Wanted (film)/WMG

The only reason why the Fraternity's names appeared on the loom is because Sloan was not killed.

Sloan was clearly at least potentially corrupt. An uncorrupt man who's name came up would either kill himself or just ignore it. Thus the loom was trying to get rid of him before he went corrupt of his own accord. Because he did not die and sent the Fraternity on bogus missions the loom tried to get rid of them too.

• That assumes the Fraternity's names actually appeared. Is there any reason for Sloan not to have forged termination records for the whole organization, in case of just such an eventuality? It's a win-win. Either they're loyal to the code, and kill themselves, or are disloyal and join him.
  • This struck me as well, so we know that Sloan has been making up names from the Loom and here look bunch of orders for you all to die! ... Really? ... Really Really?

Sloan's name coming up on the loom was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The names that come up are for people who haven't yet done anything wrong, but will. When Sloan's name came up, he hadn't done anything wrong, but since he was the only one to see it, he ignored it and started breaking the code. If his name hadn't ever come up, he would have remained loyal to the code, and the entire plot of the movie wouldn't have happened.

The world of Wanted is the much depleted Creation from Exalted.

The loom of fate is the self same loom as from Exalted, only rather stripped down. That self evidently stupid explanation about adrenaline is because the Fraternity refuse to believe that they are capable of magic. They are most likely the much weakened but still functional exaltations of the Five-Score Fellowship (Sidereals). Note the thematic similarity in the names, both are unified groups. If this is true then the real reason they go after some of these people may be to stop them exalting and unleashing dangerous magic rather than because they did anything bad.

The world of Wanted is The World of Darkness.

Related to the above. Before they realized that it sucked all of the potential drama from Exalted for some players by showing what would happen millennia later the official line was that Exalted was the prequel to World of Darkness. Now they sort of just fail to mention it. It this is true then The Fraternity spend some of their time vampire hunting, among other things.

• • The Old World of Darkness, specifically. The Fraternity are in fact just a face organization for the Euthanatos. Curving bullets are an application of the Entropy sphere.

The loom has no magical properties.

In the entire movie we're presented with exactly two examples of targets that deserve death: Fox's father's killer, and Sloan himself. Both could easily have been faked, and the names come from people with strong motives to lie. So there's no evidence that the loom was ever selecting the correct targets. All of the targets could easily have been selected by the Fraternity leaders themselves, for either good or bad reasons.

• • Expanding on this: there was never such a thing as the Fraternity. Sloan simply fed the assassins a story about a thousand-year-old secret order in the hopes that a few of them would believe it and work for him. The loom probably misses thousands of stitches a day- he just selects scraps of cloth which, coincidentally, bare the names of people he wants dead. Sloan's own name coming up was just a result of him getting careless with the other scraps.

At the end of the movie, Wesley doesn't kill Sloan.

Why? I don't know. But it does the bullet rewind thing, and instead of firing it he breaks the fourth wall. Throwing a Take That at the audience was important enough for him to cause some kind of time travel paradox, and later he's gunned down by Sloan because he forgot to take the shot.

• Sloan only manages to kill Wesley because Wesley used himself as bait to line up the kill shot on Sloan for The Mother-Fucking Decoy!

The bullet curve is telekinesis.

They have to concentrate and drop into some altered state of consciousness, each of which are often prerequisites for using psychic abilities. It makes more sense than curving the bullets by anything but a ridiculously high-tech individually guided bullet RC system, and it's the only explanation this troper can think of for how the fly's wings got shot off without obliterating the wings or splattering the fly. The adrenal gland stuff was pure BS, it was really the pineal gland. Or something.

• Jossed by, well, canon. It's pretty obtuse, but it's there. Sloan tells Wesley that, while concentrating in their altered state, they can exploit a natural part of how guns work that, simply, no one else knows about because everyone is too dead-set into the "bullets fly straight out of the gun" mentality.
  • That's not a Joss; it's not mutually exclusive with the above WMG, and it contains no real explanation for how they curve the bullets in violation of the laws of physics. It could be that are telekinetic but are not aware of it, and their "explanation" which actually explains nothing is just the way to rationalize a seeming impossibility.

The movie is happening on Wesley's head.

(Theory was, believe it or not, on the Other Wiki)

The body of Wanted can be interpreted as occurring only in Wesley Gibson's imagination, an escape from his dull, mundane, depressing life. Think Fight Club. The clues are:

• Before his new life takes over, he's on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The ATM is talking to him; clearly not everything we are seeing is real.
• His new life takes place in the same locations as his old, mundane one: The room over the railroad tracks from his apartment, the train he takes to work, even, near the end, in his office.
• His new life still includes the same people as his old one: His boss, girlfriend, and best friend, keep re-appearing. He re-visits his apartment (to collect a gun), he sees his girlfriend with shopping bags from the room over the tracks, and in the final shot the bullet goes past those three people.
• Much of the action is not realistic, it's fantasy action.
• On his first assignment, he rides past the office where his target is, on the roof of the train. In the very next scene he rides past the same office, this time in the train, in a seat on his own. The first scene could be the fantasy, the second reality.
• By the end of the film he is broke and back in his office at work. Then the fantasy kicks in again.
• In the closing scene the fourth wall is broken, and the fantasy Wesley Gibson addresses the audience directly.

This may also be true of the comic.