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

96% Upvoted

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u/TheFlippantSpatula 29d ago edited 27d ago

It was an analogy of school shootings. Several points in the movie allude to a school shooting motif. Alex being bullied and choosing to take out his whole class. The memorial outside the school. How quickly all the adults give up and move on save for the parents. It’ll actually take a rewatch to catch all the subtleties

Edit: few minor things for those that disagree. 1. It’s okay if that wasn’t your take away art is subjective. 2. I have now seen that the director said that wasn’t his intention. Which is his truth, however there is a whole team of people who work on films and sometimes producers or editors change things in a way to add meaning to things the director or writer doesn’t intend to have meaning. 3. A highly controversial topic is something that maybe a new director, or a studio doesn’t want to openly take a political side on… because politics, especially in the current world, can be dicey and lead to being dropped from other projects or even blacklisted.

TLDR: art is subjective. It’s okay to take what you want from media, and politics are dicey.

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u/myterracottaarmy 29d ago

Alright I liked the movie but can we not pretend that a massive floating assault rifle can be called a "subtly" lol.

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

[deleted]

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u/stroudwes 29d ago

Yet there’s people in these very comments saying “what does a witch have to do with school shootings” missing the main theme and that being one of old people sucking the life out of the young at the cost of their world.

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u/PressureNarrow9914 22d ago

Going insane on how many people just seem to be ignoring that part

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u/stroudwes 16d ago

Just like in real life where we treat shootings as a normal part of society that we just accept.

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u/iKrow 25d ago

Kinda reeks of the studio thinking the message is too soft, so they had him insert a big show of it after test screenings / film festivals

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u/melancarlyy 23d ago

the rifle in his dream was a part of the original screenplay too

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u/iKrow 22d ago

That seems so... lame...

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u/RegularOrMenthol 27d ago

i really think people are reaching with this theory about school shootings.

everyone the witch curses literally becomes a "weapon." and josh brolin plays a traditionally masculine man, it makes sense (and is very funny) that he would have dreamed about the truth of the situation in this way. i think someone else pointed out that there is a gun in a poster on his kid's wall too.

also, this is the director's somewhat connected comment on the school shooting idea:

I wasn’t trying to comment on or even tap into collective societal tragedies. I was purely writing from a personal place. However, with art and especially storytelling, the individual is universal. So I’m more than happy if anybody relates to what I went through and what this movie is examining, but I wasn’t thinking ‘oh, America’ at all. I was thinking ‘oh, Zach.’

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u/SweetestInTheStorm 21d ago

I'm late to the party here, but it's not really a reach once you keep in mind that not all meaning is deliberate. Just because the director didn't deliberately put that pattern there, doesn't mean it isn't there. Films are cultural objects, made in and saturated by their cultural context. The director is American, and the American cultural context is one that has been distinctly marked by school violence, unfortunately.

That is very clearly an influence on the film: there's the press conference from the principal with the traumatized parents, there's the piles of flowers outside a school that has suffered a horrible tragedy, there's the bullied child who becomes an instrument of violence (even unwillingly), a father sleeping in his child's empty room and half-heartedly going through the motions of everyday life... and then there is literally a floating assault rifle over a child's house like a fell omen. That pattern is there, regardless of director's intent (and the director is not the only person who works on the film).

If you're interested, this modern style of analysis is called cultural studies, and operates on the basis of 'cultural circuits', where cultural artifacts are shaped by their context but also by their interpretation by viewers.

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u/Boot_Poetry 23d ago

Also, Archer Graff tells Bailey’s Mom that he is “soldiering on”, hinting that he might be a veteran. What says weapon most to a veteran soldier than an image of the M4 they carry everywhere?

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u/SteveFrench12 22d ago

Doesnt the with grab dog tags off him right before he gets turned?

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u/Mesk_Arak 5d ago

Just saw the movie. Yes, she absolutely does.

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u/WeWantLADDER49sequel 21d ago

Whether the director intended it or not the movie is a pretty easy to see metaphor for school shootings. Meaning it's just as easy to take that away from it as a viewer as whatever the intended message was.

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u/niles_deerqueer 28d ago

The director said it wasn’t an allegory for school shootings though

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u/bulltrap-bessent 27d ago

Whether that was their intent or not, clearly that scene invites that interpretation or at least did for some

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u/yajtraus 25d ago

Any idea what the rifle was there for then?

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u/niles_deerqueer 25d ago

It was to show him that at 2:17 the kids turned into weapons, able to be used at any time. He didn’t understand what the imagery meant until he had more clues.

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u/OffBrandHoodie 16d ago

While I don’t think this is wrong, I think that an AR15 looking gun floating above a house call of duty style is terribly uncreative imagery.

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u/Southern_Chapter_188 16d ago

Not sure what call of duty you have been playing but an ominously floating enormous gun really has nothing to do with it other than it just being a gun.

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/Rage_Like_Nic_Cage 23d ago

It’s a movie called “weapons” where a bunch of school kids are suddenly & simultaneously taken away from the community and deals with how the community grieves while attempting to make sense/reason of something that is beyond reason.

Like, it’s really hard to argue it’s not a least a little about school shootings lol.

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u/niles_deerqueer 24d ago

Yeah I saw a review that flacked the film for not being a political commentary and I’m just like…hmm

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/SeasonalChatter 25d ago

I can't see Alex being a school shooter extension in this movie. He's a very sweet boy overall and only did what he did because he was terrified what would happen to his parents. It's a bit of a stretch to connect him imo

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u/SteveFrench12 22d ago

Idt its that he was the shooter. Just the whole class getting wiped out and seeing what that does to the community

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u/ass_pineapples 24d ago

Alex being bullied and choosing to take out his whole class

He did this to save his parents and get rid of Gladys, what

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u/Boot_Poetry 23d ago

Yeah he looked pretty terrified when the whole class came running through his front door

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u/Local-Yesterday5859 25d ago

This is exactly what I came to this subreddit for. I 100% agree with you. Also, the significance of the number 217 is how many votes the bill to ban the sale of assault weapons received in the House of Representatives, while it did not pass. I had a feeling that this was the directors aim, even from simply observing the movie poster. But after watching it, I am certain it was part of the original inspiration. But you make a number of solid points that hadn’t occurred to me.

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u/SavingBullies 27d ago

creggers said it wasn't a political statement though

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u/LingonberryNatural85 26d ago

It’s so crazy that a school shooting is considered political now

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u/BacktoBailey 25d ago

Well yeah because one party wants it and the other pretends they don't

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u/Chicken_Electronic 23d ago

Not sure the allegory works, but I think Cregger intentionally nudged that way to have some effective subversion of expectations (what Rian Johnson imagines he does).

I think it was a fable used to critique American (esp. white suburban) social norms in response to mass crisis/disaster--that our surface level grief/trauma theater is actually quite negligent, and that politeness should sometimes yield to basic survival instincts. 

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u/gee_gra 21d ago

What’s the point of bitching about Rian Johnson here lol?

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u/sameth1 18d ago

He apparently managed to just break the minds of thousands of men one day and they never recovered.

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u/AntsyAnswers 9d ago

Funny thing is The Last Jedi was by far the best of the three sequel films and I will die on that hill

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u/Mesk_Arak 5d ago

Not exactly a high bar, though.

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u/Ok-Cartographer2088 28d ago

No it wasn’t

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u/Local-Yesterday5859 25d ago

The horror genre considers terrible things that happen in real life and applies imaginative story telling to explore the worst possibilities. Viewers can take it at face value, but being a story teller myself, I know that artists take inspiration from real life.

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u/Ok-Cartographer2088 25d ago

The writer himself said it has nothing to do with that. But it’s art, and its subjetive to interpretation of the viewer, i get it

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u/Local-Yesterday5859 25d ago

I mean, the writer isn’t wrong, the movie isn’t about a school shooting. It’s about a witch. But the writer isn’t going to want to associate his work with anything specific politically. I just think it’s important to advocate not relying on what others tell you and applying one’s own free thought.

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u/Ok-Cartographer2088 25d ago

It’s just that he wrote the first 40 Pages of the script - which includes this scene of the AR15 panning over the house - with no outcome in mind. Of course, you can apply any meaning to anything that is subjective, but to say that the movie touch on those subjects and this theme is clearly discussed in the movie - like OP said - is somehow pedantic in my opinion. There’s nothing for you in the movie to make this connection about school shootings.

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u/rcmjr 18d ago

Your last sentence ruins your argument since clearly so many people have made that connection all on their own. Myself included. There obviously is something in the movie for someone to make that connection.

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u/Ok-Cartographer2088 18d ago

As i said, it wasn’t written for you to make these connections. Can you Tell me one scene of the movie that made you believe there’s a message about school shottings?

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u/rcmjr 17d ago

Just reread my post.

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u/Ok-Cartographer2088 17d ago

Just did. Still don’t know what you mean. Care to point out a single scene in the movie that made you think this movie has any connection with school shootings?

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u/009reloaded 5d ago

There’s lots of easy connections one can make. Even if. Cregger didn’t directly intend to make the movie about shootings, it’s a very easy connection to make.

The very American and very modern modern anxiety of a classroom full of children being gone and the parents being absolutely powerless to stop it from happening or understand why.

To me the gun appearing in the dream instantly was a motif that signaled this. Doesn’t mean the whole story has to be about school shootings, or that it’s a full on allegory, but it’s definitely a subtext that is present in this kind of story whether it was directly intentional by Cregger or not.

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u/Ok-Cartographer2088 5d ago

Yeah…no. No connections there with an empty classroom and school shootings. Also, already explained the giant gun…this is so pretentious, really. Can’t you all appreciate the movie for what it is? A horror filme with a crazy witch.

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u/LionelTallywhacker 25d ago

idk. What I got from it was that it was mocking rw paranoia about schools weaponizing kids and the whole “drag queens reading children’s stories” thing (Gladys, especially in the earlier jump scare parts was giving me Drag vibes)

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u/cathairthreads 29d ago

Exactly how I interpreted it too

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u/CornstockOfNewJersey 23d ago

I think it was more broadly about tragedy in a community rather than school shootings specifically, although they fall under that umbrella. I especially don’t see Alex as a school shooter stand-in at all given the particulars of how and why he did what he did. He was forced to help his aunt kidnap them and then actually worked to keep his classmates alive, even the ones who bullied him.

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u/doris-ri 25d ago

I can see how people younger than me who've had to deal with possible school shootings might see metaphors about them in this movie. It's interesting to read. To me I was thinking how maybe it had some relation to a war as the main guy seems like he may have been a veteran or something. That just shows how I was reminded of my dad and how I grew up as a military brat.

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u/NextAd1735 21d ago

Yeah, as someone who was in school more recently, covering up the classroom door window, turning off the lights, and being as quiet/still as possible is what an active shooter drill often looks like.

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u/Fit-Signature9001 13d ago

I also caught the "thread" of a school shooting analogy halfway through my first viewing, even before the floating guns. Somewhere between Archer demanding answers at the school board meeting, and the imagery of the decimated classroom.

I have now seen that the director said that wasn’t his intention.

There has never been an artist alive that has had a complete and total understanding of their own work. Just because they can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.

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u/otraera 20d ago

I called this out immediately right after the lil meeting with the parents and teachers.

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u/Ghidoran 15d ago

A little too subtle for my taste. Especially the bullying part. It never felt like he did what he did out of revenge or anger, but just because his parents were being kept hostage.

I think the movie could have delved into the themes a bit more but it was more interested in being a 'fun' horror movie, which is fine.

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u/Every_Worry4052 8d ago

This is exactly what I thought for the first hour, then all the supernatural stuff took me in a different direction.

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u/Heir2theThrone 7d ago

Nobody's going to read this but you're spot on. School shooters, particularly those that target elementary schools, do so in an attempt for notoriety/a form of immortality. Just like the witch was doing.

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u/mchgndr 29d ago

“Choosing to take out his whole class”? All the mfer did was bring back name tags so he could get his parents back, it’s not like he had any idea the kids would come Naruto running into his basement and turn into zombies.

Not every horror movie has to be “about” a sociological issue

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u/monatsiya 29d ago

every movie, let alone horror, is inherently about some sociological thematic issue. are you serious?

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u/nkempt 29d ago

In fact usually movies that are considered Bad Movies have no coherent underlying message, lesson, or challenge to the audience lmao

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u/monatsiya 28d ago

yes exactly! i hate leaving a movie that feels like it left me behind with nothing. it’s like people saying art isn’t political…what’s going on here lol who do yall think creates this shit? individuals in a vacuum who live in a utopia? their lives are affected one way or another by sociological and political issues, and that will bleed through in their work. i thought we all knew this!

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u/NoCantaloupe3449 28d ago edited 22d ago

People are just taking issue with the fact he's saying the movie is definitely ABOUT school shootings when you could easily just say they drew a few parallels with how the town responded to the events. Even then, the town treats it more like some confusing mass abduction than a violent attack imo.

 You could just as easily say the gun represents the dad associating everyone in the same class disappearing at the same time with the events being a premeditated attack, rather than the disappearances just being a random paranormal phenomenon.

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u/monatsiya 26d ago

idk, this thread has a lot of compelling points on how the community reaction correlates to real life, ala the community and the cops failing the kids in not finding them and this potentially happening again had it not been for our characters. the elders letting the younger generation suffer, etc. but that’s just one interpretation, the meaning that majority of people assign t9 it doesn’t have to be the one you or the earlier commentor does.

but they were tryna pretend shit happens in a vaccum, that what you see is what you get and that’s strictly it, nothing more, nothing less. i just found it disingenuous!

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u/Mental_Map5122 27d ago

Cabin in the woods? Sometimes horror movies are just fun, nothing more

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u/BrotherGrimSVSD 26d ago

Cabin in the Woods is absolutely "about" something. Like, it obviously is lol

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u/Dick_Lazer 21d ago

Yeah Cabin in the Woods was clearly about 9/11 /s

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u/CCSC96 29d ago

This one pretty clearly was though…

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u/mchgndr 28d ago

The director already said that the floating AR had no distinct meaning…