The Nazis have left an indelible mark on our collective consciousness. Indeed, the excess of their morbidity is unmatched throughout history. It was not just their theory of racial purity, imperialistic tendencies or how a band of crass individuals found themselves in leadership positions. It was the zealousness with which they conducted their ghastly acts of murder, torture and genocide.

And then there were the doctors and their experiments. The most notable was Josef Mengele, who performed experiments that we today would find monstrous if done to animals. He and his colleagues have been used as inspirations for a countless number of physician villains. But not in a single case have filmmakers outthought those German doctor’s mastery of the macabre.

Overlord is no different. It fails to present the psychological sickness that leads humans to want to kill other humans in the most painful and humiliating manner possible. Overlord barely exhibits severed heads, mutilated faces and a little boy in distress. For any seasoned horror movie fan, this movie is totally watchable over a meal.

The movie follows a private, Ed (Jovan Adepo), who with a small team is sent to destroy a German radio tower in France just before the Allied invasion of Normandy. With their plane shot down, they find themselves smack in the middle of a Nazi-occupied town. But they do not abandon their mission, which they plan to accomplish.

There is just one major rub. The radio tower is not just used to facilitate communication for the Nazis but houses a secret lab underneath used for human experimentations. And as Ed and the other privates come to learn, the nightmare scenario that the Nazi achieve a biological breakthrough has come true.

Many films have fictionalised aspects of the Nazi menace. The most popular is Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Indiana Jones doing his mighty best to beat the Nazis to finding the Ark of the Covenant and using its power to their end.

A less fantastic, albeit fictional, but endlessly repeatable has been Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. Tarantino’s was a movie where Adolf Hitler’s goes down in a fury of fire and machine guns. It was a movie indignant at the conclusion of Nazi history, where a number of high-ranking officials of the Third Reich never faced justice.

Perhaps, a great movie that best resembles Overlord is Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. It takes place during the early Francoist period in Spain when people with power could exercise it without impunity. It is different from Overlord in that the protagonist is a child, the antagonists are Spanish soldiers, and the theme is that of trust and spirituality, but it is hardly possible to fail to note the resemblance between the main villains.

In both of the movies, the main antagonist becomes defaced, is misogynistic and is the embodiment of the totalitarian state machinery.

Of course, it is not clear what the movie wants to say, or if it just expects the audience to have a good time. I have no beef with the latter; I enjoy genre movies totally uninterested in making a statement about the human condition. But this does not mean that the plot should not make sense.

Overlord’s greatest fault is in presenting an incoherent storyline full of plotholes. The least any movie can do is allow the antagonists to be smart, organised and scheming. They should be able to give the protagonist a run for her money before they are defeated. Otherwise, predictability abounds, and audiences will see every one of the film’s highlights and climaxes in advance.

The only crew members that seemed to be functioning in this movie are the set and costume designers and makeup artists. The labs were dirty, and the human lab rats experimented on to become superhuman are gross, evoking the unrefined and undignified view of the Nazi’s we, or at least most of us, have of them. Alas, the acting, dialogue and plot ruin it.

PUBLISHED ON Nov 21,2018 [ VOL 19 , NO 969]

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