Three Films Make A Post: I stopped caring a long time ago

Samaritan (2022): If ever you wanted to see a cross between Over the Top and The Dark Knight Rises, director Julius Avery, writer Bragi F. Schut and an expressionless rock formation named Sylvester Stallone have made the movie for you. Apart from badly ripping off the least regarded Nolan Batman movie, this is a film whose makers ignore the last three decades of superhero movies, instead preferring the eldritch horror of using a child as their viewpoint character, and the bad child acting that belongs to this sort of thing.

There’s a big reveal you’ll see coming ten minutes in but that still takes more than an hour to happen, and whose early use would have made the film and its characters a million times more interesting, action sequences that can’t see the difference between low-powered and badly structured, and a lead actor who either can’t act anymore or simply doesn’t on general principle. That the dialogue is dreadful and the plot harbours neither surprises nor interesting ideas and can’t even hit generic plot beats well should come as no surprise in this context.

Nope (2022): The new movie by Jordan Peele, on the other hand, fails on a much higher level. But then, even in this, his by far worst film, you can’t help but see that he’s still an excellent director. Just one who lets himself down as a writer this time around, creating a film that bloats a ninety minute plot up to more than two hours. I’m all for slow horror and spending lots of time to get to know characters as well as to build up dread, but in this case, the characters and their relations are simply not interesting or complicated enough to reward the time spent with them, and the monster that’s the film’s major threat is not the kind of thing for which “dread” is the appropriate feeling. Worse, the film’s attempt at a commentary on people’s drive to win cheap entertainment fame has little that intrinsically or metaphorically connects it with the horror movie parts of the affair, which makes the film not just feel sluggish, but also somewhat disconnected.

Requiem for a Village (1975): Most films about traditional country ways getting swallowed by the New and the city do tend to have a certain reactionary undertone in which the old is somehow always better than the new. David Gladwell’s documentary about the memories of an old country man coming to life on a graveyard is not such a film. There’s a deep longing for disappearing ways of living running through the film, yet it is also painfully honest about the harshness and cruelty of country life and country people, often seeming to suggest that only the good bits of the Old are swallowed by the New, while the violence, the rape and the cruelty just continue on in other clothing.

In short: Overlord (2018)

D-Day. The film follows a small group of soldiers who are parachuted in behind enemy lines to destroy a highly important German radar antenna at a church in a small French village. Hardly anyone survives the drop, and the handful of survivors don’t really seem to be enough to get through all of the Nazis between them and the goal of their mission. Our viewpoint character is Boyce (Jovan Adepo), somewhat looked down upon by most of his peers for being “too soft” (and one, imagines, for the colour of his skin, though the film doesn’t really go there) but who will, not surprisingly, be the film’s moral backbone. Also involved are the cynical and probably PTSD-haunted veteran of the Italian front Ford (Wyatt Russell), the group’s de facto leader after everyone else is dead (Bokeem Woodbine, we hardly knew ye), posturing sniper Tibbet (John Magaro), war photographer Chase (Iain De Caestecker), and dude with a Jewish name – that’s all the character he gets - Rosenfeld (Dominic Applewhite).

At least, they quickly meet the mandatory helpful hot French woman (Mathilde Ollivier). On the negative side, the Nazis don’t just have a radar operation going on in the village church but are also experimenting on the villagers and everyone else they can get their fingers on. Nazi zombie super soldier’s the watch word.

Julius Avery’s Overlord is a pretty peculiar movie. Going in, the film suggests some kind of pulped-up version of The Dirty Dozen with zombies, but the film’s first half turns out to be more of a harsh and ruthless war movie, with moments that feel authentically horrible, and little on screen that suggests any of the kind of brutal heroism you generally get from the more pulpy end of the war movie genre. I’m not complaining, mind you, for Avery is a rather decent hand at this sort of thing, turning out a first third that’s exciting but also not pulling any punches for the audience.

For the film’s middle part, things shift into increasingly less believable directions that feel rather more than the sort of war action movie with horror bits I had expected from Overlord going in, until the film’s final third suddenly turns its horror pulpiness up to eleven (starting with something unpleasant yet utterly silly happening to De Caestecker’s character), pumps its fist at absurd last stands, and goes all-out bonkers pulp war horror on us. The way the film handles this, this doesn’t feel like dramatic escalation but rather like someone taking the script, ripping out the second half (probably while roaring something about Nazis) and just ramming the second half of a completely different film into the director’s face. Fortunately, Avery mostly handles the last third with the right energy for the bizarre nonsense the script cooks up for him, so, even though the film doesn’t manage to be to anything like a coherent whole, what’s there is well-directed, performed by an ensemble that keep their dignity even under greatest duress, and highly entertaining.


Still, I wish I had gotten to see the second half of that ruthless war movie called Overlord, or the first one of the crazy pulp concoction of the same title instead of half of each of them.