OVERLORD, Better Than I Expected


The marketing for Overlord is quite misleading. The marketing seems aimed at the fantasy genre fan when to be honest, the film is two-thirds wartime action film, with the fantasy angle popping up in the last act ONLY.

If you were going for that undead battle movie, you'll be sorely disappointed, but if you just go to go to a movie, well, for an "undead" movie, it's a great war action flick!

Overlord is a Bad Robot (J.J. Abrams) production, and stars Jovan Adepo (Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, The Leftovers), Wyatt Russell (Lodge 49), Mathilde Ollivier, Pilou Asbaek (Game of Thrones), John Magaro (Orange Is the New Black), Iain De Caestecker (Agents of SHIELD), Jacob Anderson, & Dominic Applewhite. It's directed by Julius Avery.

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The film starts out on the eve of D-Day, as we follow a group of American paratroopers aiming to get dropped behind enemy lines to take out a radio transmitter that is jamming American radio signals. Once this target is eliminated, it will allow the raid on Normandy beach.

The planes come under heavy anti-aircraft fire and the team ends up jumping a bit earlier than planned but they still land pretty close to their objective, but the landing doesn't go so well, as they land among enemy troops, leaving just a handful of soldiers to continue on the mission.

As the rag-tag group works their way towards their objective, they run across locals, giving them a place to hide out, even if it's in a a Nazi-occupied village. It's here that they plan things out, but one thing leads to another and one of their crew, while trying to evade capture, ends up in the base under the radio transmitter, and that's when they start to realize there's more here than meets the eye and the mission becomes more than it originally was designed.

Now, they have to take out the antenna and destroy this horrid research laboratory under the antenna.

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There is no 'army of the undead,' as the marketing says or indicates, but rather, it's a German army protecting the lab that is working on creating a few super-soldiers that seem to be rather unstoppable.

The film is a great war film to be honest, and as you watch it, you keep wondering when the undead will pop up. But it's a true, behind-the-lines gritty kind of action film, until the squad ends up facing off against one or two of the experimental monsters the Nazi's have created.

But the tension of the film, the horrors of the experimentation stages and what not, are well done.

The casting was great, with Adepo playing our main focus of Boyce, while Wyatt Russell may have found his calling as a solid-minded, serious-ass, no frills, focused soldier.

Overlord netted a 7.1 out of 10 on IMDb, while it has garnered an 81% on Rotten Tomatoes. Both scores I totally agree with.

To be honest, I'm not sure how to look at this film. Had I come into it looking for that undead battle, I would have been disappointed. But with the way the film has been structured, with just a flavoring of a few undeads, it was really well done. Remember, underdone is much better in a film then overdone, and Overlord was underdone just right.


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