Over­lord

Over­lord, the sec­ond fea­ture from direc­tor Julius Avery fol­low­ing 2014’s Son of a Gun, begins in the famil­iar cin­e­mat­ic ter­rains of the war movie, before devi­at­ing to genre’s hin­ter­lands. After ren­der­ing the idents for both Para­mount and Bad Robot in black and white to sig­ni­fy its peri­od sta­tus, the film opens with aer­i­al footage, grad­u­al­ly gain­ing colour, of the Allied naval flotil­la head­ing to the Nor­mandy beach­es for Oper­a­tion Overlord.

At this point view­ers might sup­pose that they are about to see yet anoth­er D‑Day land­ing sequence, like the lengthy, oft-imi­tat­ed first act of Steven Spielberg’s Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan. But the focus quick­ly shifts from the sea to the sky, and in par­tic­u­lar to a trans­port plane filled with troops from America’s 101^st Air­borne Divi­sion. ​“I think I’d rather be up here,” observes Tib­bet (John Mag­a­ro), in words that equal­ly point out the greater expo­sure of boats to dan­ger and mark the film’s altered per­spec­tive. The plane is soon under fire deep over France, and we fol­low a pan­icked new recruit Pri­vate Ed Boyce (Joven Ade­po) out of the burn­ing bird and half-para­chut­ing, half-plum­met­ing down to Earth.

Only Boyce, Tib­bet, Cor­po­ral Ford (Wyatt Rus­sell), pho­tog­ra­ph­er Chase (Iain de Caesteck­er) and Rosen­feld (Dominic Apple­white) sur­vive to com­plete their mis­sion to destroy a com­mu­ni­ca­tions tow­er built over a church in a Nazi-occu­pied vil­lage under the com­mand of SS offi­cer Wafn­er (Pilou Asbæk). Tak­en in by Chloe (Mathilde Ollivi­er), who lives with her lit­tle broth­er Paul (Gian­ny Taufer) and ail­ing aunt, the out­num­bered Amer­i­can sol­diers try to work out their next move, when Boyce acci­den­tal­ly dis­cov­ers that the Nazis are up to far more than mere sig­nal trans­mis­sions in the crypts beneath the church.

To reveal more would be to spoil – albeit no more than the film’s trail­er does – but suf­fice it to say that from the very out­set, long before Over­lord shifts rad­i­cal­ly into gener­ic ter­ri­to­ries bet­ter known from the Out­post fran­chise or Frankenstein’s Army, this has already proven a vis­cer­al, high-stakes film whose char­ac­ters are always tra­vers­ing moral­ly chal­leng­ing land­scapes. ​“They’re rot­ten sons of bitch­es,” Sergeant Eld­son (Bokeem Wood­bine) had said of the Nazi ene­my, ​“which is why we just have to be as rot­ten as them.”

Indeed, to Boyce’s hor­ror, the expe­ri­enced war hero Cor­po­ral Ford proves as adept at tor­ture as his oppo­site num­ber, and sim­i­lar­ly pri­ori­tis­es the mis­sion over the lives of civil­ians, includ­ing chil­dren. So from the very start of Over­lord, war is a hell where inno­cence is quick­ly lost and where fight­ing a mon­ster some­times entails becom­ing a mon­ster. The final act mere­ly gives messy flesh to these metaphors, while con­tin­u­ing to place Boyce – a straight­for­ward­ly good, decent man – into eth­i­cal dilem­mas which will test if there is any Nazi hid­den with­in him and his comrades.

Avery most­ly sticks close to Boyce, immers­ing the view­er into his intense expe­ri­ence. Mean­while, the Nazis’ aspi­ra­tions for a ​‘Thou­sand Year Reich’ res­onate with our own times when their tox­ic ide­ol­o­gy, though nom­i­nal­ly put down in 1945, keeps spring­ing back to life.