Sixteen Further Screams For Halloween: Day 2 (Weapons)

Mood, Josh Brolin (but affectionately)

This one has been a long time coming. Ever since I saw the first trailers for Weapons, I knew it was a must-watch for this particular scary season. It was brilliant marketing, revealing just enough to intrigue and entice but not so much that it gave any of the game away. A movie you just go into and try to understand as it unravels before you. For a bit near the beginning I worried that this would be a more run of the mill thriller, and that I would have to cook a bit with some metaphor for horror. I could do that, but I don't have to. Weapons firmly belongs in the horror camp, and it is a staggering masterpiece of recent cinema in that camp. That's a fucking accomplishment considering some of the other horror films that have come out recently, but by fuck does Weapons accomplish it.

This film is damn near immaculate in the way it's constructed. The way Weapons tells its story is similar to something like a Rashomon or a Pulp Fiction: you focus on different protagonists as they experience the consequences of one inciting incident, and only through the whole can you learn the true truth of what is going on. It works really damn well, as I've made clear. Each segment ends on the perfect little cliffhanger of escalation, and every one of them not only dovetails off of what came before, but teaches you a little more about what is really happening. The movie is luxurious about it, and one thing that deserves credit is how it doesn't waste your time repeating things. If you see a scene from one person's perspective, when you get to the other person's you don't need to see it play out again. You can just play the opening bits of that scene again, and jump cut to what happened next for the person you weren't following last time. It's economical and doesn't pad things out, and a lesser story might rely on that padding. Weapons flies right by, even if it's two hours long.

Another thing I liked about the movie is how pretty much everyone we follow is flawed to varying degrees. With the exception of the school principal Marcus and little Alex Lilly, everyone is kind of fucked up and does things that are not rational or advisable for their own particular reasons. Justine the teacher, for example, falls into a lot of that horror movie trope of being a little dumb and nosy for the sake of making a plot and scary things happen to her. For a nitpicker, this is poison and they can outsmart the movie by asking why she wasn't logical at all times. For someone just settling into the film and enjoying the ride, the fact that she's kind of nosy actually matters! It matters because she cares about the one boy remaining from this incident and won't leave well enough alone! She's not a paragon of virtue and she fucks up in a lot of ways, but that makes her messy and human and in the end we can see that she's trying her best. The other protagonists range in their emotional complexity, from being prone to vigilante vandalism and emotional distance after a tragedy, to a lapsed alcoholic with a temper tantrum, to a drug addict and thief stumbling upon the plot by happenstance. These aren't perfect people, but they are human people and I believe them and their foibles.

Through all of their joint discoveries and terrifying moments, we get to piece together what is really going on. The method to the madness is supernatural, and is something I was able to call, but the scope of it is terrifying. At the heart of it all is pain and suffering, a true antagonist with selfish aims and a disregard for decency and human life, someone who will rip families apart for their own nefarious goals. There are rules to what they can do, we learn those rules, and then can see how they get turned against our foe. The catharsis of this movie is fucking incredible, and I can only imagine how an enraptured cinema hooted and hollered when it fucking kicked off. Is the movie perfect? Not really. It's the type of movie where you can easily come up with some logical dings for how things work, how things weren't figured out, and other narrative contrivances. I noticed a few myself after the fact... but here's why that shit didn't matter to me. I noticed none of it during the fact. I was enraptured by this film, thrilled by it in every way. Who gives a fuck if the police didn't figure the scheme out early? Who gives a fuck if some of the stuff from the ending wasn't explained fully? If you're sitting there dinging the goddamn thing instead of enjoying it, then maybe that's a you problem and not a Weapons problem. Point is, this ruled and I loved it. The magic is strong with this one, and I'm very curious to see if it holds up on a rewatch when one has all the pieces.

Say, speaking of magic...