Overlord

I can safely assume that "Overlord" had an extremely minuscule budget. None of the actors look like professionals, it was all shot in black & white and the film uses lots and lots of stock footage from WWII. Despite my reservations, which I'll get to in a moment, it's awfully good considering the costs.

The film follows a typical sort of soldier, Tom Beddows, from his induction to his landing at the beaches of Normandy. Throughout his story, clips of the preparations for the landing as well as other war footage is inserted...often in the clumsiest and seemingly random manner. Despite this, the story of Tom IS compelling and sucks you in to his life. Worth seeing...especially if you would love to see a decent micro-budgeted picture.

If you watched Saving Private Ryan, go and see this film too. It's totally different, but it deals with the personal feelings of a private much better, no battle scenes, just the perfect backdrop about a normal soldier going off to war, knowing what will happen.

I caught Overlord on IFC as a programming homage to Jerry Harvey and the Z Channel (thanx to Xan Cassavetes). If you are a WWII buff who loves the History Channel and interesting experimental films you'll enjoy this movie. The stock war footage is so seamlessly interwoven that it is almost a verite experience. I love when you catch something so offbeat and refreshing that you can't believe you had never heard of it before. Do they still make Fresca soda? I need 10 lines to post this. I hope I never encounter a rabid dingo. I wonder if Spielberg has seen this movie. I wonder if Spielberg digs Fresca soda. I wonder if I should've eaten that last mushroom cap.Check it out.

"Overlord" follows the experience of a young soldier from his induction into the army up to his participation in Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings.

Beautifully photographed in black and white, the film weaves archive footage seamlessly into the fabric of the story and captures, not only the look, but the very essence of the period.

Until the closing moments, the protagonist is not involved in any fighting. What we see are the minutiae of life for a young soldier being trained and waiting to go into battle – the marching and military exercises; a trip to the cinema and the local village dance, where he meets his first girlfriend; the eve of battle, when he writes his last letter home, fills in the standard army issue will form, and burns all the private papers which he is not permitted to take into battle lest they fall into enemy hands and give away some information of use to the enemy. These small personal details give the film an emotional depth and a feeling for the times, which most war films made in the post war period fail to do.

When I heard that this film consisted of about 1/3 newsreel footage, I was expecting the worst. Stock footage blended with studio footage is something you'd find in an MST3k movie; three people in a car driving quickly away from a giant lizard and then cut to a different film grain shot of an iguana in a lab and then back to the car. Oh no, the Iguana is chasing us.

The effect can be jarring, to say the least.

But Cooper, so far as I have heard, actually wrote the screenplay for Overlord with the stock footage he was going to use already in mind, tailoring his script so that the footage actually made sense. The movie is shot so that the switch from studio to stock lighting and film quality is barely noticeable. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's seamless--it does take a little while to get used to, but after the first fifteen minutes or so you don't even notice it.

And that's a good sign, that you have to "get used to" the picture for a little while before you feel comfortable watching it. That's the sign of originality. This is a brooding and slow-paced war film, but unlike other such films it maintains a certain lightness in spite of its weighty subject and so avoids coming off as ponderous. No viewpoints are shoved in your face. Hard questions are asked, yes, but you're given plenty of time to try and sort them out for yourself.

This is a movie you have to be wide awake while watching--it demands your full attention, and if you're not willing to give that up then you're probably not going to enjoy it. Overlord is most certainly not mindless entertainment. It provokes thought, and if thought makes you uncomfortable it's simply not the movie for you.