It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Stuart Cooper's Overlord is a meditation on the mechanics of war and the young souls swept into it. After winning the Silver Bear at the 25th Berlin International Film Festival, the film became incredibly obscure until recently, when it was given the restoration it deserved by the lovely folks at Criterion. Beginning in a quaint English home and ending on the beaches of Normandy for 'Operation Overlord' during World War II, it's a simple yet hypnotic story of a young private named Tom (Brian Stirner) and his slow journey to a death he feels is inevitable. The very first scene shows an out-of- focus soldier running from or towards an unknown threat before being shot down, only to be revealed as a dream sequence. This vision plagues Tom's thoughts, but he nevertheless remains somewhat chipper about it.What makes this very personal journey so incredibly powerful is the sense of impending doom. Tom always seems to be on the move, be it on a train or an army jeep, as if he is making a slow trek towards his fate, and he chooses this time to daydream. Despite not knowing where the war is heading or if he'll even see combat, he somehow knows he is going to die but remains nonchalant about it. A nice boy, well spoken and slight, Tom is not built for the army, but he does what he is told and makes friends. The only time we really see his personality come to the fore is when he meets a pretty young lady (Julie Neesam) and the pair enjoy what little time they have together. He tells her they'll meet again, but we know they won't. In making Tom such an everyman, Overlord studies the anonymity of battle, and celebrates the millions of unknown soldiers who have charged into certain death without really understanding why.Starting out life as a documentary, Cooper later made the bold decision to use the startling archive footage provided by the Imperial War Museum and weave a narrative through it. Cinematographer John Alcott (who collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon) employs grainy black-and-white photography for the central story so it is interchangeable with the stock footage. The result is staggering. By adding sound, scenes of devastating city bombings become hellish nightmares, and a beach landing turns into something out of science- fiction. In a bizarre scene, a water wheel device powered by mini rockets rolls across the water and onto land, hoping to detonate any landmines or unexploded bombs before mightily toppling over. It's World War II like you've never seen it before, and it's real. It's a winning combination of observational and personal, making Overlord one of the most innovative and devastating humanist war films ever made.

Just watched this on Amazon Prime and really enjoyed it. It was unusual and original. I found myself struggling to place it in the decade it was made at first. It was so authentic re the war, I thought it was just post war at first, then as the more liberal language came in , I thought it was the sixties. Turns out it was mid seventies. The film has a wonderful dream like quality with the hero foreseeing his own death. I don't know if the black and white film is shot on Ilford FP4 or not but it seems to have all its massive range of greys from white to black in it. This combined with the music and some of the documentary footage, although quite shocking at times, makes it paradoxically a beautiful film. Some of the documentary film was outstanding. I have never seen some of the invasion devices shown before. There was one like a huge Catherine wheel that sped on to the beach. There was another that just chewed through the barbed wire defences. Further, there was a shot from a bomber flying low over a coast line which was so clear and real it pulled you in totally to the fictive dream - it didn't have any of the usual distancing of many documentary or fiction films.Good film - I recommend it.

This review contains a potential spoiler.In honor of Ken Burns' The War I pulled out the recent DVD release of Stuart Cooper's Overlord to see things from the English perspective Overlord concerns a soldier named Tom from the point at which he leaves home to report for military service to the landing on D-Day. We follow as Tom trains, makes friends and generally waits for his part of the war to start. Shot in black and white to match a great deal of inserted footage from the time this is a soldier's life during wartime English style.Re-released in the US a year or so ago I remember the reviews being nearly perfect and I looked forward to getting the chance to see this "lost classic". Finally watching the film I'm left wondering what all the shouting has been about. Don't get me wrong, its a good film, its just the great one that some pundits, like Roger Ebert seemed to make it out to be.Essentially a film about waiting this film is merely a slice of life for the English soldier on the eve of the great invasion. We watch as Tom and his men are shunted around, we see their training, we see footage of the war from the air, and we watch as the men just wait around. There is more to it than that but for me its an 80 minute march to a foregone conclusion. It great to look at with some stunning sequences of old footage (flights over the countryside and air combat) that looked great on the 42 inch TV in the living room, but the film really didn't have much beyond that. Tom the central character and emotional center is too melancholy and morbid (he's certain he's going to die) that the film seems more incredibly sad if not incredibly distant. Why would any one want to be around him when he seems mostly to sulk and brood, even when he's falling in love with a girl he meets at a dance. The film looks stunning and on a technical level its a masterpiece of combining old with new footage.Clearly we are there, but with a central character such as the maudlin Tom Beddoe its not really a place we want to be no matter how good it looks.A disappointment (its good but not great) thats worth a look.

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.