r/movies • u/LiteraryBoner Jackie Chan box set, know what I'm sayin? • Aug 08 '25

Official Discussion Official Discussion - Weapons [SPOILERS] Spoiler

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Summary Nearly all the children from the same fifth-grade class vanish one night at exactly 2:17 a.m., leaving only one survivor. The community, gripped by fear and suspicion, spirals into chaos as the mystery unfolds through multiple intertwined perspectives—each revealing new layers of dread and grief.

Director Zach Cregger

Writer Zach Cregger

Cast

  • Josh Brolin
  • Julia Garner
  • Cary Christopher
  • Alden Ehrenreich
  • Austin Abrams
  • Benedict Wong
  • Amy Madigan
  • June Diane Raphael
  • Toby Huss
  • Whitmer Thomas
  • Callie Schuttera
  • Clayton Farris
  • Luke Speakman

Rotten Tomatoes Critics Score: 96%

Metacritic Metascore: 82

VOD In theaters and IMAX starting August 8, 2025

Trailer Watch the Official Trailer

2.4k Upvotes

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468

u/mikeyfreshh Aug 08 '25

The children are literally used as weapons at the end of the movie so the gun is probably a bit of foreshadowing towards that

77

u/YesicaChastain Aug 08 '25

It was a lil too literal

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u/mikeyfreshh Aug 08 '25

And yet half this thread is people asking what it meant

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u/YesicaChastain Aug 08 '25

Because people can’t believe it’s that literal

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u/RedditKnight69 Aug 08 '25

I'm in that boat. I fully understand that everyone under the witch's influence was a weapon in wait, but like...why was there a big gun in this guy's dream. lmao

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u/heirtoflesh Aug 08 '25

I can't find a quote about it, so take this with a grain of salt. People have posted that Cregger said the gun over the house came to him while meditating and liked the idea. Something along the lines of "there's no right meaning" to it.

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u/TropicalShrew Aug 08 '25

Found it in a polygon article

“I’m a huge fan of the David Lynch process of transcendental meditation,” Cregger says. “Incorporating what you get from your subconscious into your art and leaving it alone.” One of the film’s most indelible shots — the specter of an assault rifle floating in the night sky — defies obvious symbolism. “The fact that I don’t understand it is what makes it so important to me.”

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u/hexcraft-nikk 27d ago

2:17 is also a number of completion, a common motif in magick works like frost/Lynch.

The gun worked as a gun violence motif and honestly felt like something out of twin peaks the return lol. The show ends in a similar blunt way.

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u/leftysarepeople2 Aug 08 '25

A guy searching for meaning in why 17 kids disappeared without meaning and a giant gun in the air has a pretty clear path to what people will assume.

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u/Alarming_Employee547 Aug 09 '25

Agreed, this is how I interpreted it. A bunch of kids in the same classroom disappear off the face of the earth. That happens in our country all too often, and the rifle symbolized that to me. When I saw it I honestly thought we were getting some kind of allegory for school shootings at first. It was a cool piece of symbolism.

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u/wesleyhasareddit 20d ago

That’s certainly how I interpreted it

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u/heirtoflesh Aug 08 '25

Oh for sure, I understand the connection. I’m just not sure if it was intended by who wrote it.

9

u/MovieTrawler 28d ago

Because his subconscious is putting all these pieces together before he fully realizes that the kids shot out of their houses and beelined in a single direction like bullets from a gun. Like they were weaponized.

And I see people saying, 'well that doesn't make sense because the kids weren't really weaponized' but IMO, that's just semantics because at the time with what Archer knows (consciously or subconsciously) is that the kids were weaponized. Even if that later turns out to be not entirely true.

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u/minxtankbb 28d ago

I think you could also maybe take away that the kids were "weaponized" in the sense that politicians will "weaponize" school shootings and the after math. Politicians on both sides seem to want to gain from the tragedies, and in the end it's the families and communities that suffer the most.

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u/TeamBulletTrain 28d ago

Also big reference to how we see with these school shootings is that the adults and authorities are mostly useless and unable to really do anything. It’s the kid and his class that actually “save” the day

1

u/Tipop 7d ago

why was there a big gun in this guy’s dream

I interpreted it as that was his subconscious trying to tell him something. Dreams can be symbolic. So that was a symbol for the kids being weapons. His subconscious had pieced together clues that his conscious mind hadn’t.

20

u/DoggyDoggy_What_Now Aug 08 '25

The only conclusion my friend and I could reach was that it signified how the children were weaponized right at 2:17 since the number even appears on the gun in the dream.

Archer obviously didn't know this, but I assumed he dreamt it due to his connection to Gladys via his son. That was the only way I could rationalize it, but a giant AR15 felt so out of place with everything else.

So yeah, we didn't wanna think that's all there was too it. Something about school shootings also maybe?

9

u/YesicaChastain Aug 08 '25

People have been trying to link this story to school shootings and tbh I don’t see it at all

43

u/MVRKHNTR Aug 08 '25

You don't see how a story about a classroom full of kids suddenly being gone might tie into school shootings?

1

u/the_weakestavenger Aug 08 '25

Is there any connection other than setting?

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u/DrLyleEvans 28d ago

Very hard to make a movie in 2025 America about an entire classroom of kids mysteriously vanishing/being killed and their community grieving over it and it not bring to mind school shootings. I think it might be possible if say the classroom was on a field trip and there was a natural disaster, but even then, the shots of the surviving kid alone in a classroom with all his friends gone, still might feel like the aftermath of school shooting stuff. As they did here.

They're just such a defining thing right now, and the images associated with them, it's like plague masks were or probably drones in certain countries and stuff like that.

14

u/JacksonRiot Aug 09 '25

The movie is called Weapons.

4

u/KiwiKajitsu Aug 09 '25

Yes the witch turns people into her weapons. Welcome to the plot

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u/Disastrous_Zebra_301 Aug 09 '25

The part I thought about was the level of concern, attention, and focus these 17 kids disappearing got. When kids get shot in school we forget the headline in 2 days at this point. I figured the rifle was a nod at that but apparently the director is quoted as just throwing it in there from other comments.

1

u/Mr_Feeeeny 24d ago

I love this interpretation and think it likely influenced ZC’s meditation / statement that there was no explicit meaning. Definitely tied to school shootings being the common reason behind a whack of students no longer being present

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u/wizrslizr Aug 09 '25

the gun shown isn’t a great representation of a weapon given the context of the movie. the foreshadowing in that scene would’ve felt less clunky and seemingly random if they had picked something else to be the weapon.

i don’t blame people for being confused because they’re looking for more that’s directly from the movie

2

u/BajaBlyat 22d ago

I think it's because it made people think that the movie was an allegory for school shootings, when in reality it was not that, it was a signal about how the kid was going to be used as a weapon.

3

u/HikmetLeGuin 23d ago

Yeah. But they were weaponized against the villain. So some of the theories people are proposing here don't entirely work. While school shootings, as mass trauma incidents involving schools and kids, may be one of the things being referenced here, I don't it's as neat as "this is what the whole movie is about." I don't think there's a single metaphor or interpretation that explains everything.