Over(oh my)lord!
You have to be JJ Abrams clumsy.
That guy has turned into Michael Bey without the freewheeling fun. He can string together two or three amazing visual sequences that only work until you stop the movie. Those sequences are always linked by seventy minutes of downright nonsense and flailing not-quite-characters who flop about on screen until the next big visual rescues the audience from the confusion.
Why are these people all so stupid? Why do we care what happens to them? What just happened, where did he come from, how did these five guys just happen to land right next to each other when they dropped from a crashing plane over the course of several miles? What are those black guys doing in the 101st Airborne twenty years before the Army was integrated? Where is the Wehrmacht in all of this? How does a French peasant gal so effortlessly carry a BAR, let alone fire it so accurately, let alone make three headshots against men behind heavy cover before any of them can even squeeze the trigger? Why is that hardened elite solider crying in the middle of battle over the death of one man? Isn’t he supposed to be tough? How did that guy make it out of the…ah the hell with it.
Now, the easy counter these questions is to snort-laugh, shove your black-rimmed coke bottle glasses up the bridge of your nose, and intone a nasal, “Gosh, Jon, you can accept zombies but a little woke casting is one bridge too far?”
Yep.
That’s exactly right. There’s only so much fakery that one man can take in a single film before the whole thing falls apart. If you can’t apply physics properly, if you take too many liberties with history, if your characters behave too stupidly, then you’ve left the viewer with no handle on which to hang his disbelief. Nothing means anything and everything means whatever it needs to at the moment destroys all sense of threat, all sense of menace, and all sense of weight. Overlord, by playing too fast and loose with every single aspect of production, carries all the weight and drama of breakfast cereal commercial. It’s fake, from top to bottom, and that chincy fakery completely undercuts some incredible creature effects.
Contrast with Bone Tomahawk, which grounds itself in a dry and dusty western setting complete with unjured cowboys, aging Sheriffs, jittery deputies, and a newcomer dandy who turns out to be a lot tougher than his NYC clothes suggest. The world is real, the threats real, the danger imminent and palpable precisely because of the reality-based casting, set design, and character interaction. It’s messy and solid, and the resultant un-natural aspects of the threat take on a gravity and menace that works precisely because of the contrast between the seriousness of the world and the fantasticality of the cave-dwellers.
Overlord didn’t do well in the box office, barely making back its production budget, despite the big names involved. So it isn’t just me. This movie fails on all counts, and should remind everyone that JJ Abrams is the most overhyped and over-rated director/producer since…nope, he’s number one. Top of the game, the most over-rated man in Hollywood.
Overlord is terrible, stay well away from it.