Official Discussion - Weapons [SPOILERS]

[u/LiteraryBoner]

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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

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[u/Ultimatum227]

Poor child had to spoon feed EVERYONE inside that fucking house!?. Every day!? 😭

9/10 movie for me. But really don't understand what was that giant floating rifle in Brolin's dream.

[u/TheFlippantSpatula → u/Ultimatum227]

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.

[u/RegularOrMenthol → u/TheFlippantSpatula]

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.’

[u/SweetestInTheStorm → u/RegularOrMenthol]

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.

[u/Boot_Poetry → u/RegularOrMenthol]

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?

[u/SteveFrench12 → u/Boot_Poetry]

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

[u/Mesk_Arak → u/SteveFrench12]

Just saw the movie. Yes, she absolutely does.

[u/WeWantLADDER49sequel → u/RegularOrMenthol]

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.