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An Onslaught of Schlock and Pointed Violence

The clearest thing about Onslaught is that its director Adam Wingard is clearly a fan of elaborate action movies from the 1980s. His cast includes two actors closely associated with that era and genre and his film is over-the-top in its premise in a way that recalls the Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies of that time. The differences are that rather than carve his protagonist out of that mold of muscular behemoth, that is instead applied to the villains while the heroine is a gritty and competent war vet; and that the movie is considerably more violent than even the roughest of those films ever got. It is indiscriminate violence which probably accounts for a chunk of the shock (though bloody, the film isn’t actually very graphic), but it is still notable, as are the particular identities of its perpetrators.
Onslaught in fact falls neatly into the sci-fi or superhero fiction mold in the central tenet of its premise, which amounts basically to a spin on the Marvel ‘Super-soldier’ idea filtered through the lens of The Boys; that is naturally tied into the classic Nazism to which the very concept of super-soldiers is inextricably linked. Wingard is not so concerned with referencing comic book media though, he seems more inclined to make a harrowing real-world point through his military-funded monstrous automatons. I can’t say it’s not at least a little pertinent.
The central figure of Onslaught is troubled veteran Celeste (Adria Arjona) living in a trailer park in the deserts of New Mexico. She shares custody of her daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) with an ex looking to move away with her, but not before dropping her off with her mother all of a sudden due to an unplanned engagement. Meanwhile at a military base not far away, Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), the Nazi son of an Operation Paperclip scientist, conducts inhumane experiments on three veterans known for their ruthless violence in combat, turning them into unstoppable super-soldiers. A test of their capabilities very quickly goes wrong of course and they break out, going on a killing rampage until inevitably they reach Celeste’s trailer park and she is forced to viciously and creatively defend herself and her daughter.
Wingard endeavours where he can to tie these soldiers and their context into a history of real-world political and military history and violence -opening on a montage of various headlines and clippings on contentious activities of military personnel, with allusions too to democratic backsliding and war crimes by American troops. It’s somewhat hard to tell given their pace how much of it is real and how much fabricated for the sake of the movie’s heightened reality. In either case it gets the point across -we live within a culture of violence. And further that the act of dehumanizing the enemy in military combat is itself a form of dehumanization. The soldiers that this secret government entity experiments on are products of that -one a sadist in his killings, another curiously sorrowful but still murderous. Yet it is the institution that fully turns them into monsters.
The film's violence is quite disturbing as, with the exception of their handlers, the super-soldiers exclusively target defenceless civilians. At both a convenience store truck stop and the trailer park, they unleash carnage, and while it doesn't quite rise to gratuitous (Wingard keeps the goriest stuff off-screen), it is rather grimly indulgent. The discomfort is the point, you are meant to connect what these marauders are doing in recognizably American settings to war crimes in foreign campaigns, and to realize the gravity of methodical killing. However, Wingard illustrates it in such a way that some of the thematic goals are not the most durable, and easy fodder for the less critical or conscientious to misunderstand the point.
To this effect there is also the fact that Wingard wears proudly a set of 80s action and horror influences. Reginald VelJohnson appears as an elderly vet and Celeste's greatest ally, while the corporate military apparatus is personified in an agent played by Michael Biehn. The tenor of Stevens's eccentric performance feels perfectly in line with what you might see in the villain of an old Schwarzeneggar movie (same for an equally German Rebecca Hall) -to perhaps a lesser degree the same is true of Drew Starkey's coke-snorting cold-blooded government figure, following the rampage of the super-soldiers and tying up their loose ends. Meanwhile, when the soldiers descend upon the trailer park, their assault resembles in spats the tropes and techniques of slasher films. Masked and hard to kill, they are essentially three Jason Vorhees.
That is certainly how they are treated by Celeste when forced to fend against them, and a successful aspect of the earlier violent attacks is the tension that is built over how Celeste could possibly defeat these homunculi and what might it cost her. She has her child with her and the deaths of innocents is not off the table in a film like this. Wingard ratchets that tension fairly well in the steady momentum of the attack and how viscerally outmatched Celeste and any other survivors are -she even sustains an injury in her first confrontation and on two occasions is bailed out of death by VelJohnson. Yet Celeste is still emphasized convincingly with real power and grit due in large part to Arjona’s focused and unapologetically brute performance. An early argument with her ex reveals her as particularly tough and unwavering and that comes out through the escalation of her fight for survival -foregrounding her own elite training while never downplaying her human vulnerability in contrast to her adversaries. Her drive and the tension with which the assault plays out makes for an entertaining stretch to the movie, even while it plays into some expected tropes and grounds Celeste a bit too easily in a relatable love for her daughter.
It also bears noting that while there is a lot of good build-up to a final showdown, its execution is just a little too quick and easy. And the movie ends on a very odd note that leaves several of the higher concerns of the movie simply unaddressed. Wingard comes to Onslaught, his first original movie in over a decade, after helming the last two Godzilla vs. Kong films, and in choices like this it does reflect some of the weaknesses of those. In several ways it is not a pleasant movie, the apathy to its grimness perhaps more off-putting than the violence itself. But the tension of its action and horror is engaging and though it loses some track of its political commentary by the end, the vivid messaging that is there is worth acknowledging. And Arjona makes for a pretty decent action heroine (ahead of perhaps a major superhero role if rumours are to be believed). Wingard has made his uproarious 80s action flick and it achieves just what it sets out to.

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