Let’s get this out of the way up front: Overlord is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Cloverfield movie. There are monsters — both literal and figurative — and a sci-fi horror plot with a vague whiff of Lovecraft, but the latest film from J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot is entirely its own beast, for better or worse. Unfortunately in this case it’s the latter, as what was clearly intended to be a timely thriller fails to deliver on nearly every level.
As far as the rest of this summer movie season is concerned, Ingrid Goes West is my most anticipated film (sorry, Spidey). Aubrey Plaza continues her totally unreal tour of pop culture insanity (see also: Legion) in the latest trailer for the Sundance favorite — a social media parable in which Plaza plays a self-destructive, Instagram-obsessed young woman who seeks validation through likes, which she confuses for legit human love…you know, like all of us.
World War II? J.J. Abrams? Supernatural monsters? If this sounds right up your alley, you won’t have that long to wait: Bad Robot’s Overlord, about a troop of soldiers battling strange monsters in the middle of a Nazi-occupied village, has landed a release date in the prime real estate of October 2018.
They say that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but I guess that depends on what you’re imitating, doesn’t it? Nobody thought that a television unknown named Noah Hawley would be able to adapt Fargo for the small screen with any kind of quality, but three years in, Fargo remains one of the best shows on television. And considering how much the first trailer for Netflix’s Shimmer Lake looks like an early bump for Fargo, it’s safe to say that the streaming giant has been taking notes. We need a new adage for the imitation of imitation being a somewhat less sincere form of flattery, I guess.
10 Cloverfield Lane managed something virtually impossible in modern Hollywood: Its plot and connection to 2008’s Cloverfield was kept a complete secret up to the day of its trailer release, and even then there was no way to know just how it connected to the previous film until people went to the theater to see it. But, now that the cat’s out of the bag, everyone is looking for possible Cloverfield connections in the next slate of Bad Robot movies coming out in the next few years. Today, we might have just found another one.
I have a young daughter, and I love sharing pictures and videos of her antics on social media. Occasionally people who follow me online will tell me in person how much they love my baby or how happy I seem with her. And I am. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows; I just don’t share the moments where she wakes the whole house up at 4AM or has diaper rash so bad that she screams for 10 minutes straight. The line bteween reality and fiction online can get very blurry — and sometimes the persona we create there is much more appealing than the real thing.