Two Indie Action Films, One Clear Winner

Adam Wingard opens his new movie, Onslaught, with a brainrot history of the military industrial complex, a slipshod compilation of combat footage, political speechmaking, and behind-the-headlines conspiracizing that (semi-)convincingly situates the origins of the American century in Operation Paperclip and the importation of Nazi scientists at the end of the Second World War. It rules. Set to a pounding synth score and employing the kind of queasily associative quick-cuts that would make even a 9/11 truther blush, this sequence anticipates something hard-hitting and sharp-edged, the sort of action movie that weaponizes its gristly bad taste for subversive means. I wish I could see the movie that this credit sequence foretells. Instead, I saw Onslaught. The set-up is blessedly simple: Celeste (Adria Arjona) once served in the U.S. Army as a killer sniper; now, she manages a trailer park in the New Mexico desert. Every day, a helicopter flies overhead, triggering her PTSD as it ferries third-generation Nazi scientist Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens) to the secret defense industry laboratory where he has spent six years transforming a trio of GWOT casualties into unstoppable super-soldiers. Tested on the battlefields and perilously refined in a lab, they are the image of confidence without thought, force without purpose. Once they’re set loose, we’re told, nothing on earth can stop them. With their glowing eyes and rippling physiques, these killers act like a cross between American Sniper and The Terminator—and the same might be said of Onslaught. Produced and distributed by A24, this is meant to be a superior sort of action flick, marrying the low register of sadistic violence with the high of well-taken (if well-worn) political commentary. Celeste’s trailer park is a home for loners like Josiah, a Vietnam vet played by Die Hard cop (and sit-com dad) Reginald VelJohnson, people screwed over by their government and abandoned by society. Kammler’s super soldiers were chosen for their legacy of overseas brutality, and then engineered to reorient their violence towards the home front. After killing their captors and escaping the base, they assault a truck stop, a sequence that Wingard stages as a combination military raid/mass shooter incident. The results are uncomfortable—some might say tasteless—but they are undeniably potent. No American has to go to the movies to know what this looks like.

Read it at Defector ↗

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