Maybe I just need to give Weapons another watch but I'm just really not getting the hype.
Weapons is all about presentation and order of consumption. The reality is, Tarantino is famous for this and it's why his movies are so good. The self regulated pacing of telling movies in sections lets story impact hit the hardest because you have more room to manipulate narrative. You can present conclusions and show them in new lights or drip information to audiences. It also excludes character knowledge so you feel like you're smarter than the characters in the movie as a framing device. This can be used for suspense and tension. People eat this stuff up. They really, really, really eat this stuff up. Its why some of the best movies/series/stories have a similar format. There's just not a lot of horror movies doing this. So Weapons got the benefit of that plus timing. The last closest things we got were Hill House and the first part of IT which both made fuck tons of money and are beloved.
In a vacuum is Weapons good? Fuck no. If you were to describe the movie to anyone, it's terrible. It's incredibly goofy, it's incredibly stupid. We get answers for nothing. The characters don't really have an impact on the plot. The mystery is just dropped and isn't not all that amazing. It's not really all that scary. Heck it even flat out cheats. However, the movie just barely crosses the finish line because the ultimate antagonist is really hateable for the limited screentime it has. The payoff also isn't that far away from the time it's introduced, so it gets a lot out of it's climax and we forget about all the stupid stuff in between.
Reminds me of the hype for Barbarian. No one will say what the film does well, just that it's "great". Which means it's average at best.
Don't push that button. I've written several posts in this thread on how much I despise Barbarian. Its probably my most hated movie of all time right there next to Suicide Squad 2016. Weapons is better than Barbarian in every single way and isn't nearly as woke. I have an autistic level of hatred for that movie. Heck, even their joke with Justin Long in Weapons was at least funny.
The first 20 minutes of Barbarian are better than anything in Weapons. Barbarian had tension and an interesting set up.
Then the movie ran out of money to afford Bill Skarsgard and fed him to the titty breast milk meme monster.
I learned my lesson from seeing both Get Out and US after reading so much hype for these movies, everyone saying they were both the greatest horror films ever made so that's what I expected
Get Out is a guilty pleasure. I like it. It's stupid, but it's a unique kind of stupid only someone as stupid as Jordan Peele could slap on screen. Its a dumb, dumb, stupid movie but it's pretty darn amusing watching rich white people once again auction off black people. Brought something warm to my heart to see that on screen.
Or Skinamarink, oh fuck that movie pissed me off and all of the Youtubers being paid to suck it's taint worked because you still have zoomers talking about what a masterpiece Skinamarink was but it was genuinely one of the worst movies I've ever fucking seen.
Skinamarink is a hard watch....Its so fucking long.
On a side note, Late Night With the Devil is the best modern horror movie in the 2020s and you cannot convince me otherwise.
