YMMV / Overlord (2018)

• Alternate Character Interpretation: At the end of the movie, the unnamed superior officer asks Boyce if the rumors about a lab are true. Boyce tells him they found nothing out of the ordinary. He gives Boyce a long look and then dismisses him. Does he really believe Boyce? Or does that look mean he knows Boyce is lying, but knows more than he's letting on and shares the belief that no one should have the serum, and so chooses to support the lie?
• Awesome Music: Jed Kurzel's ruthlessly oppressive score, which juggles the gritty war and Body Horror B-movie tones the film is going for quite well.
• Broken Base: The film's Politically Correct History, mostly its treatment of black soldiers in the United States army. People find it either an insignificant detail of a film with more fantastical elements or an offensive erasure of a part of history we shouldn't forget.
• Cliché Storm: Much like media such as Wolfenstein, Call of Duty: Zombies and Captain America, the film draws a lot of inspiration from World War II era pulp tales and plays all the clichés associated with the genre completely straight, although this doesn't make it any less entertaining.
• Complete Monster: SS Hauptsturmführer Wafner is the head of a Nazi operation in a French village to create a secret weapon using a black tar that can mutate humans and raise the dead. Wafner has innocent villagers horrifically experimented upon, subjecting them to horrific agony while having failures burnt alive. Wafner has any troublesome villagers experimented upon, while blackmailing the girl Chloe for sex by threatening the life of her eight-year-old brother Paul. After being captured when he attempts to rape Chloe, Wafner escapes with Paul as a hostage, attempting to have Paul experimented upon too. Intending on creating a Nazi empire that encompasses the world, Wafner believes himself to be a god when he utilizes the serum himself, even torturing Corporal Ford by impaling him on a meat hook and gloating about his glory, thinking nothing of the pain and death he causes to create his Reich.
• Evil Is Cool: As noted in Asskicking Leads to Leadership, Wafner gets quite a bit of this. See more in that trope for details.
• Fridge Brilliance: Those injected with the Nazi serum can withstand multiple bullets to the torso or head, but are seemingly vulnerable to fire. The substance animating them is derived from tar, which can be extremely flammable.
• Fridge Horror:
  • Chloe and Boyce find Paul tied down to a lab table when they go to rescue him. While he's thankfully unharmed, the fact that he appears to have been prepped for experimentation makes you wonder how many children had been taken from their homes for Schmidt and Wafner to test the black tar on.
  • When Wafner asks his men to leave, he tells Chloe he wants her right then and there, but when she tells him he's not interested, he tells her it's going to happen one way or another... and we see Paul in the attic curling up in a corner, and already covering his ears.
• Love to Hate: Wafner is a thoroughly detestable piece of work and that's what makes him such a good villain. The fact that he's played by Euron freakin' Greyjoy definitely helps.
• Moral Event Horizon: Either when Wafner tries to rape Chloe or when he kidnaps Paul to be experimented on.
• One-Scene Wonder: Sergeant Rensin dies at the end of the opening scene but makes quite an impression for being a fearless Cigar Chomper and A Father to His Men, and for being played by Bokeem Woodbine.
• Signature Scene:
  • The opening scene of Boyce parachuting gets a lot of love, for how it so quickly establishes the visceral and chaotic tone you're in for.
  • The land mine scene and Shell-Shock Silence that follows it. It was even used as part of the viral marketing campaign, without revealing anything about the movie itself other than the scene (without any context) and the title.
  • Search for anything about this film, and you're bound to be met with Wafner's disfigured Slasher Smile. It's even the teaser poster for the movie◊.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • The film is an exact adaptation of some core premises of Bloodborne: A mysterious "old blood" (the tar) with strange properties (healing and rampant transformation and corruption) is found in an underground tomb (under the church), but in order to make it safe(r) to use it is filtered through special "blood saints" (the test subjects who are directly injected with the tar) before being administered to the final recipients. Failures during the refinement of the process lead to people turning into beasts and being eliminated (the execution squad destroying feral zombies).
  • Definitely the closest we could get to a movie version of Operation Darkness.
  • Or a Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos movie. It even has the infinity formula.
  • On the topic of the MCU, this film has also been called a Bloodier and Gorier Captain America: The First Avenger, seeing how both films take place in World War II and involve Super Soldiers in a form.
  • The film's subject matter and overall tone may as well mark it as Wolfenstein: The Motion Picture, or Call of Duty: Zombies: The Movie. Its title is even the same font as the former franchise.
  • The backstory of Delta Green has its 1940's precursor P-Division fighting their Nazi counterparts - this movie's plot would make for a great operation.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Chase's deaths. Both of them. The first has Chase in shock and behaving oblivious to his fatal wound, gasping for breath and asking for his camera before passing away. Boyce uses the serum to revive him, but Chase is now a insane super-strong zombie and his own squad is forced to shoot him down. Heart-breakingly, Boyce had not only subjected Chase to a worse death, but also replaced his last words with an angry diatribe towards him.
  • Ford staying behind to ensure the lab and serum are destroyed and Wafner is defeated is pretty depressing. Boyce seems pretty shaken up when tells the relieving officer he wishes the corporal was still with them. The two had come a long way from the start of the movie.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Seeing an all-black unit on a special mission and working with white soldiers with specialized skills for the mission when both groups had no experience with fighting in integrated units could have allowed for some good Character Development while also respecting historical buffalo soldiers. Instead, their working together during the time period is teated as normal for the sake of Politically Correct History.

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