Just the Ticket #111: Overlord (The Movie One)

Greetings, Ticketholders!

It's time for the second dose of Overlord (if you missed the first dose, click here). My choice of words will make sense later in the review, but speaking of doses in the real sense, go get vaccinated for COVID if you haven't yet. Yes, there are already new variants of the disease out there that may cause us trouble in the coming months, and you may spend the next few days feeling like the flu punched you in the arm with a small brick, but that's a small consideration compared to increasing your chances of combatting whatever comes your way next.

So go get your dose of antibodies, click those social media buttons and leave your thoughts down below, and look out for a SPOILER Warning! because your weekly dose of Just the Ticket starts now.

I should also note that if you want to watch Overlord for yourselves in lieu of any SPOILERS, it is available to watch via the links shown here. Okay, lets continue....

Back when it first came out in 2018, fans of Cloverfield (which I am not) saw J.J. Abrams' name attached and began speculating that Overlord (which was released the same year that the apparently disappointing Cloverfield Paradox hit Netflix) would somehow be connected to the disparate franchise. Why not? From a found-footage kaiju film with explosive body horror and hallucinating fans who thought it was going to be a live-action Voltron prequel, to a nearly unconnected (but far superior) two-hour bottle episode about a crazy survivalist and the woman he is trying to "protect," to something in space that I didn't watch because I didn't care anymore and Life was better. So why not a movie about Nazis strip-mining France for ingredients to a serum that turns the corpses of their victims into mindless super-zombies? Who's to say that French soil didn't get leached with Clover blood during some past visit by the aliens from 10 Cloverfield Lane?

So, yeah; that's pretty much the geography of SPOILER Territory for this one: Nazi zombies. Overlord follows a group of soldiers in WWII. In addition to MCU stars Wyatt Russell (troop leader Corporal Ford), Bokeem Woodbine (Sgt. Rensin, who is black and talks about his future after the war and this is a horror movie waiting to happen, so guess how long he lasts), and Iain de Caestecker (all but unrecognizable as photographer Private Morton Chase), our heroes also include PFC Lyle Tibbet (John Magaro, Orange Is the New Black), and in a surprisingly progressive choice for lead character, PFC Edward Boyce (Jovan Adepo, Fences), a Haitian-born paratrooper who initially serves as the group's interpreter on their mission to destroy a Nazi communications tower in the hours leading up to D-Day. As a war movie, Overlord has pretty good cinematography, and the short battle scenes throughout strike the right tone.

The shift of genre begins when the surviving soldiers enter a French town and come into the care of Chloe Laurent (Mathilde Ollivier, last week's Boss Level), a resourceful civilian whose mother was experimented on by the Nazis. This was a smart way of introducing the super-zombie concept (showing their appearance for scare value, but not yet demonstrating their capabilities, while also playing on the "infected loved one" trope that has been utilized in everything from Romero's Dead remakes in the mid-2000s to The Walking Dead). We also get a version of the opening scene from Inglorious Basterds out of this part of the film, when Captain Wafner (Game Of Thrones' Pilou Asbaek, serving a kind of Christoph Waltz/Hugo Weaving/Daniel Bruhl role, though the inspirations still feel more potent than the character himself) and his goons come to inspect Chloe's house while our heroes are hiding in the attic with her basball-obsessed kid brother, Paul. Wafner is sufficiently creepy and the tension of the scene is not at all diminished by its derivation. Things end a bit happier here than they did in Basterds, with Boyce--clearly set up as the romantic interest for semi-final girl Chloe--and Ford breaking cover to take out the goons and capture Wafner for interrogation.

Boyce then goes in search of Tibbet and Chase, who had decamped to a rendezvous point to evaluate their mission, and inadvertently discovers the Nazi lab where Chloe's mother had been "fixed," where he steals a vial of the aforementioned serum and rescues a captured squad member named Rosenfeld. Everyone makes it back to Chloe's in one piece, but Wafner gets free, kidnaps Paul, and fatally wounds Chase, forcing Boyce to administer the serum after witnessing what it can do to the dead. Chase's ensuing transformation is gruesome, terrifying, looks awesome, and instills in the viewer a mounting sense of crushed hope that things might still go normally despite all prior evidence to the contrary. This is also where we get our first impression of the super-zombies' physical abilities, and it leads into Wafner, wounded but very much alive and back at the laboratory, injecting himself with two vials of the serum.

With Tibbet and Rosenfeld providing some entertaining shock and awe outside, Boyce, Ford, and Chloe (who shifts rather abruptly into tiger mom mode, but shoehorned female empowerment is hardly worth complaining about here) break back into the laboratory/communications tower to blow it up and rescue Paul before he can be experimented on. The stealth sequences with Boyce are suspenseful, but the third act feels mostly like Wyatt Russell's audition reel for Falcon And the Winter Soldier, as Ford takes the serum himself to stand on even keel with the enhanced, half-skeletal Wafner, ultimately sacrificing himself to secure the victory while Boyce, Chloe, and Paul escape the exploding compound. The parallels to Captain America and Red Skull could not be more obvious here if they tried. But again, the derivation doesn't diminish how creative, brutal, and personal the Ford/Wafner fight itself actually is.

Great action, great special effects from Industrial Light and Magic, amazing body horror, and good pacing for an almost-two-hour movie. Overlord is worth checking out, even if you're not a zombie afficionado or an Abrams speculator.

A-

I don't really have anything planned for Just the Ticket next week, but stay tuned for more Timely Thorsday Loki coverage (Episode 2 drops today) and Isekai "Quartet" looks at a few lesser entries in its universe on Monday.

Ticketmaster,

out!