Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett are not shy about using conspiracy theories in their movies. Even in the very mainstream and relatively family-friendly Godzilla franchise, the creative duo (Wingard directs, and Barrett writes) incorporates imagery and themes that, for better or for worse, mark them as products of a decade where paranoid thought became mainstream. This was a little more awkward during the height of QAnon, but in 2026, the proverbial cow has wandered so far out of the barn of objective truth that you might as well cut the thing in half with a machine gun and make hamburgers. Enter Onslaught.
Wingard backed out of Godzilla X Kong: Supernova for this low-budget action flick, and the director’s relief at getting back to bullet-riddled basics is palpable. A few actors familiar from Wingard’s franchise work appear in Onslaught, also liberated by the pulp excess of the material: Dan Stevens is here, of course, doing his silly-accent thing as a German scientist one character refers to as “third-generation Paperclip” (a reference to Operation Paperclip, the once-secret program that brought thousands of ex-Nazis to America to work on U.S. aerospace technology). Rebecca Hall is here too, going a little broader than usual as the mad doctor’s dominatrix wife/handler.
