With “Onslaught,” director Adam Wingard returns home.
The new Adria Arjona-fronted action film not only marks a retreat from his recent blockbusters like “Godzilla vs. Kong” back to his smaller-scale roots, but quite literally harkens back to where he grew up.
Wingard was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a so-called “secret city” acquired by the federal government in developing the Manhattan Project and turned into a planned community shrouded in mystery. These hushed, conspiratorial undertones have permeated Wingard’s work, from early efforts like “The Guest” (about a government super-soldier who disrupts a suburban family’s life) to his monstrously huge “Godzilla vs. Kong” movies, which explored and expanded the mythology of Monarch, a secret government agency tasked with monitoring giant creatures.
In the opening moments of “Onslaught,” a title sequence cycles through the secret history of the United States. Facts are redacted in real time, animated black bars obscuring the truth. It not only signals that Wingard is back to the more conspiracy-focused work of his earlier career but also that he’s back to making the hard-hitting, genre-blending fare that got him his big Hollywood jobs in the first place.
The title sequence gives way to a scene where Celeste (Adria Arjona), a single mother and former soldier who is stranded in the scrubby New Mexico town of Moriarty, is using jack-o-lanterns for target practice. From there, the movie introduces a Nazi scientist (played, in a bald cap, white hair and dead eye, by Wingard regular Dan Stevens) and a program to turn fallen soldiers into unstoppable killing machines. There are massacres and machine guns. One of these creatures carries a cartoonishly huge cleaver. Because of course he does.
Yep.
Wingard is back.
Not that “Onslaught” was always on the docket. The way that Wingard tells it, he was very committed to doing a third “Godzilla x Kong” movie for Legendary after 2024’s glorious, candy-colored “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” became the highest grossing movie in the 70-year-plus “Godzilla” franchise.
“We were talking about the follow-up and I was even laying Easter eggs in the last movie. If you look at ‘Godzilla x Kong,’ a lot of like the titles of Bernie’s podcast, if you pause those, a lot of those were written by me because I was seeding sort of where I wanted to go with the sequel,” said Wingard. Legendary and Wingard had even entered into negotiations for Wingard to return to direct. And he wanted to … but only after he had made the R-rated “Onslaught.” Legendary couldn’t wait.
“This is a franchise that’s on the rails and it ain’t coming off. They’re going to hit one of these every couple of years – as they should,” Wingard said. “I had a sort of ‘Sophie’s Choice’ moment where I needed to make a decision one way or another – either I spend the next couple of years doing a ‘Godzilla’ film, which I’d just done two, so I’ve been in that world for a while … Or I could do the thing that I’ve been putting off for a decade, which is doing a smaller, more personal project. It was a difficult choice.”
Wingard remembered telling his agent that he was probably going to make “Onslaught” and his agent telling him, “Look, just so you know, if you say no to this, they’re going to get another director. You’re probably going to know him. And you have to be ready.” (We equated it to going to an ex-girlfriend’s wedding. Wingard agreed.)
“But I don’t regret it at all. This was the best decision I’ve ever made because I needed to remind people who I am as a filmmaker. Since ‘The Guest,’ I’ve been working under other people’s stylistic rules that they’ve set within these IP and franchises. I felt like not only were people losing the script of who I was stylistically, but maybe they never quite knew because I went off on all these different tangents,” Wingard said. “I wanted to do a film that really solidified what an Adam Wingard movie is. And that’s what this film is. This movie for me wasn’t about a No. 1 weekend. Hopefully the movie does well, but it was never about that. This was always about, We’re going to make a movie that’s going to rip and it’s going to do all the things that I love with music and tonality and genre mash-ups, those things.”
In addition to “Godzilla,” Wingard had also made a live-action adaptation of the Japanese manga “Death Note” for Netflix and a new, oddly divisive “Blair Witch” movie for Lionsgate.
Back when he walked away from “Godzilla x Kong,” Wingard had a number of big budget franchise movies in the hopper – a sequel to “Face/Off” that he and Barrett were working on for Paramount; a “Thundercats” movie for Warner Bros. that would have combined live-action and animation. For a while he thought one of these “major projects” would happen if he didn’t do another “Godzilla” movie.
But then two things occured – Wingard had a child, and he got hit by a car, “crossing the street while working on ‘Face/Off 2.’” “Not many people can say that,” Wingard joked.
The two life events served to crystallize what he should do next. “I started realizing that I can’t put this off anymore. Every project for me now has to be a legacy movie. Even if I go back and do feature films in the studio world again, they need to be very personal to me in a different way. And I need to start developing things in a different way,” Wingard said.
“Onslaught” emerged as a frontrunner because of how perfectly it reflected his life.
“I knew I wanted to do a movie about a parent, a dysfunctional parent, a parent who wasn’t ready to be a parent, and I wanted to work through that in a film, and so that gave us a grounding. It was like, Okay, that at the heart of it is what this is. And then outside of that, now we can build on it – we can set this within this ‘Guest’ universe where we’re in Moriarty, New Mexico, and really get back to that world. But I don’t think we would have figured out a really cool plot if there wasn’t this very grounded, personal reason to do it.”
And while “Face/Off 2” is no longer happening with Wingard and Barrett (he described it as “a mutual parting of ways”), he said that they had very nearly cracked the legacy sequel. “I think we were so close to getting a version that was there, it was one of those too close yet too far situations,” said Wingard. Still, he said that he didn’t want to say what their take was in case it’s recycled for a future iteration of the project. “After you’ve been working on something for five years, you’re like, ‘OK this is so close, but life’s too short. It’s just not going to work out,’” Wingard explained.
One of the best things about “Onslaught” is how ruthlessly propulsive it is – with a running time of just over 90 minutes, it moves. And Wingard said part of this was from coming off of two “Godzilla” movies, where every frame, every second is scrutinized and jettisoned if need be. “Everything becomes so staccato. One of the main things I wanted to get away from, in terms of doing my own movies, is that I wanted to do a movie that breathed,” Wingard said.
Wingard said that his favorite films are John Carpenter’s movies (which you can tell by Wingard using the same glyphic serif font, Albertus, in the opening credits) and one of his favorite aspects of those movies – he cites “They Live,” “Prince of Darkness,” “The Thing” and “Halloween” – is that they have a “hangout vibe to them.” “You aren’t always bombarded with stuff. You’re living with the characters and sometimes the pacing is a little slow in places. But his movies are also very short and I don’t think people really think of his films as being slow paced,” Wingard said. “But when you watch them, you’re just hanging out with these characters sometimes.”
He wanted the same energy for “Onslaught.”
“This film actually does that quite a bit more than I’ve ever done in a movie,” Wingard said. The introduction of the trailer park is a great example, as we get to know the various colorful characters living in the same trailer park as Arjona (among them Eric Wareheim’s local policeman and “Die Hard” vet Reginald VelJohnson as a retiree) – “here’s the wind blowing through and Adria is listening to music and then things build up.” Still, it’s always compelling and always helps add to the world.
He worried, he said, that this would be his first movie to crack the two-hour mark, something that he’s concerned with on every movie. “With this one, I really thought it was going to be closer to two hours whenever I was shooting because there’s all these musical sequences and things,” Wingard said. But the script was always very short – 86 pages for the final shooting script.
“But even then I was like, OK, this gives me room to breathe finally. Because a lot of times, your scripts are much longer than the film and then I feel like you have to speed through certain things,” Wingard said. He said that his years of watching anime growing up leads him to keep the pace up no matter what. “It cooks along. There’s always something happening,” Wingard said. Always simmering, never boiling over.
Wingard’s attention to the shape of “Onslaught” continued through to the movie’s climax, which is perhaps more intimate than you might imagine (we will stay away from specifics for fear of giving anything away).
“I didn’t want to just end on a crescendo. I like the idea that this movie actually diffuses at the end, and it becomes kind of meditative again, you know, as opposed to just like boom Godzilla killed the monster and he’s walking out to the ocean and we’re out of here,” Wingard said. “I always felt like ‘You’re Next’ was the closest thing to that. It ends on a big crescendo, but the final set piece really is two characters talking to each other. And this movie does a little bit of that again.”
Now that “Onslaught” is coming out, Wingard said he sees himself returning to the same world – where super soldiers prowl small times and clandestine government instillations contain dark truths waiting to break free. Because, really, how could he not come back to this world?
Wingard is from the secret city, after all.
“Onslaught” is in theaters now from A24.
The post How Godzilla, Parenthood and Getting Hit By a Car Led Adam Wingard to ‘Onslaught’ appeared first on TheWrap.
