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Birdbox and Overlord
Aug. 31st, 2023 08:31 amBirdbox (Susanne Bier, Netflix, 2018)
Overlord (Julius Avery, 2018)
I very much enjoyed Birdbox, which is elevated above the standard disaster plot of mysterious contagion / followed by road trip i.e. quest, simply by quality direction and quality acting.
There are two main narratives. The first is the present day, with Malorie (Sandra Bullock) taking two four/five year olds on a river trip to a mysterious destination which she hopes wil offer sanctuary. The catch? They have to wear blindfolds all the time. To remove them means death.
The second (and main narrative) starts five years earlier, with a pregnant Malorie. Suddenly people the world over begin committing suicide. A mysterious (possibly alien) presence causes most people to immediately decide to die within seconds of them "seeing" it.
Malorie manages to find refuge in a house full of various eccentrics, including John Malkovich as a marvellous curmudgeon. The main aim is survival. For example, getting to the supermarket a half-mile away and back is not too easy when you have to do it without opening your eyes.
An additional spanner in the works is the discovery that some insane people do not kill themselves when they see whatever it is, but they do feel the urge to force other people to see "the wonder".
Gradually these two factors reduce the numbers. Malorie and one of the other members of the group both give birth at the same time.
The film is good because nearly all of the characters have depth, even those who get killed off early, and even the "baddies". Sandra Bullock in particular is brilliant as Malorie, a far-from-perfect mother with more than her fair share of personal problems, and yet one who wants to "do the right thing".
A strong performance too from Trevante Rhodes as Tom, o ne of the other survivors. Malkovich looks to be having a great time as a miserable old bastard, and Tom Hollander provides a neat mid-film cameo. Of course, we as viewers know that it will be a cameo, because his fee and schedule would have been swuch that he probably couldn't manage to be on set for more than a few days' shooting time.
And the kids are, of course, guaranteed heartstring-pullers.
Overlord, by contrast, was fairly terrible. Perhaps it was a success according to its own parameters (lots of rather unpleasant gore as people die in variously unpleasant ways), but in terms of characters, plot development, acting, whatever, it doesn't hack it.
Let's assume that you come to this film knowing *nothing* about it (this is basically impossible as the film's publicity tells you the "reveal" about a third of the way through).
It opens with a group of American paratroopers preparing to drop into France just ahead of D-Day, with a mission to take out a communications tower. The plane comes under fire from the ground, the parachute drop is rushed, the group get separated.
Eventually a few of them come together and manage to make oit to the town, where a young lady (Chloe, played by Mathilde Olivier) hides them in the attic.
Mysterious things are going on in the town. We catch our first glimpse of the results of this -- Chloe's aunt, who looks to have become some kind of monster, is hidden away in another room.
Enter Pilou Asbaek as stereotypical German baddie (the German troops are never any more than carboard cut-outs).
Gradually the truth emerges (you know, that truth we were already told about in the publicity) that the location of the communications tower is also a place where a scientific programme is underway. Cue the excuse for shots of lots of people who have been subject to those experiments.
The film heads towards a thoroughly ungripping conflagrational climax.
I mean, it's terrible. I fast-forwarded through a fair bit of it because it seemed obvious what was going to happen. The film is termed an "alternate history" World War II film. Well, my idea of "alternate history" is "what if Churchill had been killed in a bomb during the blitz?" Not "what if the Nazis developed a serum that turned people into monsters? Asbaek spends quite a bit of the film doing a Dr Phibes impersonation. Wyatt Russell as Corporal Ford also takes the serum so that we can have some kind of Captain America vs a Nazi super-hero baddie fight at the end. Jovan Adepo does his best as the lead role, but surely he could see that he was trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. Mathilde Olivier (who also had a main role in 1899) does't seem stretched at all. Asbaek gives his all, but it's a bit of a comedown from the days of Borgen.
I mean, the film *must* have something, as its target demographic seemed to like it. But, as one critic observed, it's just a collage of standard plot devices, stitched together, which don't really make any sense as a coherent whole. Therefore all that you get are what (to me, at leas), seemed a sequence of disconnected set pieces constructed as either a visual gore-fest, a super-hero vs super-hero battle, or a World War II drama battle scene. We've seen all of these before, done better, in other films that made some dramatic sense.
Birdbox: 8/10
Overlord: 2/10
Overlord (Julius Avery, 2018)
I very much enjoyed Birdbox, which is elevated above the standard disaster plot of mysterious contagion / followed by road trip i.e. quest, simply by quality direction and quality acting.
There are two main narratives. The first is the present day, with Malorie (Sandra Bullock) taking two four/five year olds on a river trip to a mysterious destination which she hopes wil offer sanctuary. The catch? They have to wear blindfolds all the time. To remove them means death.
The second (and main narrative) starts five years earlier, with a pregnant Malorie. Suddenly people the world over begin committing suicide. A mysterious (possibly alien) presence causes most people to immediately decide to die within seconds of them "seeing" it.
Malorie manages to find refuge in a house full of various eccentrics, including John Malkovich as a marvellous curmudgeon. The main aim is survival. For example, getting to the supermarket a half-mile away and back is not too easy when you have to do it without opening your eyes.
An additional spanner in the works is the discovery that some insane people do not kill themselves when they see whatever it is, but they do feel the urge to force other people to see "the wonder".
Gradually these two factors reduce the numbers. Malorie and one of the other members of the group both give birth at the same time.
The film is good because nearly all of the characters have depth, even those who get killed off early, and even the "baddies". Sandra Bullock in particular is brilliant as Malorie, a far-from-perfect mother with more than her fair share of personal problems, and yet one who wants to "do the right thing".
A strong performance too from Trevante Rhodes as Tom, o ne of the other survivors. Malkovich looks to be having a great time as a miserable old bastard, and Tom Hollander provides a neat mid-film cameo. Of course, we as viewers know that it will be a cameo, because his fee and schedule would have been swuch that he probably couldn't manage to be on set for more than a few days' shooting time.
And the kids are, of course, guaranteed heartstring-pullers.
Overlord, by contrast, was fairly terrible. Perhaps it was a success according to its own parameters (lots of rather unpleasant gore as people die in variously unpleasant ways), but in terms of characters, plot development, acting, whatever, it doesn't hack it.
Let's assume that you come to this film knowing *nothing* about it (this is basically impossible as the film's publicity tells you the "reveal" about a third of the way through).
It opens with a group of American paratroopers preparing to drop into France just ahead of D-Day, with a mission to take out a communications tower. The plane comes under fire from the ground, the parachute drop is rushed, the group get separated.
Eventually a few of them come together and manage to make oit to the town, where a young lady (Chloe, played by Mathilde Olivier) hides them in the attic.
Mysterious things are going on in the town. We catch our first glimpse of the results of this -- Chloe's aunt, who looks to have become some kind of monster, is hidden away in another room.
Enter Pilou Asbaek as stereotypical German baddie (the German troops are never any more than carboard cut-outs).
Gradually the truth emerges (you know, that truth we were already told about in the publicity) that the location of the communications tower is also a place where a scientific programme is underway. Cue the excuse for shots of lots of people who have been subject to those experiments.
The film heads towards a thoroughly ungripping conflagrational climax.
I mean, it's terrible. I fast-forwarded through a fair bit of it because it seemed obvious what was going to happen. The film is termed an "alternate history" World War II film. Well, my idea of "alternate history" is "what if Churchill had been killed in a bomb during the blitz?" Not "what if the Nazis developed a serum that turned people into monsters? Asbaek spends quite a bit of the film doing a Dr Phibes impersonation. Wyatt Russell as Corporal Ford also takes the serum so that we can have some kind of Captain America vs a Nazi super-hero baddie fight at the end. Jovan Adepo does his best as the lead role, but surely he could see that he was trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. Mathilde Olivier (who also had a main role in 1899) does't seem stretched at all. Asbaek gives his all, but it's a bit of a comedown from the days of Borgen.
I mean, the film *must* have something, as its target demographic seemed to like it. But, as one critic observed, it's just a collage of standard plot devices, stitched together, which don't really make any sense as a coherent whole. Therefore all that you get are what (to me, at leas), seemed a sequence of disconnected set pieces constructed as either a visual gore-fest, a super-hero vs super-hero battle, or a World War II drama battle scene. We've seen all of these before, done better, in other films that made some dramatic sense.
Birdbox: 8/10
Overlord: 2/10
