Okay, so, I saw Weapons over the weekend. The movie has been getting its share of hype,and I had to see what the fuss was all about. I definitely had high expectations, and perhaps that was my folly. But I was left at the end of the movie wondering what the big deal was.

A few positives before I get to the rest of what I want to say: the movie was well-directed. It looked good. There was a great visual style to everything, except for one or two moments that felt jarringly out of place. The use of darkness and negative space to build suspense was well-done, and not overdone. There were few jump scares, allowing for the concept to hold its own weight, rather than relying on cheap shocks to scare the audience.

The acting was very well done, all around. None of the characters were phoning it in, no one felt unrealistic. Everyone felt as though they were truly living in the reality presented.

Unfortunately, the movie, for me, fell apart due to logistics and issues with writing.

Before continuing on, be warned, spoilers will follow.

Weapons and Marketing Misdirection

The trailer drew me in from the start. If you haven’t seen it, it presents the premise in a very straightforward manner. The idea is that a classroom’s worth of schoolchildren had all woken up in the middle of the night and run out into the darkness. The idea of nearly twenty schoolchildren suddenly going missing, combined with the title of the movie, had me anticipating a film that was going to be at least partially about school violence and the very American trend of school shootings. Would the kids be sent back to their school with – or as – weapons? Was this just the start of a massacre? Would the school turn into a bloodbath at the hands of the kids that had gone missing? What kind of Pied Piper had managed to brainwash these kids, and how?

Boy, was I disappointed.

Suffice it to say, despite one moment of imagery, this movie had nothing to do with the theme it seemed to be marketed around. To be honest, it had very little to do with the idea of “weapons.”

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The “weapon” concept seemed forced, and almost entirely for the sake of marketing. The most egregious moment occurred during a dream sequence, in which Archer, the father of one of the missing children, sees a giant assault-rifle style weapon appearing above a house, with the number 2:17 written on it. This occurs early on in the movie, before anyone is actually “weaponized.” This moment seems like it might have meaning at the time, but considering that Archer’s dream was focused primarily about his son (and not, say, Marcus, James, Paul, or Alex’s parents – the people who were actually weaponized), once the credits start rolling, one can’t help but ask, what was the point of that image in his dream?

Unfortunately for anyone who wants an answer, writer-director Zach Cregger doesn’t have one. When asked by Variety what that moment means, he says:

I don’t know. It’s a very important moment for me in this movie, and to be frank with you, I think what I love about it so much is that I don’t understand it. I have a few different ideas of what it might be there for, but I don’t have the right answer. I like the idea that everyone is probably going to have their own kind of interaction or their own relationship with that scene, whether they don’t give a shit about it and it’s boring, or whether they think it’s some sort of political statement, or whether they think it’s just cool. I don’t really care. It’s not up to me. I just like that it’s there.

So, there you have it: he doesn’t know why it’s there.

Now, he alludes to the relationship between creator and consumer: the viewer of a work is always going to walk away with their own interpretation. But when viewing a film, it’s generally assumed that the writer and directors have reasons for doing what they’re doing. In the case of the giant assault rifle, there is no reason other than that Zach Cregger likes that it’s there.

Okay, but why 2:17? The simple answer is that this is the time that the kids wake up and leave their homes. The more complex answer involves asking, “Why is that the time the kids woke up and left their homes?”

Cregger admits that he initially made the choice without intention, later believing that he chose it subconsciously as a reference to Stephen King’s The Shining. He stated in an interview with Far Out Magazine:

2:17 has to have come from that. It has to. And look: I’m a Kubrick guy when it comes to The Shining; I definitely worship that movie, and I thought of changing it to 2:37. But then I was like, ‘You know what? My first impulse has got to be the one I stick with,’ so I kept 2:17.

I’m not trying to shoot the guy down (no pun intended), but it’s frustrating as an audience member to learn that one of the film’s most iconic images is there for no reason other than appearance’s sake. It has no intended deep meaning other than a passing homage to an earlier work of fiction by America’s most celebrated horror writer. And while it is an interesting image, which certainly does leave itself open for interpretation, at the end of the day, it doesn’t change the fact that whatever meaning it may hold for an audience member, that meaning was not intended by its creator, because the creator himself admitted that he doesn’t know why it’s there.

Marketing. It’s there for marketing. It’s the same reason the title is “Weapons” and not “Victims” or “Witchcraft” or “Missing” or “2:17 AM” or “The Parasitic.”

I don’t know about you, but I left the movie feeling let down and lied to by the film’s marketing campaign and title.

Now, look, admittedly, there were a few characters who were weaponized by the main villain, but we eventually learn that the main villain’s goal wasn’t to create human weapons. Rather, the goal was something that was foreshadowed, in my opinion, a bit too obviously.

Foreshadowing in Weapons

Foreshadowing, for those who aren’t familiar, is a method of a creator dropping hints in their story as to what is to come later on. The best foreshadowing is subtle (one of the best examples of brilliant foreshadowing is Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, which is ripe with moments and bits of dialogue that seem to mean nothing or be vaguely suggestive of something until you reach a point where suddenly everything clicks, and everything is meaningful).

Weapons attempts to utilize foreshadowing, but its foreshadowing is neither subtle nor sensical.

Many times in the movie, the concept of parasitism is brought up. Most of these occur within Justine Gandy’s classroom, where it’s clear that she’s teaching a unit about parasites. We see diagrams, notes, charts, and even hear a lesson about parasites during one flashback. In a separate moment, Ms. Gandy’s principal, Marcus Miller, is watching a documentary about parasites.

A general rule for when one is reading or watching a work of fiction: most of the time, the creator of the work has intention behind what they’re putting into their work. If a character is talking about parasites, it’s worth assuming that parasites are going to be in some way relevant to the rest of the work. When parasites are mentioned multiple times, especially out loud by several characters, the creator of the work is basically hammering you over the head with the concept, begging you to catch it.

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So, okay: parasites. Get it? Late in the movie, it is revealed that Gladys, the villain of the movie, is essentially a parasite, using the youthful energy of the children to heal herself from some great ailment. This is akin to Winifred’s goals in “Hocus Pocus,” but on a much larger scale.

We also get another bit of foreshadowing, this one more subtle than the others. During one scene, James breaks into the house which Gladys is using as her base of operations. He’s looking for things he can sell at a pawn shop, and checks out the family’s electronics and DVD collection. “Oh, Willow,” he notes.

Fans of the movie might remember the evil Queen Bavmorda, who is a powerful sorceress. This alludes to the nature of the villain of “Weapons,” and is a bit more subtle than all of the “parasite” references (“Hocus Pocus” might have been too on the nose).

The dream sequences are probably the biggest offenders, not because of their lack of subtlety (in these sequences, the lack of subtlety is kind of the point, as the sudden appearance of Gladys is used for jump scares). Rather, the dream sequences are used as narrative devices, introducing us early on to the appearance of Gladys, but no explanation is offered for them.

Why are Gandy and Archer dreaming about Gladys, a witch with whom they have had no contact and whom they have never seen? There’s no in-universe reason for it. Gladys doesn’t mention any ability to try to scare people away from investigating her by accessing their subconscious. Neither character is under her spell at the time of their dreams. In fact, neither character has even posed much of a threat to her when they have these dreams, so she’d have no reason to go after them in their dreams, anyway.

The argument, of course, is to suspend your disbelief. Assume there’s a reason, such as the witch’s power just kind of radiating through the town. The problem with that is that there’s nothing in the context of the movie to actually suggest that. No one else mentions offhand that they, too, have been suffering from nightmares featuring this weird woman. There’s no strange uptick in crime, no weird weather patterns, nothing to suggest an aura of evil hanging over the town.

Simply put, the dreams, much like the flying assault rifle, exist in the movie because they look and feel kind of spooky (and to give us a creepy preview of Gladys), not because they make sense in the context of the movie, and not because they mean anything beyond their appearance.

Weapons’ Broken Logic

For me, this was the most frustrating aspect of the movie. Some would consider these “plot holes,” but to me, a plot hole is something that is unexplained. What I’m about to outline are items that are simply illogical.

I’ve already addressed the lack of logic to the assault rifle in Archer’s dream, as well as Gladys’s appearance in the dream sequences, so I won’t harp on that more.

Let’s talk, instead, about the investigation and evidence. There’s a $50,000 reward for information about the missing children. The entire town is in an uproar. Several of the parents of the children that went missing have security cameras and doorbell cameras that are submitted to the police to analyze. But, apparently, no one else in the town has a security/doorbell camera, and if they do, they didn’t bother to look at the footage to see if they had anything that could earn them an easy $50,000.

Of course, if anyone else had had that footage, the investigation would have ended very quickly, Archer wouldn’t have had anything to do, etc. It’s something that happens (or is omitted) for the convenience of the plot. It’s not a plot hole, per se, because, sure, it’s entirely possible that no one else in the town has a camera, it’s entirely possible that if they did, they didn’t check the footage. It’s just incredibly implausible.

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For argument’s sake, it’s also entirely possible that the town is bewitched by Gladys to avoid checking their footage – but again, there’s no evidence that this is the case. Had there been some ominous symbols in grafitti somewhere, maybe you could make that argument. But, no, instead, we have broken logic.

There’s other issues with the timing of events in the movie. One that bothers me the most is Gandy walking up behind Alex as he’s stuffing all of his classmates’ nametags into his backpack. Based on her proximity and the timing of things, it’s incredibly unlikely that she wouldn’t have seen what he was doing.

Paul gets stabbed in the face and hand by heroin needles, but if he ever experiences any kind of drug side effects, these go unmentioned.

Marcus is the first “weapon” that we see. While we first see him attack Gandy by trying to strangle her, we later find out that Gandy is the second person he’s been sent after. The first is his husband, who, rather than strangle, he headbutts to death. Alex’s parents never actually get to touch him, so it’s unclear what their method of attack would be, but Paul and James both seem intent on strangling Gandy and Archer, respectively. The fact that Marcus headbutted his husband is inconsistent with everything else we see, and that inconsistency is unexplained. Most likely, it was included because Zach Cregger liked that it was there.

More on Marcus’s attack on Gandy: we see that he runs across town, past several groups of people, on busy sidewalks, etc. and yet, he isn’t stopped, isn’t pursued by police. Bear in mind that this is a town that is in grief from the loss of nearly twenty children, that the police have been actively looking for any and every lead they can, and that we’ve seen an on-duty police officer notice a junkie trying to break into a building in a back alleyway. All logic dictates that someone would notice Marcus running with blood on his face in a manic rage through the town. All logic dictates that the police would have arrived at the scene of his attack on Gandy shortly after he had gotten there. But instead, the police are entirely unaware of this until well after it happens and Marcus is dead because of a random driver just happening to run him down as he crosses the street during a red light.

There’s issues with the logic of the magic spells, as well. Marcus attacks his husband well after he’s dead, only stopping when Gladys washes her spell stick. When Alex unleashes the kids on Gladys at the end of the movie, they stop when she is dead, even though Alex never washes the spell stick he used to send them after her. Likewise, Archer and Alex’s parents stop their attacks when Gladys dies, not when their spell sticks are washed.

Gladys makes her way from her closed bedroom to the basement, where she manages to ambush Archer. But based on the layout of the house, she couldn’t have gotten down to the basement without taking the main stairs, which Alex was standing right next to the entire time.

And what does the director have to say about all of this? In an interview with Cinemablend, he says:

I think there’s a little bit of you know, creative liberties with like the events. [laughs] Creative liberties, I mean, none of it’s real, but… but it’s funny because I did try and do a calendar where I was trying to exactly pinpoint like how these events coincided. And it’s impossible. They don’t. There are major potholes all over this. Like the cop dragging the guy in and then the cop car’s there all day, and so the little kid doesn’t see the cop car until he comes home from school. It’s like, how’s that possible? It doesn’t work. It doesn’t add up… At a certain point you have to just be like, ‘That’s okay.’ You know?… They’re unreliable narrators. It’s all, yes, subjective.

So, there you have it. What happens in this movie doesn’t need to obey the laws of logic, because writer/director Zach Cregger decided to abandon logic during production. He embraced plot holes (<cough> broken logic <cough>) and explained them away with “subjectivity” and “unreliable narrators.”

So, what are we as viewers supposed to think of a movie where we’re not supposed to search for meaning or logic?

Weapons and Unanswered Questions

To be honest, I didn’t have many unanswered questions – unless the broken logic above is supposed to have made me ask questions instead of frustrate me. But a common question I’ve seen is “Why do the enchanted people run like that?”

Unfortunately for those looking for in-universe answers, once again, there aren’t any to be found. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cregger states that it may have stemmed from a famous photo from the Vietnam War of the “napalm girl”:

I think that image is so awful, and the way she’s holding her arms out just killed me. I think there’s something really upsetting about that posture. If I had to guess, that might be where the seed is from. I don’t know. But there was no second-guessing that pose. I knew that they would run that way.

So, once again, the answer is: because that’s what Zach wanted in his movie.

Weapons and Witch Hunts

Well, we find our own meaning. Cregger has invited us to do so. Whether you can be satisfied by that is up to you, but I will say that I found the most interesting aspect of the movie to be the portrayal of a modern witch hunt taken literally. In modern language, a witch hunt tends to mean a situation in which a group of people start turning on innocent people in an attempt to find a scapegoat or explanation for an event. The beginning of the movie sees Gandy as the target of the town’s witch hunt, but Gandy and Archer eventually team up to take down an actual witch. There’s something interesting in that parallel.

And hey, maybe that’s what this article is. Maybe the movie disappointed me, and so I’m hunting my own witch. Maybe I’m supposed to suspend my disbelief and simply allow a movie to entertain me. Maybe I expect too much of moviemakers. Maybe it’s okay for something to be in a movie and not have any meaning, to not follow any logic, to be there just to look cool.

Maybe.

I’m curious to know what you think.

Until I watch this again and reevaluate it, though, I’ll stick to better crafted witches and their witchcraft.

I’m going to go watch Suspiria.

Stay Shocked,
Z

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Categories: Analysis, Film Analysis, Movie Reviews

Tags: Film, Film analysis, Horror, Weapons, Zach Cregger