A24 is riding an extraordinary run. Backrooms crossed $100 million at the domestic box office on Wednesday, becoming the studio’s highest-grossing domestic film ever in just six days of release — and it was the very film that first screened the trailer for Onslaught, A24’s next major genre release, ahead of its September 4 opening. That trailer, which dropped online Tuesday, introduces a premise that lands uncomfortably close to a real federal research agenda. In the film, a classified military facility somewhere in the American desert produces a squad of genetically engineered super soldiers who escape containment and begin killing civilians, leaving former Army sniper Adria Arjona as the only thing standing between them and her daughter. The premise is presented as science fiction. The underlying biology is not.
Two active programs at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are currently soliciting research proposals to do, in practical terms, precisely what Onslaught‘s fictional program is described as doing: permanently or semi-permanently alter human physiology at the biological level to produce warfighters who perform beyond what the unmodified body can sustain. One of those programs issued its solicitation in September 2025. The other issued its notice on May 18, 2026. Neither has authorized human trials. Both describe goals that would have sounded like science fiction a decade ago.
What DARPA’s Smart-RBC Program Actually Does
The more advanced of the two is the Smart Red Blood Cells program, or Smart-RBC, which DARPA formally announced in September 2025 and for which oral proposals were submitted at DARPA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia in January 2026. The program’s goal is to engineer red blood cells so that they function as autonomous biological machines: sensing chemical signals in the bloodstream, processing that information through embedded biological logic circuits, and releasing effector molecules that alter the body’s metabolism or physiology in response.
The stated use cases read like a performance checklist for Onslaught‘s antagonists. DARPA wants engineered red blood cells that can trigger faster blood clotting after injury, accelerate acclimation to high altitude, regulate core body temperature in extreme heat or cold, and protect against radiation, chemical, and biological threats. The program is structured as a 36-month effort across two 18-month phases, with approximately $35.1 million in available funding. DARPA’s program explicitly excludes human trials, which is where the film’s implied timeline — from lab creation to operational deployment — skips decades of clinical development.
The key safety distinction DARPA draws is that Smart-RBC uses enucleated red blood cells, which cannot carry or transfer genetic material, meaning the modifications do not alter the underlying genome of the recipient. That makes Smart-RBC categorically different from germline editing, which would rewrite the DNA of every cell in the body. Onslaught‘s premise appears to involve something more like germline or whole-body somatic editing — the kind of change that would be permanent, systemic, and currently impossible to deliver reliably in a living adult human.
What DARPA’s D-PECHE Program Targets
The newer program, designated DARPA-SN-26-67, targets a different layer of biology. The DNA-Protein Epigenetic Chemistry Engineering program, known as D-PECHE, aims to demonstrate new mechanisms for writing and erasing epigenetic modifications in living cells — changes to gene expression that do not alter the underlying DNA sequence but can switch genes on or off and potentially alter cognitive performance, stress responses, and biological resilience.
DARPA describes epigenetic modifications as “potentially reversible,” which addresses one of the most serious ethical objections to military bioenhancement: that permanently altering a soldier’s biology without a path back constitutes an irreversible deprivation of bodily autonomy, even with formal consent. Proposals for D-PECHE are due June 24, 2026.
What D-PECHE and Smart-RBC share with Onslaught‘s premise is not the specific mechanism — the film implies permanent germline-level modification — but the underlying ambition: engineering human biology to produce performance characteristics that the unmodified body cannot sustain. The distinction between “temporarily enhanced” and “permanently altered” is ethically crucial and technically enormous. It is also precisely the line that good science fiction dramatizes.
How Close Is CRISPR Gene Editing to Making It Real
The fictional soldiers in Onslaught appear to have been modified for extreme muscle mass, pain insensitivity, and elevated aggression. Each of these maps onto a real, actively studied gene target. The myostatin gene (MSTN) acts as a brake on skeletal muscle growth; animals with myostatin deletions develop dramatically increased muscle mass, and CRISPR/Cas9 has been used to knock it out in mice, rabbits, and sheep. Pain sensitivity is regulated in part by ion channels including Nav1.7; rare human mutations that disable this channel produce congenital insensitivity to pain, confirming the biology exists even if engineering it in healthy adults remains far beyond current delivery capability.
The delivery bottleneck is the critical gap between the animal studies and the film’s premise. Getting a targeted genetic edit to express uniformly across all relevant tissues in a fully grown adult human — without off-target mutations, without immune rejection, without cancer-inducing errors — is orders of magnitude harder than the animal demonstrations suggest. DARPA is aware of this. The Smart-RBC program’s explicit exclusion of human trials, and D-PECHE’s emphasis on reversibility, both reflect an engineering reality: the tools exist, the targets are known, and the delivery systems needed to use them reliably in healthy humans do not.
That gap did not stop biohacker Jo Zayner from attempting a DIY version. In October 2017, Zayner injected a CRISPR construct targeted at the myostatin gene into their own forearm at a synthetic biology conference in San Francisco. Dr. Aneal Khan, a medical geneticist at the University of Calgary who commented on the event, noted that scientists were “still working out how to safely and effectively use it in a clinical setting.” The localized injection almost certainly produced no measurable enhancement — CRISPR editing in a small cluster of arm muscle cells does not produce a super soldier. But the experiment illustrated the precise cultural dynamic that Onslaught dramatizes: the tools are available, the targets are known, and the only thing preventing mass application is competence, not access.
Wingard and Barrett Return to Their Enhanced-Soldier Universe
Onslaught is not the first time Wingard and co-writer Simon Barrett have explored this territory. Their 2014 cult film The Guest, now widely described as the spiritual predecessor to Onslaught, centered on a soldier — played by Dan Stevens, who returns in Onslaught — who had been subjected to an experimental military enhancement program. The film treated the soldier’s physical capabilities as secondary to a more unsettling premise: that whatever had enhanced his body had also degraded his social cognition and moral regulation, producing someone extraordinarily dangerous precisely because the physical upgrade and the ethical leash were incompatible.
Onslaught appears to push that premise further. Where The Guest‘s David retained charisma and self-direction, the soldiers in the new film are described by press coverage of the trailer as faceless and relentless, stripped of individual identity. That characterization maps onto the core ethical concern bioethicists raise about military enhancement programs: that optimizing a human body for combat while suppressing the inhibitions that regulate when and whether to use that capability does not produce a better soldier so much as an autonomous weapon with a human body.
Alex Pereira, the UFC Light Heavyweight Champion, is billed as playing a character called “The Butcher” — a casting choice that signals the film intends its super soldiers to function as force-of-nature threats rather than morally complex figures. Adria Arjona, whose recent Andor performance drew significant critical attention, leads as the Army sniper protagonist. Dan Stevens, Rebecca Hall, Michael Biehn, Drew Starkey, and Reginald VelJohnson round out the ensemble.
What Military Genetic Ethics Research Actually Says
The policy debate that Onslaught dramatizes is active, not hypothetical. In April 2025, the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology delivered its final report to Congress, titled “Charting the Future of Biotechnology.” The bipartisan commission found that the United States was at risk of falling behind China in military biotechnology and issued 49 recommendations for accelerating federal investment. NSCEB Vice Chair Michelle Rozo stated that China had made biotechnology a strategic national priority in ways the US had not, framing the competition as one that would define national security across the coming decades.
Academic bioethicists have pressed back on framing military enhancement as a straightforward competitiveness issue. A peer-reviewed analysis in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry identified the dual-use problem at the core of military genetics research: the same tools that could protect soldiers from chemical attacks could be repurposed for weapons, meaning purely national regulatory frameworks are structurally inadequate for the risks involved. Bioethics scholars have also focused on the consent problem specific to military contexts — the question of whether informed consent is meaningful when a service member faces institutional pressure to volunteer for an irreversible modification.
Does Onslaught Get the Science Right
As a piece of science fiction, Onslaught compresses and dramatizes a real research arc. The specific enhancements it depicts — super-strength, pain insensitivity, aggression without inhibition — are individually grounded in known biology and actively studied gene targets. The delivery mechanism implied by the film (a classified military facility producing operationally ready modified humans) skips past the hardest unsolved problem in the field: whole-body somatic delivery in adults that works reliably at scale. That problem is not solved, and no current DARPA program claims to be solving it.
What the film gets precisely right is the failure mode. Both Wingard’s earlier work and the bioethics literature converge on the same concern: that the enhancement and the behavioral regulation are not separable, that a program optimized to remove physical limits will tend to remove other limits too, and that the result is not a better soldier but something harder to control. That is not a science fiction warning. It is the active concern of every ethics review board currently evaluating DARPA’s own solicitations.
Onslaught opens in theaters Friday, September 4, 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are genetically engineered super soldiers scientifically possible?
The individual biological targets — genes regulating muscle mass, pain sensitivity, oxygen efficiency, and aggression — are all known and have been modified in animal models using CRISPR and related tools. The insurmountable barrier today is delivery: getting those edits to express reliably across all tissues in a healthy adult human, without off-target mutations or immune rejection, is not yet achievable. No current research program, including DARPA’s, has announced human trials for whole-body genetic enhancement.
What is DARPA actually doing with human enhancement research?
DARPA’s Smart-RBC program aims to engineer red blood cells that can sense physiological signals, process them through biological logic circuits, and release enhancement molecules in response — improving endurance, altitude tolerance, and trauma response. A newer program, D-PECHE, targets epigenetic modification of gene expression for cognitive and performance improvements. Both programs explicitly exclude human trials and describe their goals as “temporary” and “reversible,” distinguishing them from the permanent germline modification depicted in Onslaught.
Is Onslaught connected to The Guest?
Onslaught is not confirmed as a direct sequel, but multiple cast members and crew have described it as a spiritual successor. Dan Stevens, who played an enhanced soldier in The Guest (2014), returns in a supporting role in Onslaught. Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett co-wrote both films, and the central premise — a classified program producing soldiers whose enhancements have made them uncontrollable — is structurally identical.
What is CRISPR’s role in military genetic enhancement research?
CRISPR/Cas9 is the gene-editing tool most commonly associated with this research area. It has been used to knock out the myostatin gene — which limits muscle growth — in multiple animal species, producing significantly more muscular animals. China’s military research programs have cited CRISPR as a key technology for potential combat enhancement, according to peer-reviewed bioethics literature. US researchers consider performance enhancement in healthy humans an unethical application of CRISPR under current standards.
