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As a fan of both WWII and horror movies, it took me a surprisingly long time to get around to seeing Overlord. Having seen it, I found the film disappointingly predictable. However, my concern here is not with assessing the aesthetic aspects of the film, but the glaring historical inaccuracy. If you have not seen the movie yet, there will be some spoilers.
The film opens in a way that shows the director is familiar with the Call of Duty series (over-the-top CGI explosions) but also includes a surprise to those familiar with history: the focus is on an integrated team from the 101st Airborne. While the soldiers engage in the usual early movie insulting banter of war films, there is not even a hint of racism. In fact, the white soldiers are incredibly respectful of their black sergeant. There are, of course, two problems here. The first s that there was no hint of even the slightest racism against the black characters. The second is that the U.S. Military was not integrated until 1948—well after the June 6, 1944 setting of the movie. As such, the movie is historically inaccurate on a significant and obvious matter. i
The first problem can easily be addressed: not everyone was racist in the 1940s, so these soldiers could just be very enlightened on race. While this seems improbable, it is not impossible—and one might say that if you can accept the Nazi science that re-animates the dead and grants the living superhuman abilities, then accepting enlightened soldiers in 1944 is easy.
The second problem does not admit of an easy solution: the movie is simply wrong about the historical facts. One solution, which would also address the first problem, is that the movie is set in an alternate reality that contains Nazi super-science but lacks American racism. While absolutely no backstory is provided for this, one could imagine that in this alternate reality the civil rights movement started decades earlier or something else occurred to create an integrated and tolerant military. It could be argued that the screenwriters left this out because the characters would not discuss such alternative history while on a mission. That said, if the real explanation for the apparent inaccuracy is that it is an alternative reality, then the movie should at least make some gesture of trying to address that point. Audiences that know history are certainly owed some explanation for the inaccuracy. It is certainly possible that they did not care about the inaccuracy and gave no real thought to it when selecting the actors.
While some might suspect that I have suddenly become a racist and will now rant against casting black actors in what should be white roles; this is not a point I will make. I have no issue with casting women and minorities in roles traditionally occupied by white men. One of my concerns is with historical accuracy—although I can certainly accept arguments for inaccuracies that make for a better movie. In the case of Overlord, they could have retained the accuracy about integration and had an integrated cast by having the soldiers be from different units thrown together for some plausible story reason (though this might require some historical tweaking, the only African American combat unit landing on D Day was the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion). Since such an easy fix exists to retain historical accuracy on a significant matter available, the failure of the movie stands out even more. Whatever goals the filmmakers wished to achieve through in integrated cast could have been met without sacrificing accuracy.
I also have a more significant moral concern with the movie being inaccurate on this matter. The integration of the armed forces and the acceptance of black soldiers were major milestones in American history that required a great deal of effort and sacrifice. While a movie is under no obligation to make political or moral points (and doing so can sometimes detract from a work), there is an obligation not to simply ignore important historical matters such as the integration of the armed forces of the United States. This would be somewhat like having a movie set in 1916 and having women legally voting in the United States without any explanation for why this is happening. Ignoring such achievements is an insult, albeit not a major one, to those who gave so much to accomplish them. As such, Overlord suffers from an easily fixable historical inaccuracy that is somewhat of an insult to those whose efforts made the integration of the armed forces possible.
One Saturday morning when I was about 9 or 10 years old, I was watching cartoons with my friend Tommy. Specifically, we were watching “The Milton the Monster Show”.
During the musical intro, the mad scientist was stirring various liquids into a quasi-human shaped mold, singing out the recipe instructions with each ingredient poured.
“That’s just stupid”, I remarked. I was referring to the scientific inaccuracy of having a monster appear out of some liquid concoction. “Where was the structure?” I thought. “Where are the bones? The flesh? How can these forms be differentiated simply by stirring some liquid?”
I could accept the idea of a Frankenstein-like monster being created in a lab, but dammit – he had to be put together in a manner that at least attempted to follow some kind of established re-animation principles!”
Of course, I didn’t voice any of that – just the “That’s just stupid!” part.
My friend Tommy had a completely different objection.
“Yeah,” he said, “They wouldn’t be singing!”
I guess we all have our breaking points. You’re OK with a Zombie Apocalypse horror-adventure with a WWII backdrop, but cannot abide the historical inaccuracy of an integrated paratrooper unit. How’d you do with “Inglorious Basterds”?
“they could have retained the accuracy about integration and had an integrated cast by having the soldiers be from different units thrown together for some plausible story reason (though this might require some historical tweaking, the only African American combat unit landing on D Day was the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion).”
So what you’re saying is that some historical inaccuracy (or “tweaking”) is OK for entertainment purposes, but you draw the line at … what, exactly? The fact that integration came at great cost for some people, and should not be treated lightly? I wonder how the families of the millions of Jews feel about this whole “Zombie Apocalypse” thing?
(Also when I was a kid, I was a big fan of “Hogan’s Heroes”. This infuriated my father, a first-generation American Jew born of Russian parents, who saw first-hand the horrors of WWII. He could not abide any treatment of Nazis in entertainment as anything other than the insane evil scourge they were. For him, there was nothing funny about them. Of course, Mel Brooks would disagree – as would Robert Clary, the Jewish French actor from that series who spent his youth in a concentration camp).
In an interview, Overlord star Jovan Adepo explains to Inverse that the movie’s decision to ignore segregation was in the service of something arguably more important than historical accuracy: entertainment.
“We’re not trying to make a historical movie,” Adepo says. “I think that we wanted to make very clear that this moment in time is almost like an alternate universe that is very much an action-adventure set during World War II.”
“This pivot away from historical accuracy only reinforces the idea that Overlord takes place in an alternate universe. After all, this is a world where a Nazi scientist uses weird goop found underneath a French village to craft a supersoldier zombie serum. So a desegrated military three years too early isn’t the strangest thing going on.”
“Casting was less about race and more about who has those characteristics that help put together the strongest cast possible,” Adepo says.”
“On the other hand, Overlord also downplays the racism that drove the Nazi’s political agenda, essentially brushing that away alongside segregation for the sake of a high-energy action movie.”
(according to your metric, shouldn’t this also be an objection to the movie? After all, ignoring the murderous Nazi anti-Semitism and their solution to the “Jewish Problem” has to be at least as insulting to the families of the Jews who died in the gas chambers as the lack of acknowledgment of the struggle of African Americans to achieve an integrated military. Then again, if we follow the left’s establilshed talking points, racism is “out”, but antiSemitism is “in”, right? )
But, going back to Jovan Adepo’s interview,
“The movie just so happened to fall into this category of race-neutral and not necessarily for the sake of just being inclusive. It was just like, we have a great story and we want to fill the roles well. If it just so happens to be inclusive, fine. They weren’t doing that as some sort of deliberate prop or trick. That was never in the conversation. I actually really appreciated that.”
I guess we all have to draw the line somewhere. Some are able to suspend disbelief enough to accept a Zombie Apocalypse but not integration three years before it actually happened. Others can accept monsters arising from some man-made primordial goo, but not their creators singing about it.
Honestly, I find your review fairly consistent. Your selective intolerance falls right along party lines, and is an accurate expression of the specific (and extremely hypocritical) rules of today’s flavor of political correctness.
I’m a bit of an “explosions don’t go boom in a vacuum” guy who is also a stickler, to some degree, for historical accuracy. Though I remember watching older WWII films with my father (WWII Pacific theater, combat infantry guy) and it would bug him how close to each other and lack of cover by the soldiers in battle scenes and I’d always have to remind him, it’s a movie and they can only fit so much in one camera shot. But this piece seems absurd in its concerns to me as well. I believe the reason is adequately explained in your last paragraph, DH. The political correctness and virtue signaling blind the People of Teh Narrative to many, many obvious things. Seems like that blind spot could be exploited for financial and political purposes. I believe Trump is doing much of the latter.
as would Robert Clary, the Jewish French actor
Also, did you know that Werner Klemperer (Col. Klink) was also a Jew? At least as the Nazis defined it. His father was a Jew by birth; converted to Catholicism, but later returned to Judaism. His mother was Lutheran. Werner portrayed bad-guy Nazis in a number of dramatic roles as well.
Your selective intolerance falls right along party lines, and is an accurate expression of the specific (and extremely hypocritical) rules of today’s flavor of political correctness.
Yeah. Normally I try to reply seriously and on topic, but that is not possible in this case. DH, I salute your patience in giving a full response.
There is a much-copied meme of a woman looking into a laptop screen with the caption “There must be some way this oppresses me”.
Replace that with “There must be some way this oppresses someone” and it would seem fitting here.
In a movie set in an alternate reality where Hitler produced supersoldiers with a serum that made them into mutated zombies (from what I gather; haven’t seen it) in a country where the knowledge of history of a great part of the people is less than profound, picking on a few years difference in the time the army achieved racial integration seems to be a case of looking into that laptop very, very hard.
Bonus video and great comment from YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRZZpk_9k8E
“Ah yes, the Great Civil War of 1965, I remember it like it was just 51 years ago. The Chicago Cubs, Minnesota Twins, and The NY Yankees seceding from MLB, causing a delay in the World Series, much to the chagrin of the LA Dodgers who finally were able to reunite our country again after the Dr. Zhivago Peace Accord signed by President Rocky J. Squirrel and Vice President Bullwinkle during the Sound of Music premier in Dodge City.”
As if ANY of those college educated children would know Dr. Zhivago. Heh. Can you imagine asking those questions to high school students 50 years ago and getting even one wrong answer? Once the “educators” decided that high school diplomas should be handed out like eucharists, our current reality was set in stone. But anyone who objected back then was written off as ignorant. I was also amused at how many were psychology, “human sciences”, and other snowflake majors. For these people college is nothing more than an extended childhood which we taxpayers support, along with their rent seeking college professors
Maybe just as horrifying is the “related” video that appears on the sidebar when watching the one you link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctz_dHfYfb8
But be careful. Don’t be fooled by what might seem obvious to you on first look. Here’s the underlying truth behind this video:
First, throughout the entire video, he questions almost exclusively white people, ignoring people of color (their opinions obviously don’t matter to him), thus exposing himself as a racist, Actually, are there any people of color on that campus? Maybe the entire university is racist!
And then, this obvious Republican Trump-Supporting shill, lies about the source of the details of the tax plan by saying they were Bernie Sanders’ ideas. What a liar! He lies to respectable (but unsuspecting) liberals in a blatant effort to make them look uneducated and foolish.
Once you realize this sneaky, underlying truth you too, like me, will really “feel the Bern”.
in terms of drawing the line, I do not have a complete theory developed. But the general principle I apply is that the more significant the inaccuracy, the more aesthetic justification is required. Having the US Army integrated in 1944 is a major inaccuracy. Having a soldier or two from the Balloon Barrage unit end up getting thrown in with the 101 Airborne on a mission would be a very small inaccuracy. It would also be, as Aristotle would say, plausible because it would be quite possible: during war, soldiers do sometimes end up scattered.
I can accept zombies because it is a horror movie-that is part of accepting the genre.
I’d say that zombie in WWII would qualify as a “Major Historical Inaccuracy” – so much so as to throw the entire idea of “historical accuracy” out the window, and open the film up to the criticism it really deserves within the context of its own genre. But we all have our own lines in the sand, I suppose.
One thing that has always bothered me is this whole “battle” we’ve been fighting for decades about Christopher Columbus. Whatever positive results may have come from his voyages has been completely negated by his actions once he arrived – the subjugation and enslavement of Native Americans, the scourge of disease he brought to indigenous populations, and the wars, confiscations, slaughters and worse that followed his “discovery of the New World”.
What seems to have been forgotten is the fact that it wasn’t just Columbus, it was the entire world that engaged in this sort of thing – including the various tribes of Native Americans who waged war upon, confiscated land from, raped and enslaved the women of, and slaughtered their Native American “brethren”. Revisionist history has us believe that these tribes lived in peace with each other, respected the land, certainly kept their carbon footprints at a low level, and were nothing more innocent victims of the white man. The world was at peace until Columbus came around. It makes for a nice narrative.
But that’s actually beside the point I’d really like to make. Is anyone here aware of what was going on in Spain, in Portugal, and in the rest of Europe in 1492?
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, who *might* be known to today’s college students as the pair who funded Columbus’ trips to the Western World, were prominent figures in the expulsion of Muslims from Spain – an unthinkable act by today’s standards. Further, once the Muslims had been driven out, they set their focus on the Jews, (Maybe this next part will sound familiar to self-described “fans” of WWII).
For a time, Jews were allowed to live in peace in Spain, but as more Christians began to see them as competition in business and politics, a tide of state-sponsored anti-Semitism began to grow. Jews were forced to wear their hair long and to wear patches on their sleeves for easy identification. (Hmm … maybe I have my years mixed up – was this 1492 or 1942?)
Ferdinand and Isabella were the initiators and the driving force behind the Spanish Inquisition. They were the ones who appointed the “Grand Inquisitor”, Torquemada, with whom I believe we are all familiar. (I know all about him. I saw Mel Brooks’ “History of the World, Part I”.
“Will you confess?” “No, no,no, no”, “Will you convert?” “No no no, no” “Let’s face it folks, you can’t torquemada nuthin’!”
What fun! It’s like Hogan’s Heroes”!
But here’s the question – “Where did Ferdinand and Isabella get the money to fund Columbus’ journeys?”
The first one is up for grabs – but he made three subsequent trips after 1492 and before 1502, and these trips were funded by the confiscated wealth and property of the Spanish Jews who were victims of Torquemada, Isabella, and Ferdinand during the Spanish Inquisition, and anyone who dared to aid or sequester them.
“There was a period of four months, which would be extended ten more days, until August 10, [1492] so that [the Jews] would leave the kings’ domains. Those who did not do so within that period or who returned later would be punished with the death penalty and the confiscation of their property. Likewise, those who aided or concealed the Jews were liable to lose “all their goods, vassals, and fortresses, and other inheritances.”
(Pérez, Joseph (2009). Marcial Pons (ed.). The Jews in Spain. Madrid. ISBN 84-96467 -03-1)
So there is a lot to argue about with regard to Columbus’ “discovery” of America – imperialism, acquisition, massacre, enslavement; much of the argument revolves around the fact that this kind of activity was not limited to the “white man” oppressing people of color, but rather it was worldwide – it happened on American soil before anyone ever laid eyes on a Caucasian – it happened in Africa and the Middle East, it happened everywhere.
But in none of the arguments, nor in any of the accusations, any of the disparaging of the motives, the practice, and the results of Columbus’ voyages, is a single line devoted to the concurrent Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the confiscation of their property – and the “goods,vassals, and fortresses, and other inheritances” belonging to those who aided or concealed them. The history books say only that Ferdinand and Isabella “pawned the crown jewels” in order to fund Columbus’ first voyage.
I guess it’s what we’d call “an insignificant historical inaccuracy”, like the downplaying of Nazi antisemitism in order to further the zombie apocalypse plot element. It’s certainly not on the level of altering the timing of the integration of the US Army by three years. Now that’s an outrage.
Once again – the oppression of “people of color”, regardless of the context or the global oppression of others by “people of color”, has been elevated to the high status of “Political Correctness”. And within this accepted narrative, even a (rising) level of historical inaccuracy can be acceptable, as long as the inaccuracy promotes, rather than challenges, the narrative.
And the Jews? Who the fuck cares about them, anyway?
In today’s world, of course, the lines are clearly defined. So it’s OK to rail against the historical inaccuracies of a zombie movie if it doesn’t portray the plight of African Americans’ struggles for integration into the US military correctly, but it’s OK to ignore the antisemitism of Hitler, the Nazi Party, and the entire Axis powers, including the armbands, the shunning, the freight-trains, the enslavement, the starvation, and the systematic extermination of six million Jews, portraying the Nazi’s as a bunch of zombie enablers instead. After all,
“the more significant the inaccuracy, the more aesthetic justification is required.”.
I get it. I see the hierarchy now. So even leaving out the racism of the American troops is mentioned, but begrudgingly accepted because “these soldiers could just be very enlightened on race. While this seems improbable, it is not impossible…” But no mention of the complete omission of the concentration camps. I guess these were “enlightened Nazis”.
The left in this country, led by the mainstream media and the Democrat party is almost by definition horrified by what it sees as racism, sexism, “white supremacy”, “toxic masculinity”, “homophobia” and more. They will invariably take the self-defined moral high ground.
But Antisemitism is patently excluded from this PC world. Highly vocal Democrat government officials can not only actively support organizations like Hamas, and act as keynote speakers at fundraisers for their PR branch, CAIR, but they can publicly denounce Jews using hackneyed racist tropes and, instead of being ridden out on a rail like those who might make such comments about any other group, they are forgiven, they are hailed by their party, and – most incredibly – those who object to their attitudes and outspoken antisemitism are themselves derided as “racist” or “anti-Muslim”.
And (forgive me repeating myself), the historical inaccuracy of the three-years-too-early integration of the US Army within the context of a freaking zombie movie is fodder for so-called “intelligent discussion” all over the Internet, but the historical inaccuracy of the antisemitism of the Nazis and the rest of Europe is quietly downplayed, even ignored – because after all, there is significant inaccuracy and there is insignificant inaccuracy. And the same, of course, is true for both the Pollyanna version (“In fourteen-hundred-and-Ninety-Two, Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue”) and the modern version of the voyages of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. Certain aspects of the story just aren’t important.
OK, enough. Somewhere in the attic in a box I have an armband with a Star of David on it that my father brought back from the war, along with a sign from the door of a shop that reads, “Juden”. I’m going to go look for them – I have a feeling I’m going to need them pretty soon. Columbus Day is right around the corner.
As I noted, I would be fine if the writers said “this is an alternative world that has both Nazi super science and integrated forces in 1944.” But, if you are going to do historical horror, then there is still an obligation to do some history. Also, they could have easily addressed the inaccuracy, so they also get dinged for being lazy about this point.
the more significant the inaccuracy, the more aesthetic justification is required
Sounds reasonable.
But how can significance be measured? What are the units and axes?
Having the US Army integrated in 1944 is a major inaccuracy.
I don’t understand how this claim can be defended.
I just looked up Historical Inaccuracies in Films – you can search yourself if interested – and found some real howlers listed in very well known films. This does not surprise me. I imagine very few people look to films – at least fictional ones – for accuracy. Probably not documentaries either,
In the context of films generally, horror films, or WWII films, this seems a very minor inaccuracy compared to the average.
Bonus web site “Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics” http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
Much of that material has been removed,and readers are now told to check the companion book for examples, but there is enough left to demonstrate errors of physics common to movies. I am willing to bet, sight unseen, that this movie contains some of those mentioned. How does the importance of physics vs. history stack up in the case of this movie?
Mike looks for historical accuracy in zombie flicks. We look for philosophy in Mike’s posts. I ask you, which of us is the greater fool?
I would assess significance in part by its historical/social/political importance. Segregation was a big thing in the United States with vast social and political implications. To simply have integrated forces in a movie would be to ignore a very large part of American history.
I would assess significance in part by its historical/social/political importance.
Ok, that’s a starting point.
So you would measure historical significance on these three axes, plus others unspecified
1. Historical importance. This feels rather tautological to me, measuring historical significance in historical importance.
2. Social importance.
3. Political importance.
I’m sure that integration was a matter of both social and political importance. But was the exact year so important? I can see no argument for that. Certainly if the forces had never been integrated to this day, it would certainly be a glaring error, but I see no justification for calling the difference between 1944 (or even, say, 1941) and 1948 “major”.