November 12, 2018

How ‘Overlord’ embraces its pulpy/serial roots and pays homage to ‘Indiana Jones’

Warning! The following contains plot spoilers for Overlord!

Overlord, the latest cinematic offering from producer J.J. Abrams and Paramount Pictures, is not your average war movie by any sense of the word. Set against the backdrop of the D-Day landings in June of 1944, the film (directed by Julius Avery) follows a group of American paratroopers tasked with taking out a radio jamming tower in a French village occupied by the Nazis. 

The mission, they’re told, is imperative to the air support that will be provided to the Allied troops landing on the beaches. As the soldiers plan to take out the tower, however, they learn that the Germans are up to much more than occupation—they’re conducting gruesome experiments on French citizens with the intention of giving Hitler his “Thousand-Year Reich” via the creation of undead super-soldiers that can take a hit and then some. 

When this enters into the plot, Overlord veers sharply into the territory of horror and science fiction, something that puts it more in line with something like Indiana Jones than Saving Private Ryan—and not just because Nazis are the bad guys in both. 

Julius Avery has gone on record, describing his movie as “Indiana Jones on acid,” which is an important comment, because the movie owes a lot to the pulp and serials of yore (much like Indy) and is quite aware of that fact. 

Right off the bat, the screen starts off with pops and crackles before showing off the Paramount and Bad Robot logos in stark black and white. All the while, we hear radio broadcasts from the war era, mainly Hitler’s raving speeches and the “SIG HEIL!” response from his devoted followers.

Transition to a sky full of Allied planes flying toward France as the movie’s title and the name of its studio wipe across the screen in a way that instantly evokes that old-timey feel of when going to the movies meant dressing up to the nines and receiving a news update as well as a movie. That opening wipe makes you feel like you’re watching a Movietone newsreel or Frank Capra-directed propaganda film straight out of the 1940s. In fact, you half expect the Transatlantic of some long dead announcer to start in with, “FRANCE, 1944! ALLIED FORCES EMBARK ON THE MOST AMBITIOUS AMPHIBIOUS ASSAULT IN HISTORY! GO GET EM’ BOYS!”

Right off the bat, Overlord is telling you that it’s not going to take itself too seriously by paying homage to that old school way of title usage, which has been out of style for a very long time and was not considered cheesy or tacky when it was a widespread method in moviemaking. 

Similarly, Overlord also subverts our expectations of war movies with humor and horror in order to set itself apart from what’s come before. For example, when Chase (Iain De Caestecker) is fatally shot by the Wafner (Pilou Asbæk), we get an emotional moment where his fellow soldiers are attempting to console him as his life ebbs away. 

It brings to mind the scene from Saving Private Ryan when Giovanni Ribose’s medic character succumbs to his gunshot wounds. The moment tugs on your heartstrings when Chase takes his final rasping breaths…but then Private Boyce (Jovan Adepo) injects him full of a Nazi serum meant to reanimate the dead. Chase comes back to life with a terrible thirst and super strength before he begins to transform into a monster, something reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing. 

Boyce and his fellow soldiers are forced to kill Chase for a second time, but the act of bringing back a fallen soldier and then turning him into a horrifying creature undercuts the war movie cliche of mourning for a dead comrade. In addition, it delivers shocking visuals—on par with the Ark of the Covenant melting the faces of the Nazis or the wrong Grail aging Walter Donovan at an unsettling rate. As a side note: The concept of disfiguring a Nazi’s face is not left unturned in Overlord, which 

Boyce and his fellow soldiers are forced to kill Chase for a second time, but the act of bringing back a fallen soldier and then turning him into a horrifying creature undercuts the war movie cliche of mourning for a dead comrade. In addition, it delivers shocking visuals—on par with the Ark of the Covenant melting the faces of the Nazis or the wrong Grail aging Walter Donovan at an unsettling rate. As a side note: The concept of disfiguring a Nazi’s face is not left unturned in Overlord, which gruesomely rips open the cheek of Wafner, who then must take the serum in order to stop the pain and undo the damage. 

An example of humor comes when one of the German soldiers is captured by the Americans and forced to ride his motorcycle (identical to the one Indy and his dad ride in The Last Crusade) into the compound where the Nazi experiments are going on. He arrives, his hands tied to the vehicle, his mouth duct taped shut, trying to warn his soldiers in arms that it’s a trap. The commanding officer rips off the duct tape only to realize that he has pulled the pin of a grenade sitting snugly in the soldier’s mouth. The explosion goes off, blowing up the Nazi from the waist up, and igniting all of the other explosives stuffed into his motorcycle’s side car.

This can’t help, but make you smile because it’s the kind of sneaky ingenuity that Indiana Jones would come up with—when you see the grenade’s pin sticking to the duct tape, you know the good guys have one-upped the evil Nazis, perhaps the best villains in the history of cinema. 

At the end of the movie, the camera pans up to reveal that the French village was just a few miles from the beaches of Normandy, offering us a glimpse into the wider war and just how close it came to being lost, had the fictional Nazi super soldier been successful. This closing shot puts it on the same level of the last shot in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Ark is boxed up and wheeled into the dark reaches of a government warehouse that’s revealed to be much more massive than we thought.

Humor and horror aren’t things you often see in the war genre, but pulp/serial-inspired movies like Overlord can get away with it because they’re there to subvert, not pander. Mixing Nazis with zombies may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it sure as hell makes for one wild ride.