MovieChat Forums > Us (2019) Discussion > Nope.

Nope.

posted 5 years ago by [deleted]
1 reply | jump to latest

I'm an outlier. I thought this movie was mostly dull.

After Get Out -- and based on the reviews for his 2nd outing -- I was expecting a much better and different movie. The reviews I read suggested that it was just about one family fighting off their evil doppelgangers in a setting like The Strangers.

I just didn't get the concept. The movie starts with a mention of tunnels. Then we learned they are filled with clones. These clones are psychically tied to their upper world doppelgangers.

This just opens up so many questions starting with why? How?

It's fine for a movie to operate on two levels -- one real, one allegorical -- but the 'real' side of the movie has to stand alone as a logical construct that operates on some sort of internal consistent logic. This one didn't. So many examples of this -- too many honestly to list here.

My wife and I were constantly asking questions like: Why did the white family get killed immediately and brutally, but the black family doppelgangers go through these elaborate steps to kill them, e.g. boat rides on the water, a street race, etc.

That was our biggest complaint by far. Literally nothing happens to the black family -- except for Adelaide at the end -- in scene after scene where they are threatened over and over by their evil twins.

It just seemed like a 'concept' movie where the writers stuffed it with all sorts of obvious symbolism, allegory and foreshadowing in a ham-handed way. The IMDB page has a long list of these. It's like the writers had a competition to see who could come up with the most ideas with little thought given to the 'real' side of the story.

Maybe Peele hoped to distract us with the directing, but even that wasn't great. No suspense at all. Imagine a Friday the 13th movie where Jason not only doesn't kill anyone, but barely scratches them in scene after scene. We were sighing in boredom by the end of the movie.

In some ways, it reminded me of The Quiet Place... another movie that critics loved but that completely falls apart under any sort of meaningful analysis.

I hope Peele doesn't pull a Shyamalan... coasting on the rep of his debut as subsequent movies become more and more mediocre.

[–] NoEasyBuckets (334) 5 years ago

My main issue was the explanation for the clones and how it was just glossed over. I'm fine with not having every detail spelled out, but whole idea of the clones beneath the ground "because of the government" was just too much with too little explained. Also, if you're going to have a movie with clones/doppelgangers, you have to do better than revealing that they were switched all along. It's just too cliche.

I was okay with Adelaide's family being toyed with since it was at the hands of the real Adelaide, who knew exactly what was taken from her by her clone. I found the movie more entertaining than you did and was curious to see the payoff. Unfortunately that's where I ended up disappointed.