On June 6th, 1944, 160,000 Allied soldiers landed on occupied France via parachute, glider, and watercraft, in order to liberate Western Europe from the Nazis. It is an event that is almost legendary in its scale and consequences, so it is little wonder that filmmakers have visited the subject time and again. From The Longest Dayin 1962 to Steven Spielberg’s brilliant opening scene in Saving Private Ryan, directors have used the beach landings to show heroism and bravery against harrowing odds.
While there certainly were heroes on that terrible day, those stories were not what interested British director Stuart Cooper when he set out to make his own D-Day film, 1975’s Overlord. Instead, Cooper delivers a more intimate, grittier, and tragically accurate historical fiction, one that will stay with audiences long after the credits roll. The name Overlord actually comes from the Allied codename for the invasion of Normandy during World War II. The film sets this expectation for the big day from the start, with the name blatantly informing the audience about what the movie is leading up to.
‘Overlord’ Examines World War II Through an Intimate Lens
In stark contrast to the gravity and size of Operation Overlord, audiences are introduced to an “everyman” recruit named Thomas Beddows (Bryan Stirner). Beddows is an Englishman who joins up with the British Army, undergoes basic training, and anxiously awaits his assignment in the war. The length and breadth of the film is spent, not with Beddows taking cover from German guns, but rather, taking scoldings from drill sergeants. Beddows does all the things viewers expect during the first quarter of a typical war film; he trains, he talks about life after the war with his mates, and he even dances with a woman and plans to take her out on a date. Only in Overlord, this period of pre-combat makes up the bulk of the film.
Instead of intricately shot combat scenes with hundreds of extras, Cooper relies heavily on archival footage of actual soldiers and implements of war. Intercut with the “live action” shots are real scenes of bombings, Nazi rallies, and troops and tanks on the march — adding to the realistic nature of the movie. In order to avoid visual whiplash, Cooper actually tracked down period-correct camera lenses from the 1930s and 1940s, so the look of his new footage would match the stock films. All of these scenes are woven seamlessly throughout the narrative, with Beddow’s troubled dreams being particularly wrought with grizzly visions of war. This gives Overlord an authentic look that also feels quite dreamy and nostalgic, making the events portrayed all the more sad to watch.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
‘Overlord’ Subverts Expectations for a Devastatingly Impactful Conclusion
It is impossible to talk about Overlord without discussing its infamous ending, so anyone who would like to watch the film first should be aware of spoilers coming up. As mentioned above, most movies about D-Day give audiences a sort of hero to follow up the beach. Hundreds of soldiers die around our hero, but he always makes it, giving viewers a sort of proxy through the battle. But in Overlord, after spending more than an hour and a half with Private Beddows, the young man is shot in the head before he even steps off the landing craft. This scene is an absolute gut punch, leaving the viewer feeling completely devastated, if not a bit numb. Much in the same way that The Deer Hunter shows the deep friendship of the four leads before throwing them into The Vietnam War, Cooper gives us a portrait of a decent young man with a whole life ahead of him before unceremoniously cutting him down in the final minutes of the movie. As deeply depressing as it is, this is just what Overlord is trying to accomplish. Thomas Beddows is just one of the literal millions of young men across the world who lost their lives similarly during that terrible war.
Stuart Cooper’s Overlord is an epic of a very different sort than other war films. It does not dazzle with its effects, and it does not show the hell of battle through the eyes of a hero. Instead, Overlord chooses to represent the ordinary, almost forgotten soldier that falls without a word. Every extra in a war movie that dies in the background represents another Thomas Beddows, and Overlord was made for those lost lives. Everybody ought to see this film at least once, and remember that war is not fought by mythological heroes, but by ordinary people.
