A Movie Can’t Be Just Its Own Thing Anymore
· The Atlantic
Onslaught, in theaters this week, should be the perfect early-September treat. The aggressive action thriller is gory, loud, and packed with interesting actors, and it has a straightforward premise: Three murderous super-soldiers, the result of some shadowy extra-governmental experiment, have escaped from a lab and are descending upon a small town in New Mexico. A tough-as-nails retired Army sniper named Celeste (played by Adria Arjona), living somewhat off the grid in a trailer park, must use her grit and know-how to defend herself against the oncoming attack. Yet as simple as that sounds, the film feels needlessly complex. Rather than just delivering on its clean setup, it becomes fixated on teasing future installments—a symptom of the obsession with sequelization that’s affecting even smaller genre films.
Visit milkshakeslot.com for more information.
The director Adam Wingard was, once upon a time, a master of the cheap thrill. This is a compliment; he emerged from the micro-budget mumblecore scene in the 2000s, then made two impressively nasty bits of horror—the slasher You’re Next and the wonderfully tawdry and tense The Guest. But Wingard has spent years trapped in franchise drudgery, offering up an unnecessary follow-up to The Blair Witch Project and a pair of giant-scale, instantly forgettable Godzilla movies. Onslaught initially suggests a more back-to-basics turn for the director, a return to R-rated indies that are unencumbered by cinematic universes. That mission, however, seems to have been a little corrupted by what Wingard’s been working on in the meantime.
Onslaught begins on a compelling note. Its aesthetics are top-notch, the opening credits unfolding as an invigorating blitz of conspiratorial imagery that cuts together cable-news clips of several presidents, including Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, with drone footage of overseas combat; the entire sequence feels like a fever dream of the early 2000s. Celeste is a veteran of an unspecified overseas combat engagement, and the audience briefly glimpses in flashback the traumatic firefights that preceded her discharge. Living alongside her in the desert trailer park is a crew of other misfits, including the bumbling policeman Kovacks (Eric Wareheim) and a cantankerous older fella named Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson). To Celeste’s annoyance, her ex-husband drops off their cherubic daughter that day to stay the weekend; the tension is, of course, quickly building to a violent incursion.
[Read: Hollywood’s star power is shifting]
Part of my irritation with the film, though, stems from just how jazzed I felt about its first act. The actor Dan Stevens, at this point a longtime collaborator of Wingard’s (including, most recently, the director’s previous Godzilla movie), dons nightmarish makeup to play Dr. Hans Kammler; he’s a German-speaking mad scientist in charge of the military experiment that goes wrong. Rebecca Hall, another Godzilla alum, is Dr. Kammler’s domineering wife, Hanna—a stiletto-clad, cigarette-smoking badass boasting some mysteriously derived authority. The duo’s cartoonish poise is a delight to witness, as is their ridiculous hubris: Whatever lab simulation they’ve designed for their seemingly zombified super-soldiers quickly falls apart, leading the latter to invade the surrounding environs.
Some solid gunplay follows, and the final showdown between Celeste and her trailer-park buds and the soldiers has some brutal flourishes—though it irritatingly takes place at night, making the chaos a little harder to see. But the screenplay (written by Simon Barrett) teases revelations throughout, then delivers on practically none of them. Hanna and Dr. Kammler’s work remains nebulous, and Celeste’s backstory is only vaguely filled in. These gaps would be forgivable if Onslaught existed mostly to deliver the frivolity that Wingard once excelled at; instead, it ends on a cliff-hanger that hints at further developments. In interviews, the director has even alluded to the movie belonging to a growing shared universe alongside You’re Next and The Guest, though there’s no real on-screen evidence of that.
I am not opposed to Wingard building connections among his works, especially if he’s looking to do it in a more intentional way. Too often, though, Onslaught acts like it’s making moves in that direction without a real sense of purpose. The Godzilla-centric enterprise that Wingard has spent the past few years in, also known as the “Monsterverse,” relies on the kind of lazy storytelling that films designed to spawn numerous sequels tend to tell: Rather than ending punchily, the movie lands on a big conflict that sets up new villains and crossover possibilities. Perhaps Onslaught will be a big enough hit to get a similar treatment, even on a smaller scale. More likely, though, the lack of resolution will leave people feeling as dissatisfied as I did.