Having been surprised and delighted at being so thoroughly thrown for a loop by Barbarian, I walked into the earliest matinee showing of Zach Cregger's follow up feature, Weapons, with high expectations. I walked out of that matinee showing satisfied with what I had just experienced, even if it had not thrown me for as big a loop as Barbarian had. So it goes.
If you have read the ad copy on the poster, or seen one of the trailers for the film, then you will know every bit as much as I did going in. Which might be for the best, as this movie, for the most part, is structured as a mystery focusing on finding out the why, what, and where regarding the disappearance of Mrs. Gandy's class.
Why did they run out of their homes at 2:17 in the morning? What made them do so? Where on earth did they go?
The manner in which Cregger answers those questions might try the patience of some viewers and leave others a bit confused. Because, just as he had done in Barbarian, Cregger takes a non-linear approach to his story.
Breaking the narrative into character titled chapters can and does result in shifts in point of view, motivation, pacing and even tone. While the tonal shifts in Weapons are nowhere near as jarring as the first one in Barbarian was, they still occur.
The changing of the narrative point of view, coupled with the need to start over every twenty or so minutes, necessitates the repeating of several scenes from a different perspective. These moments shed no light or nuance on the mystery. They exist so the viewer gets a narrative grounding point for where and when in the timeline these intermingled storylines and characters intersect in the Big Picture.
Whether or not the film actually needed these chapter breaks and shifting points of view at all will no doubt be the subject of many an online argument or critical discussion. As messy as they were, they made a rather outlandish concept feel more grounded and human than it otherwise would have.
Weapons may have fallen a tad shy of reaching my too high expectations. But it still managed to hold my interest, keep me in suspense, and even scare me a time or two, right up until its cathartic, albeit a tad too abrupt, ending...
No comments:
Post a Comment