Please tell us about Weapons 🙏
HAPPILY!! this has spoilers.
First off: if this movie wasn't SO hyped up and lauded as sooo original and cutting edge and scary and groundbreaking, I would have just found it garden variety bad. I would have been like...yeah that was a sort of bad horror movie and moved on.
HOWEVER, BECAUSE it was extremely celebrated and talked up, my mild dislike was seriously amplified. I had to ask WHY is this man's work getting so much praise? Why are (decidedly anti feminist womanhating bleak boring shitty) works of 'art' being gassed up? Why are we as a society collectively excited by depthless things that suck if they LOOK stylish and are made by arrogant men? And of course all the reasons just piss me off more.
So. Weapons. Despite the hype I went into it with moderated expectations. I saw this director's other movie, Barbarian, which was also very hyped (albiet less popular) but also quite bad. The word in horror communities was that it was sooo shocking, and sooo crazy. It was neither of those things imo, I saw it as a very basic film with a 101 level thesis about men and patriarchal horror, obviously written by a man who hadn't thought about this with very much depth, awkwardly filtered through one of my least favorite tropes: male gaze hag horror/ mother monster horror, in which an ugly old woman is posited as the grossest and scariest thing in the world. This doesn't work on audiences who have a normal relationship to women and aging. It gives media a very "ewww!! gross!" point and giggle ten year old boy feel. And in the context of a movie like Barbarian, which I think was trying to say something about patriarchal violence, it undermines the meaning. I could talk more shit about Barbarbain but we're here for Weapons which, imo, is much worse (in part because it followed Barbarian, which allowed its cracks to show).
A list of things that didn't work FOR ME about Weapons:
Most egregious of all: IT MEANT NOTHING, IT HAD NO THESIS. IT WAS ABOUT NOTHING. IT SAID NOTHING. It had a witchhunt but it had no commentary on witchhunts. It had children getting kidnapped and used as weapons but no commentary on school shootings or gun laws. It had (shocker!!) an ugly old woman antagonist but but no commentary on beauty standards or aging. It had gay characters who die extremely brutally onscreen (far more brutally than any other character) just for the fun of it. When asked about the film the director was like "oh it was just a meditation on one of my diary pages as a kid." Like. Ok yeah it feels like one! Where everything happening has no meaning at all EXCEPT as a place for your latent unresolved and unexamined prejudices to be aired out on screen. He might not think he hates gay people or ugly old women but by making horror movies he is placing no meaning or thought into, it's very clear he does. His "art" tells on him. That aside, though--this is just such weak lazy writing. Like horror movies don't HAVE to be deep, they don't HAVE to say something bigger--but good ones do. Horror has always been a lens through which we examine what scares us and why. Horror is accused of being lowbrow but has a long unsung history of thoughtful and quality writing--why is this piece of shit example so celebrated? Plus, the bad writing makes so many concepts and choices that COULD have worked for this movie fall flat because there is no reason for them. Wasted potential.
It used a number of creative and unusual structure and pacing choices that added nothing to the movie. For example, it was told non chronologically through a series of different POVs, but was NOT ABOUT perspective, unreliable narration, the passage of time, or ANYTHING that could have been hammered home or underlined by this choice. He just did it to do it. Because there was no thesis to be underlines, here was no reason for it. All it did was make the movie boring and repetitive because we were seeing the same scenes over and over again from different peoples eyes.
It was extremely predictable both on a dialog level and a plot level. I guessed nearly every twist well ahead of time, and I could also guess characters dialog in advance because the script was not how real people talk, it's how characters in a shitty horror teleplay talk. I kept waiting to be surprised, for the predictability to be a red herring, for the witch hunt to all be a diversion and an actual interesting or thoughtful storyline to be revealed or take over. But no. It really was just this simple and stupid.
The reveal is, again, Like in Barbarian, an ugly old women villain. Thus demonstrating this is the scariest thing this guy can think of. And I'm sorry, skill issue??? Like whats wrong with you? Why do you think old women are so terrifying? Unpack your shit, bro! It made the movie seem so childish and goofy for me! Also, there was a witch hunt happening in the town for the school teacher of the class who disappears. But the antagonist turns out not to be her...but another, 'actual' witch. Spooky scary evil balding old witch!! Ahh!! Witchhunts are fine if you have the right witch, apparently! God its just. So insanely laughable and unscary to me. I cannot comprehend how anyone found this film frightening, at least after the reveal. Particularly if you've seen Barbarian.
It was so boring. Long semi-artistic segments with music, soooo much repeated and recycled footage, Characters I didn't give a fuck about interacting for literally no plot-furthering reason (why did the school teacher and her cop ex boyfriend's interactions have so much screentime? It didn't accelerate the plot? I think it was just so this stupid fucking useless untalented rich white guy director could slip in a WEIRDLY VIOLENT AND GRAPHIC sex scene).
The body horror served no purpose save for to be "shocking" and grotesque. There was gratuitous gore. I think maybe the idiot horror bros who are saying this film is crazy and a masterpiece just liked that part. It was Cronenburg-esque but the thing about Cronenburg is THE BODY HORROR IS THE WHOLE POINT!! IT SAYS SOMETHING! This said nothing. It was just there to make the audience go aaugh!! ew! Icky! You might argue that is the goal of horror and SORRYYY I want more out of a movie that is being CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED. It was like a little boy sneaking up to someone and touching their leg with a dead lizard. Cheap AND CHILDISH. And for people like me who have no disgust threshold it didn't even achieve the desired effect so it was just one more dull unharmonious element in this mess of a movie.
In conclusion: white guy with money makes self obsessed, up its own ass high budget horror film that LOOKS good up on the big screen but has literally no substance and a ton of wasted ideas. There are molds broken (pacing, structure) which makes some audience members feel really smart, but they are unable to see the bigger more important molds that remain intact and violently reinforced (women are gross, do I REALLY need a story or is my cool guy idea enough? I'm totally an artist I promise!!) Everyone says ooooh! Ah!!! We have another ridiculously overrated piece of shit movie made by a man with a stupidly high rotten tomatos score because we collectively as a society are getting stupider, worse at reading, and less likely to interrogate the patriarchy and the "art" men create.
Like sorry for being sincere. Sorry for having standards. Sorry for not buying into nihilistic, hollow, grossbad for the sake of grossbad. Sorry for wanting things to, uh, have a thesis.
Women are out there having to prove and defend their right to create art, having to explain what everything is about, second guessing themselves and perfecting their plots and running through everything they create with a fine tooth comb to make sure it's airtight and has value and even then once they do release it they'll be criticized and hated and ripped apart and hyper-scrutinized and meanwhile this director is bottling his farts and throwing them in theaters and people are like WOW this fart is so sophisticated and interesting I have NEVER seen anything like it Horror really CAN be good...
makes me SICKKKK.
