“Well…
I have complicated, mixed feelings about this one.
On one hand, like Get Out, I appreciated the movie that was a bonkers-as-hell horror flick. Get Out probably had this problem to a greater degree: everyone wanted to talk about the social commentary, and most folks seemed to ignore that it was straight-up a nutty horror movie with a bizarre premise that was a good watch. The commentary is there, no doubt, but how come nobody wants to talk about what a good horror film it was? I think that movie works even without the Black/White stuff going on, and while the commentary adds flavor, the movie works without it.
Us has a similar audience problem, I think, which is that people are trying REALLY hard to graft a meaning onto it, when I don’t necessarily think it needs one (and/or I think the themes are pretty clear in Peele’s movies, so lots of folks end up trying to outdo each other to make the theme deeper, and in my mind, those takes end up focusing on the takes themselves rather than the movie, end up taking away from the movie rather than adding to it. The movie becomes LESS interesting for all the takes rather than MORE interesting).
I feel like Jordan Peele’s movies have fallen into this horrible trap where it becomes an intellectual contest to interpret “what they really mean.” And whoever can come up with the most meaningful, deep interpretation wins.
Meanwhile, we sort of ignore the movie part, and that’s a shame because the movie part is a lot of fun.
For me, this activity amounts to undoing some of the movie’s magic and appeal. Jordan Peele took an idea and a story, put them together, and made something visually compelling, something more out-there and interesting than the original idea. Then, people take the more interesting version and try to cram it back in the original box, make sure it’s “about” something that we all understand and is, dare I say, mundane. Boring. I don’t say that to minimize the situations people are in, I say that because the attempt to take a movie with as wild a premise as Us and to try and reverse-engineer it into the original kernel statement about our world feels, to me, like a storyteller’s version of a behind-the-scenes featurette that kills the magic of the effects and filmmaking. Useful for people who want to tell similar stories, but maybe a bad thing for people who want to watch a scary movie.
Overall, the movie is incredibly intriguing, Jordan Peele knows how to make a movie, and I DID appreciate this one. I enjoyed it more than Get Out because it leaned harder into horror movie wackiness, and that’s what I likes. I like a movie with an unexpected journey into horror, and the closer we got to the end, the more watchable the movie was.
But then I have my little qualms. The dispatching of the villain was kind of just there. It sort of just happened, and it would’ve been nice if there was something more significant about it. The epigraph at the beginning and the first 10 minutes of story spoiled a good chunk of the movie for me. I’m not an astute viewer, I don’t actively try to solve the movie as I go, and even I knew what was happening, and the final twist just didn’t do it for me. I felt the question “Which Lupita WAS that?” was more interesting than the answer, and that could’ve been left ambiguous for a stronger movie, IMO.
I hope Jordan Peele continues to get wackier and more horror-oriented, and I hope his themes continue to get simpler and less interesting to talk about so that we can spend more time talking about the horror plots and themes and less time talking about the meaning of his movies in larger society. Because I think his movies are more interesting as horror movies than they are as social commentary.
His movies, to me, are like a decorative knot, a Monkey’s Fist of sorts. The original threads are straightforward and uninteresting, and what’s interesting is what he does with them, the paths he takes, and the end product is beautiful and functional. But when everyone and their mother unties the Monkey’s Fist, it unravels quite a bit, and we’re left with far less than we had before we started picking at it.”