Review: Get Drunk, Watch 'Overlord'
Samuel Kaufman ’20 / Emertainment Monthly
Note: Emertainment Monthly does not endorse underage drinking. This review also contains adult language. Reader discretion is advised.
You’re stressed. The holidays are fast approaching, things are rough at work right now, half of the country supports a racist madman. You’ve tried meditation, therapy, deleting social media. Nothing seems to help. Well, lucky for you, J.J. Abrams is here with the solution.
INSTRUCTIONS:
- Get drunk
- See Overlord on the biggest screen you can
- Bring friends (They should be drunk too)
- Convince everyone you know to follow these instructions
- Repeat
See how easy that was? And look how much better you feel!
Overlord is a very easy film to recommend. If you saw the trailer and thought, “yeah, I fuck with that,” see it immediately (check above for detailed instructions on how to see it). If you saw the trailer and thought “you couldn’t pay me enough to sit through that,” stay far away. The film is refreshingly upfront with what it is; there’s no deception or bait-and-switch. It’s not shooting for high art or lofty social commentary. You’re going to see a lot of gore, a lot of action, and if you relate to this review, you’re going to love every second of it.
Overlord is the sophomore feature film from director Julius Avery and is prominently produced by J.J. Abrams. It follows a small group of American Airmen who get dropped behind Nazi lines in the days leading up to D-Day. Their mission is simple – take out a radio tower that the German’s have placed on top of a church in a small French village. After their plane is shot down in an opening sequence that will shake your teeth and rock your world (again, see this on the biggest screen you can), only a handful of the soldiers are left. This ragtag group of Red-Blooded American Men works against the clock to complete their mission, and waste a few Nazis along the way. But their plans get complicated when they start to suspect that the church is housing something more than a radio tower. Something horrifying, and not necessarily human.
What exactly is in that church? Well, without spoiling it, it’s Nazi zombies. Aw beans, it’s spoiled. Oh, well. If you saw the trailer and didn’t immediately figure out that it was a movie about Nazi zombies, this probably wasn’t the movie for you anyway.
The characters are about as broad-strokes as you can get, but in a WWII movie of this variety, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You root for the good guys because they’re Good; you’re fine with them killing the bad guys because they’re Bad. How bad? Well, they’re all either Nazis, zombies, or both. Far smarter people have noted this long before, but both Nazis and zombies are some of the only movie villains that can receive unlimited violence towards them with zero moral qualms, and Overlord takes full advantage of that fact. The catharsis is palpable. Times may be tough right now, but seeing a few Nazi zombies get blown to smithereens will put a smile on your face, guaranteed.
So, one more time, for the people in the back, what are your plans this weekend? Oh, that’s right. Get drunk, see Overlord.
Fun Grade: A++++
Overall Grade: B-
Watch The Trailer:
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USPd0vX2sdc[/embedyt]