films these days, I’m not 100% sure it isn’t. So I’m reviewing Overlord just to make sure it’s covered.
The basic premise of Overlord is that on the eve of D-Day, as some of the pre-invasion sabotage work that was planned and performed, a paratrooper squad is sent to destroy a German radio tower located in an old church. Their plane is shot down and crashes, and a contingency of the remaining squad continues forward with the mission. As they head toward the village where the church is located they run into Chloe — a young French woman who is a badass. As the few paratroopers work their way into the church, they find that it’s not just a Nazi radio location but that they’ve been conducting extensive experiments in the basement.
I’ll stop here to avoid any spoilers — but in truth you really can’t state any spoilers about this film BECAUSE WE’VE ALL SEEN THIS BEFORE.
The film stars a bunch of people whom we’ve never really seen. They do a fine job at acting and it’s nice to see unfamiliar faces — otherwise this would have starred Ray Stevenson, John Turturro, and/or Tom Sizemore. In addition, it has directors and writers and people we don’t know … but the one familiar name is J.J. Abrams. I draw attention to this because I’m surprised his name is at all attached to this!
This film is familiar and predictable. Apparently it had a budget of $38 million … off hand … I don’t know why. I think they were going for a 1960s-1970s film noir thing — and they nailed it without all the dead-space that Quentin Tarantino fluffs his films with — and I think they were going for a B-movie feel, and it works in that way. But $38 MILLION?!? And here I thought governments were wa$teful!!! Seriously, this film ought to have been made for half with about $20 million going to creating jobs. And yet, it made $41.9 million at the box office … which $4M is a lot of money … but for films with this sort of budget, my understanding is that profiting so little makes it a financial flop.
Frankly — speaking of Ray Stevenson — although it takes place in modern-day, I think Outpost (2008) was a better film. I could see Overlord as a back-story film, and it sure as hell would be better than Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz (2013), which WAS the disaster of a backstory to the 2008 film. I could see Overlord as a different project in-line with the initial Outpost project … kind of like a back-backstory. That for me is the only real saving grace for this film! In the end, it looks like a rip-off mishmash of Outpost and Castle Wolfenstein without paying for the rights to either.
And that’s not even going into the gross historic WWII inaccuracies built into this film — most of which was to make the PC-crowd not loose their self-righteous factless minds. On the whole, I give this film a Yellow Puss rating.
Good News – There’s no way to make an Overlord 2
… hopefully.
I will add — there are cool special effects shots at the beginning of this film when planes are flying into France and at the end when its star, Jovan Adepo as Boyce, does a one-shot running out of the laboratory/church.
