Weapons movie, spoilers

I finally saw "Weapons," and it’s a good horror movie. I enjoyed watching it.

So if you don’t want to be spoiled, leave now and go watch the movie. Be a fresh mind with no preconceived notions and let yourself be sucked into the story.

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I have thoughts about the movie. And I realize the director has left all the mystery intact, presenting the movie as-is, and basically saying that whatever you think it means, that’s what the movie means.

It’s your personal experience and whatever you feel about the movie, whatever metaphors or allegories your brain has produced, then that’s what the movie is for you. Enjoy the movie. And I respect that.

That said…

I feel so bad for Alex. I don’t think he’s ever going to get his parents back.

Those kids were under Aunt Gladys’ control for a month, and it took them two years to start talking again. And some of them still aren’t talking. Meanwhile, Alex’s parents were under her control for a longer time, and it seems like she might have used a different method to enthrall them.

When Alex first comes home from school to find his parents under her control, they were able to see him and interact with him a bit. By the end, they were just mindless husks, and that’s not something that can easily be fixed.

It seems as though Aunt Gladys was sucking the life out of them. If it was simply the vitality, maybe they can get that back with time, but if she was taking their life force? Maybe all her victims will have a shortened lifespan.

And it doesn’t say what Aunt Gladys is sick with, but if it was cancer, then when those kids ate her, could they get cancer from eating her? And it was her own fault that she got torn apart and eaten because she was the one to put that idea into Alex’s head.

Which makes me wonder: If she is some kind of parasitic being, will she be spread around by having been eaten? Are those kids incubating the next generation of whatever creature was wearing an Aunt Gladys skin?

Anyways, I think that at it’s core, the movie is about a bad cop making bad decisions that result in a bad outcome. Some people might say it’s about school shootings, parental fear, and the aftermath of children just suddenly being taken out of life. But my brain is focused on Paul, the bad cop who’s so focused on himself and his problems that he doesn’t realize he’s a bad cop.

We feel sympathy for Paul because we see him as a human being with human flaws. He’s an alcoholic that is trying to remain sober, and the stresses of his life result in him falling off the wagon, and then he just keeps making worse and worse decisions.

It’s sad that Justine had to kill him, but it was his own decisions that made that happen.

He likely didn’t think of himself as a bad cop, but we, the viewers, have a clear view of him fucking up at his job. And that fuck up results in him ruining his life, and then losing his life.

He asked James "Do you have anything in your pocket?" then he gets pricked by a needle and punches James, and from that point forward he just makes some really terrible decisions.

The stress from punching James and knowing that if James makes a report he could lose his job is part of the reason he’s so quick to drink alcohol, and then he makes the decision to cheat on his wife who is the beloved daughter of the sheriff. And the whole time, he knows that as long as James doesn’t report what he did, the dashcam footage for his patrol car will be overwritten in 30 days.

He’s just counting down the time until that dashcam footage can no longer be used against him. Which is why he reacts so badly on seeing James approach the police station.

Seeing him racing in his patrol car and reaching up to disconnect the dashcam is the moment when he truly failed as a cop. And then he doesn’t call it in when he goes to the Lilly house with James, even though all those people are desperately waiting for any news about their missing children.

I don’t know if a bunch of police busting into the house would have made much difference, but it would have meant that Paul wasn’t a completely fuck up as a cop. And maybe he wouldn’t have died like that.

That killing Aunt Gladys broke her thrall over Alex’s parents and those kids, means that if police had busted into the house and been attacked, there’s a good chance they would have shot Aunt Gladys and that would have been the end of ALL OF THAT.

Instead the children hunted her down like they were animals and they tore her apart with their bare hands and ate her flesh. And they wouldn’t have been forced to have that memory if Paul had simply called it in to the station.

But he was so scared about losing his job.

Like, he’d lost everything else in his life. He’d fucked up his marriage by cheating on his wife, which angered his father-in-law who is his boss. He’s scared that after the needle prick he might have been exposed to HIV or hepatitis. He still has unresolved feelings for Justine, which leads to him lying to her about his availability.

He’s not a good dude. And he’d bad at his job.

But he didn’t deserve to be taken over by Aunt Gladys and dying as a result.

Like, on first meeting him, we the viewers have to sympathize because his wife was putting pressure on him to get her pregnant and it was obvious that he was not ready to be a dad. He didn’t even seem sure that he wanted to be married to her. And then getting pricked by the needle and worrying about the effect it’s going to have on his health and we find out he’s a recovering alcoholic… He was not in a place to make a life-altering decision. But there he was. Making bad choices due to the panic he was experiencing.

And James is deep in his addiction, to the point that he’s no longer allowed around his family. They had to cut him off to protect themselves because he’s willing to steal anything from anyone to feed his addiction. Like, he goes into the Lilly house, sees what’s happening there, and then he just continues stealing stuff. He doesn’t even think about calling the police until he realizes that there’s a reward for any information about the missing children. At which point it’s his greed for more drugs that motivates him.

Others were enthralled by Aunt Gladys, but he was enthralled by drugs. Hollowed out by his addiction.

Justine honestly cared about the children. At the end scene, her first impulse is to find Alex and make sure he’s okay. Throughout the whole movie, she wanted those other kids to be rescued, but she was also very worried about Alex. She had a deep commitment to her students, even as she fails to care for herself.

She’s an alcoholic, and without her class, all she had was alcohol. She was left anchorless.

And I think her having sex with Paul and the inference from her having had an affair with a colleague at her last school shows that she has self-harming tendencies. She knows that what she’s doing is wrong and it’s not good for her, both as a person and on a professional level, but she still does it because of her own inner damages.

She loves the children she teaches, and that’s kind of her glimpse of light, so having them all taken away from her leaves her with nothing but her self-damaging impulses.

And throughout the whole movie, she was basically flailing around and begging for help from someone she saw as a figure of authority. She spoke to Marcus in person, she called him on the phone, she told him multiple times that she felt something was off with Alex’s home life. And because of her history of "caring too much" about her students, he shrugged off her concerns and didn’t take her seriously.

As a result, he ended up enthralled by Aunt Gladys and that killed him and his husband.

All he had to do was notify the police or CPS that something was going on at Alex’s house. If enough people had known there was something weird happening, Aunt Gladys would have packed up her magic tree and fled the scene, hopefully releasing the children when she did so.

Because it did seem as though she had to have her victims close at hand to suck out their energy. Otherwise she could have just enthralled them and left them in their homes as catatonic victims. They would have been hospitalized, and she could have fed on them from a distance, if that’s something she was able to do.

I believe she had to have them close at hand to feed off of them.

So I think, to me, "Weapons" is an allegory about life. Like, there’s addiction, there’s the fear parents have for their children, there’s the suddenness of their children just being gone, and the hurt and anger that causes.

Like, Justin Long’s character and his wife… The wife did not want to help find her own child. And maybe it was just because this seemingly aggressive stranger made her uncomfortable, or maybe she and Justin Long’s character–who had already seemed to put aside the pain of their missing daughter–are supposed to represent the blasé attitude of some parents.

Like, they have children because it’s something expected of them. And they raise their children, and maybe the children have a good life and feel loved in the home, but at the same time, the parents are distant and a bit hands off when it comes to real emotional love. And the kids grow up all right and they’re happy people, and they don’t realize what they missed out on, but at the same time, they do miss out on something they don’t know exists in other families.

Alex’s parents loved him, and he loved them. He was willing to do anything to keep them safe, even if that meant bowing down to Aunt Gladys’ demands.

Aunt Gladys represents calamity. She came into the lives of Alex and his parents, brought in by familial obligation, and her presence resulted in him losing the parents he once had. He still loves them, but they will never be the people he remembers, because once the damage is done, that’s it.

Like a car accident, a stroke, a break-in and assault. She entered their lives like cancer and her influence grew and grew. She changed every aspect of their lives to the point that even their house was nearly unrecognizable by the time she was done.

It’s a good movie. Fun to watch as a horror spectacle, but also filled with what-if thought provoking theories about what it all means.

And maybe it means nothing if you don’t think it means anything.

And maybe it means everything if you think it means something.

You take away from the movie what you put into it. And that’s what makes it a good movie.

10/10, would watch again.

~Harper Kingsley

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