A sobering antidote to World War II flag-wavers, director Stuart Cooper's stark and unsentimental look at a young man's fateful journey from home to the Western front, is an enduring indictment of the dehumanizing contraption of war and its many silent victims.

Nothing is glorified, as amiable everyman Tom (an excellent Brian Stirner) goes from conscription to basic training to deployment at Normandy on D-Day. A solider at 20, Tom is put through his paces and ambles along, hopelessly naïve and accommodating at first, he soon learns to despise the entire thing. His embittered sentiments are poignantly conveyed in Christopher Hudson's sparse and memorable screenplay: "It's like being part of a machine which gets bigger and bigger whilst we grow smaller and smaller, until there's nothing left".

Hudson even takes a pop at Noel Coward and David Lean's 'This Happy Breed' (1944) "...I thought it was terrific at the time...", says Tom, "...but I can't remember much about it now". Coward & Lean worked together on a few war themed films in the '40s, all of which served as morale boosters intended to promote the myth of unified nationalism and an unquestioning patriotic ethos. One which pandered to the meticulously engineered image of the stoic Englishman carrying on in spite of it all and, crucially, never once stopping to bring his political masters to account or dispute the manner in which life at home was sustained by the blood and treasure of a hundred nations; enslaved and looted at gunpoint by the Empire.

'Overlord' uses a lot of archive and stock footage from the war, now usually that would take an audience out of the film or serve as a shortcut to make up for budgetary constraints. But here, since cinematographer John Alcott ('The Shining', 'Barry Lyndon') matches the film to the newsreel; it actually has the opposite effect and draws you deeper into the narrative. Archive shots of the blitz blend in seamlessly with scenes from the movie; a panjandrum gone haywire, bored troops waiting around in transports and even D-Day footage, though hindered somewhat by an overtly symbolic dream sequence, all work in context.

'Overlord' ends where 'Saving Private Ryan' begins and makes Spielberg's acclaimed opus look somewhat absurd, fetishistically violent, overblown and melodramatic by comparison: 'Overlord' is the simple story of one man's war; tortured missives from a thinking pawn casually sacrificed on the grand chessboard of imperial misadventure: Easily one of the best WWII films ever made and a definite contender for one of the best war films of all time