OVERLORD (Julius Avery). 109 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (November 9). See listing. Rating: NNN
Here’s a fun little coincidence: Julius Avery’s WWII thriller Overlord arrives just months after Leo Scherman’s Trench 11, which told a very similar story of Allied troops discovering something horrible behind enemy lines in the previous conflict.
It’s an intriguing incidence of parallel evolution. Trench 11 was a teeny Canadian production with a marketing budget that guaranteed you wouldn’t hear of it, while Overlord has the resources to conquer the world, deploying all manner of CG-enhanced, Dolby Digital bombast in its elaborate single-take set pieces and its elaborate underground confrontations. (Having J.J. Abrams on your team will do that for you.)
Set on the eve of D-Day and following an American paratrooper squad into a small French village on a mission to blow up a German radar station, Overlord takes the phrase “horrors of war” and really runs with it. Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith’s screenplay stitches elements of a Gothic horror movie into the body of a combat picture and turns the whole thing up to 11.
It’s Saving Private Re-Animator, if you can wrap your head around that, and it’s busy and bloody and ridiculous and kind of fun, with a call sheet of war-movie stereotypes like the courageous rookie (Jovan Adepo), clenched demolitions expert (Wyatt Russell, channelling his dad’s stoic competence in The Thing), wide-eyed photographer (Ian De Caestecker), Brooklyn hustler (John Magaro), plucky French villager (Mathilde Ollivier), sneering SS villain (Pilou Asbæk) and so on.
It could have been a little tighter, and I kinda question the wisdom of releasing this on Remembrance Day weekend, but if you’re looking for chaos, explosions, goop and machismo, Overlord has all of those things by the bucketload.
And then maybe check out Trench 11 on demand.
