The new horror movie, Weapons, has quickly gained attention after coming out on August 8. Weapons has surfaced all over the internet the past few weeks, and a lot of people seem to be talking about it. The main focus has been on how the children run in the movie. People have been coming out of the movie theater running in a disturbing way, because that is a key part of the movie that everyone seems to find funny. Weapons was directed by Zach Cregger, who rose in popularity in 2022 for directing a horror movie called Barbarian. Barbarian included a lot of comedy, so many people did not take the movie seriously. Weapons also included some comedy, which many people did not prefer. Zach Cregger put in excessive effort to make his horror movies funny, but also included lots of terror.
The story is first told by a young girl narrating the tragic events in her small town in Pennsylvania. Just like any other day in their town, every kid was tucked into bed by their parents, but this Wednesday was different. At exactly 2:17 a.m., 17 kids woke, got out of their beds, opened their front doors, and ran into the darkness. The next morning, when the parents went to wake their kids for school, none of them were there. Fast forward to the elementary school in which all the 17 children were in class together; all the other classes had all of their students, except for one class with only one child left. The teacher, Justine Gandy, walked into an empty classroom with only one kid left sitting in the very back, Alex. Cameras show footage of the kids running out of their home at the same exact time, in the same exact way.
Throughout the movie, it is narrated from several different perspectives. It switches from person to person, which makes the plot more unhinged and deranged. The perspectives included Justine, the policeman, the robber, and the father of one of the missing children, Archer Graff. This shows the different sides of grief, guilt, agony, and displeasure from each person.
In my opinion, the movie was not worth seeing. It had its moments, but I think overall the director, Zach Cregger, tried too hard to mix comedy with terror. It just ended up making the movie messy and chaotic. With all of the different genres and moods happening in the movie, it was an unusual watch. I had a hard time understanding what was happening half of the time, and on top of everything, if you make a movie gory, then it should at least lean more on the scary side and not try to make it so humorous. Weapons started to get boring towards the end of the film, and it felt like there was no purpose in continuing. Top critic on Rotten Tomatoes, Shubhra Gupta says, “After a point, though, it all starts feeling empty: monsters without motives are no longer interesting, and the big reveal takes away the much-needed suspense.” Others also felt that Weapons was no longer interesting, and all of the built-up suspense was just wasted. If you would like to judge for yourself, you can see this movie at the Mary Max Theater in Logansport, but personally, I would not recommend it.
