making your whole film revolve around a metaphor is just a bad idea in general
Get Out is good because it works on its own as a story, the worldbuilding and the characters' decisions all make sense when you consider them in isolation. and then it can make sense as a metaphor on top of that
Us does not work as well in that regard
i felt the same way about Sorry To Bother You - it was like, yes, i agree with all the politics in this film, but also i don't watch films just to have my politics confirmed
making your whole film revolve around a metaphor is just a bad idea in general
Get Out is good because it works on its own as a story, the worldbuilding and the characters' decisions all make sense when you consider them in isolation. and then it can make sense as a metaphor on top of that
Us does not work as well in that regard
i felt the same way about Sorry To Bother You - it was like, yes, i agree with all the politics in this film, but also i don't watch films just to have my politics confirmed
Why?
this is just something i personally dislike and i don't know if it will be relatable to other people
but in my mind it's always like - just say the thing you mean. for me it's rare that an extended metaphor clarifies a problem or adds something new to a discussion
maybe it has some kind of persuasive value for people who aren't me, which is fine
it's important that the tethered are created, not natural, becaude poverty is not natural. american capitalism is not the natural state of humanity.
Uhhh...poverty IS the natural state of humanity, though. Hunter-gatherers aren't exactly rich.
Hunter gatherers have been shown too have upwards of 80% more leisure time than people in "civilized" nations. They are among the happiest people on earth because of their lifestyle.
I think anything humans do is the natural state of humanity.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
it's important that the tethered are created, not natural, becaude poverty is not natural. american capitalism is not the natural state of humanity.
Uhhh...poverty IS the natural state of humanity, though. Hunter-gatherers aren't exactly rich.
Hunter gatherers have been shown too have upwards of 80% more leisure time than people in "civilized" nations. They are among the happiest people on earth because of their lifestyle.
Most of the early studies on that treated a ton of work as not being work and only treated gathering food as work and not things like food preparation.
I don't really think it is "built on a metaphor" to any degree more than Get Out is.
They're both good solid horror stories about things that are horrific and images that stick with you as frightening that are also wrapped into a story that has a solid metaphor, and also good jokes.
Like there are rabbits in it because Jordan Peele is creeped out by rabbits. Dopplegangers are creepy! I 100% was excited for this movie because dopplegangers creep me out way harder than like, murderers or monsters.
The fact that the metaphorical elements generate a lot of discussion doesn't mean that Peele was sitting down going "No shoot what are the dad's sandals a metaphor for? Is it the inherently ill-distributed nature of captial? Dammit!"
I feel like one of the things I enjoyed was that we only
get what Red thinks about what's happening. She's made some guesses, but she definitely doesn't give us "what happened".
I didn't really care for this movie-it was well done but something was off about it and I can't quite place it. Honestly most of the logistics of the film don't bother me as much as the exposition.
I never really got a good handle on how 'metaphorical' the tethered people were, in some aspects they seemed to have supernatural powers, but then they become more and more mundane as the story goes on. If things were left more vague about where they came from and what exactly they were it wouldn't bother me as much. Tim's character getting hit in the head with the poker and being fine, his daughter falling on the table and getting back up later, the family's doppelgangers all seemed sort of supernatural in their behavior. but then its like, oh, they're actually just flesh and blood people but they're also compelled to do things? I have to re-watch at home and see if I get different vibes from the opening act, but I was just really bored through the whole opener until they left the cabin when I was like 'oh, this is actually going somewhere'
I think a lot of problems people are having, including myself, with the movie is that the Tethered have maybe a 40% complete explanation of the rules.
If they had left it completely ambiguous I think it would have been better and also better if they completed the explanation.
This weird half baked area is what trips me up.
The Half in the Bag guys said the same thing in their review. They said they liked the movie and encourage people to see it in theaters (plus they eagerly await Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone), but they also said it tried to explain a ludicrous concept to the point that it made you think about the logic behind it too much. The movie would have been better without the long exposition scene in front of the blackboard.
Where did they get 300 million of those red outfits???
I want to clarify I still liked the movie and don't regret seeing it, and I've seen metaphor-driven movies before with no problem, but this one in particular violated my suspension of disbelief.
Yeah the main detriment of the movie to me was that I started thinking about the details too much at the end.
Particularly the big twist - although it was a bit predictable, I really struggled to wrap my mind around it. Adelaide's trauma and fear from that event doesn't make a lot of sense for the culprit who did the swap. And why did Red become tethered to Adelaide when they switched places? Just being inside the tunnel makes you the one who's forced to follow the one on the surface? Couldn't she have simply walked out the first chance she got? There's no real rational way to explain it, but I think if they had done less exposition on how the doppelgangers worked, it would have been easier to accept.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Every night they have to perform exhausting physical activity from which they derive no pleasure. The scene in the tunnel with the macabre version of the board walk is the pointless miserable labor that millions perform every day. Of course their labor isn't actually useful, but neither is the labor many of us are forced into.
Its not an indictment of revolution, its just realizes that injustice breeds bloodshed. You'll hear more than one person say that there's no innocence in an unjust system. Think of it like the French Revolution. Did the population have just cause to revolt? Yuuuuup. Did they kill a lot of innocent people? Yuuuuup. Peele isn't condemning or condoning, he's putting the cycle of violence that a class based society breeds on a screen in lurid colors.
My thoughts, adding a little extra to that.
Popular revolts and revolutions are very often created/lead/co-oped by charismatic figures for their own ends. Red down below started a revolution, and ostensibly an understandable one due to the horrific conditions of the Tethered underground, but the plan makes no sense in actual terms of helping anyone above or below. Mass murder and then the freed Tethered hold hands in a giant line...indefinitely? Until they starve?
Because helping them wasn't the point in the first place. Red below had gone insane and just wanted revenge. How many revolts over the years, no matter how understandable the conditions were, actually happened because a leader wanted to take back their "rightful" position, or vengeance against someone else, or any other number of reasons ultimately equally petty compared to what should be a noble revolution of the masses? The situation usually gets more unstable immediately afterward too - that line can't stand forever, and revolutions often fall immediately to civil war and further cycles of revolution.
The movie is messy in places, but I'm thinking that's partially intentional because yeah, these sorts of things are messy.
I think a lot of problems people are having, including myself, with the movie is that the Tethered have maybe a 40% complete explanation of the rules.
If they had left it completely ambiguous I think it would have been better and also better if they completed the explanation.
This weird half baked area is what trips me up.
Where did they get 300 million of those red outfits???
I want to clarify I still liked the movie and don't regret seeing it, and I've seen metaphor-driven movies before with no problem, but this one in particular violated my suspension of disbelief.
Hey, maybe they were running a garment sweatshop down there. It'd explain the scissors as weapon-of-choice, right?
So was caring for and feeding these people if the govt had abandoned the program?
Doesnt really matter
I shouldn't, but arguably the more screen time you spending showing their lives down there, the more likely the audience is to start wondering about the answer to this question. Simply saying "it doesn't matter" doesn't actually make it not matter, once a viewer has decided it does. This was, I think, a mis-step on Peele's part, and you can't just hand-wave it away with "it's a horror movie, it doesn't need to make sense." Horror, sci-fi, fantasy, these are genres that are not bound by our normal rules of logic, physics, etc. But it's usually best if you can either make them seem internally consistent or if you can obscure enough of the flaws that the audience doesn't ask the question.
You pull back the curtain far enough, and people will start asking what's back there. Telling them they're wrong to ask isn't really the proper response. You need to either make sure you have answers to those questions, or not pull back the curtain so far that people ask them. It's a somewhat minor flaw in an otherwise great movie, but a flaw nonetheless. And one that will significantly impact enjoyment of the movie for a lot of the audience who are unwilling to ignore it.
So was caring for and feeding these people if the govt had abandoned the program?
They cared for themselves and ate the rabbits.
There's nothing rabbits can eat in an empty tunnel. They needed rabbit food. And also you will not be healthy and tough like the tethered were existing only on rabbit.
So was caring for and feeding these people if the govt had abandoned the program?
They cared for themselves and ate the rabbits.
There's nothing rabbits can eat in an empty tunnel. They needed rabbit food. And also you will not be healthy and tough like the tethered were existing only on rabbit.
Sir. They ate the rabbits. That is the explanation. If you're concerned with protein poisoning relative to the general health of the imaginary duplicates you are overthinking things by a large margin. You need to put it up there along side "nefarious duplicate clones" even being able to exist.
So was caring for and feeding these people if the govt had abandoned the program?
They cared for themselves and ate the rabbits.
There's nothing rabbits can eat in an empty tunnel. They needed rabbit food. And also you will not be healthy and tough like the tethered were existing only on rabbit.
Sir. They ate the rabbits. That is the explanation. If you're concerned with protein poisoning relative to the general health of the imaginary duplicates you are overthinking things by a large margin. You need to put it up there along side "nefarious duplicate clones" even being able to exist.
I don't think "but wtf do the rabbits eat" is a ridiculous question, and it's one I think a lot of the audience is going to ask. Again, the curtain is peeled back just enough that a ton of very obvious questions arise, none of which seem to have any remotely reasonable answer.
Aside from a few minor editing things,
Had a placeholder soundtrack
Didn't have the pre-title of the 'tunnels' stuff
Didn't have the speech at the end
The later two things I think would've improved things. I just think the movie would be so much stronger if it worked with nightmare logic instead of trying to make it more real
So was caring for and feeding these people if the govt had abandoned the program?
They cared for themselves and ate the rabbits.
There's nothing rabbits can eat in an empty tunnel. They needed rabbit food. And also you will not be healthy and tough like the tethered were existing only on rabbit.
Sir. They ate the rabbits. That is the explanation. If you're concerned with protein poisoning relative to the general health of the imaginary duplicates you are overthinking things by a large margin. You need to put it up there along side "nefarious duplicate clones" even being able to exist.
I don't think "but wtf do the rabbits eat" is a ridiculous question, and it's one I think a lot of the audience is going to ask. Again, the curtain is peeled back just enough that a ton of very obvious questions arise, none of which seem to have any remotely reasonable answer.
It's not a ridiculous question but it's definitely completely irrelevant to the plot of the movie and is easily handwaved away.
There were hundreds of doors down in the tunnels. One of those rooms is filled with a lifetime supply of rabbit food. Also there's a box of Oh Henry's in there along with several copies of ET for the Atari. See? It's that easy.
People like nitpicking sci-fi/fantasy/horror movies. It's part of the fun. "Us" seems to be horror/sci-fi, so there's some explanations that sort of make sense but don't really hang together entirely, like "the force" from Star Wars.
People like nitpicking sci-fi/fantasy/horror movies. It's part of the fun. "Us" seems to be horror/sci-fi, so there's some explanations that sort of make sense but don't really hang together entirely, like "the force" from Star Wars.
Those people all loved then mitachlorians explained the force I'm sure
People like nitpicking sci-fi/fantasy/horror movies. It's part of the fun. "Us" seems to be horror/sci-fi, so there's some explanations that sort of make sense but don't really hang together entirely, like "the force" from Star Wars.
Those people all loved then mitachlorians explained the force I'm sure
Yeah, that illustrates how answers are not necessary, but doesn't mean that the millions of Star Wars fans who liked speculating on how the Force worked before that were doing something wrong. Discussing this stuff is part of the fun of watching a movie.
At the end of the day, I don't care but it seemed interesting that the american govt doesn't much give two shits about black people on the surface, but they were making sure these other morlock ones were taken care of? Although I suppose there was a mix of all manner of folks. When I was younger I didn't tend to ask questions but now it sort of irks me when I see these things, and in some cases is a mild irritant and in others just ruins the flick. (Prometheus)
As to getting answers, it's totally a double edged sword; sometimes I want those answers, other times ....fuck it, just leave the enigma. Why do the Vex do the things they do in Destiny? I hope we never find out. Midi Chlroians were sort of a weird quirk that I didn't really fuss over and my loss of interest in Star Wars as I've gotten older meant I just wasn't invested enough to get fussy about 'em.
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ObiFettUse the ForceAs You WishRegistered Userregular
I don't care if a movie expects me to take some things just on the movie's word for it. But when it explains something to me, I expect it to make sense at least in the universe the story is being told in.
Like above someone mentioned aliens with acid blood. If the movie shows me that an alien has acid blood, then I'll go along with it. It could be a thing I guess. But if the movie explains to me the alien physiology in such a way that makes the acid blood no longer make sense? It will be a bad spot on the movie.
Or like a villain like Jason. They just show he doesn't die. He's got some crazy evil in him and its supernatural. Sure. I'm with ya. But if they try and explain how Jason can do all these supernatural things? Thats probably where you lose me unless you can make it really convincing.
US? I love the movie. But easily the worst part was when she was explaining exactly how it all went down in the tunnels. I was good with it being these doubles from underground. Because its just something the movie asks us to go along with. I was even fine when they said it was a cloning experiment gone wrong. I'm also fine with the explanation that clones and the original share a soul. The Tether idea is fine because its just a rule that the movie establishes. But when you start trying to convince me that they lived on rabbits and also planned out gathering all these jumpsuits and scissors and also these tunnels are like pristine. It starts to fall apart.
She doesn't explain "how it all went down in the tunnels". She describes what they are and what their life is like. That's basically it. The rest is just window dressing.
1) This family has doppelgangers
2) Oh, more families have doppelgangers
3) OH, everybody has a doppelganger! How does this work? I wonder if they'll explain it or not.
*long explanation scene*
4) Wait, the fuck? This explanation makes no sense!
In contrast, one of my favorite Junji Ito stories is kind of similar to Us:
In The Hanging Balloons, everyone in Japan has what appears to be corresponding giant floating heads with wire nooses coming after them that want to hang them. People end up starving to death in their homes because their corresponding "balloon" is waiting just outside for them. Plus, you can't just pop the balloons, because the head of the person that balloon corresponds with will also horrifically deflate.
That scenario is even more fantastical than what Us presents, but it also doesn't try to explain or justify it at all, so I don't question it.
If they perhaps cut out the explanation that it was all part of a government mind control experiment and left it as some kind of ambiguous netherworld that just so happens to look like manmade tunnels I doubt I'd be questioning it so much. Instead I found myself wondering things like "so do all these tethered stay underneath the amusement park all the time, or do they move around underground tailing the people aboveground?"
Its not nitpicking as much as the movie shoving it in your face at the climax of the film when most of what had gone on seemed to run on its own nightmare logic.
general spoilers - also none of this is really complaining, I've actually warmed to the movie more the more I've thought about it, and most movies rarely stick with me this long so it has that in its favor.
I mean, there's 2 approaches you can take here: Twilight Zone or X-files. It seems like Peele started with the 'nightmare' twilight zone logic..the tethers have rules, they are metaphorical representations of us, and all things that go on underneath are a hazy nightmare-this lets him have things like the synchronicities piling up, the weird imagery, the rabbits, the costumes, the mimicking, All of that works best when that is the internal logic of the film. The tethers are human, but still distorted in some way. Soul/no soul thing is fine, the mimicking stuff is fine, its all about playing up the nightmare Red lived in. The escalator is not a 'Real' place, its a metaphorical transition into another place, like in so many Twilight Zone movies.
The X-Files approach: Adapting some old DUMB (deep underground military bases) conspiracy theories into a horror movie. They roughly line-up with the beginning of the film. They're a nightmare conspiracy theory too, but they require a different starting point, where you figure out the lore of the place and work backwards. It doesn't need to be rock solid, but it requires some more explaining. I've even seen YT comments were conspiracy theorists are like OMG PEELE KNOWS. But this requires a different set of aesthetics, if this were mulder and scully investigating it, the threat is that at any moment their doppels could pop out of any sewer or secret basement door and attack them before scuttling back under. There's an old scientist explaining how the whole thing went tits up. The underground area is vast, dark and terrifying. Its a bigger, less personal story (or you could restrict the mechanics to just Santa Ana bt 89 and 2019) The synchonicity and mimicking (to the literal level of the carnival scene) is more jarring. The other side of this approach is that all the tethers are more 'real', they're tormented by the experiment, shunned by the world and without proper speech and all that.
Peele seems to have been mostly working at a symbolic level with what exactly the underground was, you can even see it in the use of color/arrows when Adelaide is descending. I can't remember the color logic, but I think there's red arrows pointing down to the underground (becoming more red symbolically meaning becoming more like the tethers). The class room at the culmination of the movie is a representation of TEACHING Adelaide of her wrongs, its not a classroom in the blue prints of some military base you know? The synchronicity stuff showing out throughout the whole movie, the symbolism, and even explicit dialogue from Adelaide the family shows up seem to skew to this side. But then at some point either the producers or Peele felt that it wasn't good to leave things so ambiguous so added more exposition in the least obstructive way possible (intro text, the villain speech at the end, Zoras mention about the flouride in the water that never goes anywhere, they even added that shot of Adelaide looking at Jason after the test screenings).
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miscellaneousinsanitygrass grows, birds fly, sun shines,and brother, i hurt peopleRegistered Userregular
The entire thing is horror as allegory, anyway, so i'm not sure why people are getting so hung up on any logical/logistical inconsistencies instead of analyzing the messages it offers
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
I saw this yesterday and I'm still kind of digesting, will probably go see it again this week.
Couple few things though:
I've heard a couple few people saying the class allegory doesn't work because the protagonists are middle class. If they are it must be some of that Wall Street Journal middle class because they drive a Mercedes and have a summer home (not cabin) on the waterfront in Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is like 30 minutes away from where I used to live in the Bay Area and while it's marginally cheaper than the Bay Area proper, waterfront houses with docks definitely aren't. That family's in the top 10%, if not 1%.
It's also weird to me that in a story with a secret government project with fictional mass cloning technology, and even more fictional quantum entanglement of the soul, that folks are getting hung up on how the Tethered survived on rabbit and seem to have some enhanced physical abilities. An extremely unethical government created them, who's to say they're 1:1 copies and not enhanced? Where did the rabbits come from? Same automated vat cloning operation as the humans obvs.
For all the explanation we got; we really didn't. We have the assumptions of an adult who was abandoned down there as a small child. Red's an incredibly unreliable narrator.
I saw this today, and really liked it. I have to digest it more to know if I liked it more than Get Out, but it was tense and engaging and thoughtful, so yay.
My biggest complaint is that the exposition near the end was delivered in a clunky fashion. I could've used a little less specific detail, but I might have minded it less if it was delivered in a more organic fashion.
Also, I'll say that the twist was easy to see coming, but I felt that it was thematically important that it happen, so I didn't mind. It would've been a very different message without that bit.
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Also, movie's been out for a bit, so I think it's time to open up spoilers.
WATCH OUT FOLKS, OPEN SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT
ALSO MAKE SURE YOU TAG ANY SPOILERS FOR GET OUT
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
People keep harping on the twist and I'm not even sure it was meant to be a twist in the traditional sense. Just about everybody I know who has seen the movie realized that Red/Adelaide had been switched out. The end simply confirms that this happened. The real reason it's important is that it makes the viewer question the archetypical role of the "bad guys" in the film. If Adelaide could come out of the underground and become a fully functional member of society why can't everybody else?
It's not about the twist. It's about the implication of what that twist means for what we've seen over the past 2 hours or so.
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Why?
this is just something i personally dislike and i don't know if it will be relatable to other people
but in my mind it's always like - just say the thing you mean. for me it's rare that an extended metaphor clarifies a problem or adds something new to a discussion
maybe it has some kind of persuasive value for people who aren't me, which is fine
I think anything humans do is the natural state of humanity.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Most of the early studies on that treated a ton of work as not being work and only treated gathering food as work and not things like food preparation.
They're both good solid horror stories about things that are horrific and images that stick with you as frightening that are also wrapped into a story that has a solid metaphor, and also good jokes.
Like there are rabbits in it because Jordan Peele is creeped out by rabbits. Dopplegangers are creepy! I 100% was excited for this movie because dopplegangers creep me out way harder than like, murderers or monsters.
The fact that the metaphorical elements generate a lot of discussion doesn't mean that Peele was sitting down going "No shoot what are the dad's sandals a metaphor for? Is it the inherently ill-distributed nature of captial? Dammit!"
I feel like one of the things I enjoyed was that we only
If they had left it completely ambiguous I think it would have been better and also better if they completed the explanation.
This weird half baked area is what trips me up.
The Half in the Bag guys said the same thing in their review. They said they liked the movie and encourage people to see it in theaters (plus they eagerly await Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone), but they also said it tried to explain a ludicrous concept to the point that it made you think about the logic behind it too much. The movie would have been better without the long exposition scene in front of the blackboard.
I want to clarify I still liked the movie and don't regret seeing it, and I've seen metaphor-driven movies before with no problem, but this one in particular violated my suspension of disbelief.
My thoughts, adding a little extra to that.
Because helping them wasn't the point in the first place. Red below had gone insane and just wanted revenge. How many revolts over the years, no matter how understandable the conditions were, actually happened because a leader wanted to take back their "rightful" position, or vengeance against someone else, or any other number of reasons ultimately equally petty compared to what should be a noble revolution of the masses? The situation usually gets more unstable immediately afterward too - that line can't stand forever, and revolutions often fall immediately to civil war and further cycles of revolution.
The movie is messy in places, but I'm thinking that's partially intentional because yeah, these sorts of things are messy.
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Doesnt really matter
I shouldn't, but arguably the more screen time you spending showing their lives down there, the more likely the audience is to start wondering about the answer to this question. Simply saying "it doesn't matter" doesn't actually make it not matter, once a viewer has decided it does. This was, I think, a mis-step on Peele's part, and you can't just hand-wave it away with "it's a horror movie, it doesn't need to make sense." Horror, sci-fi, fantasy, these are genres that are not bound by our normal rules of logic, physics, etc. But it's usually best if you can either make them seem internally consistent or if you can obscure enough of the flaws that the audience doesn't ask the question.
You pull back the curtain far enough, and people will start asking what's back there. Telling them they're wrong to ask isn't really the proper response. You need to either make sure you have answers to those questions, or not pull back the curtain so far that people ask them. It's a somewhat minor flaw in an otherwise great movie, but a flaw nonetheless. And one that will significantly impact enjoyment of the movie for a lot of the audience who are unwilling to ignore it.
It does matter. They had to fend for themselves. The neglect is part of the metaphor.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning
I don't think "but wtf do the rabbits eat" is a ridiculous question, and it's one I think a lot of the audience is going to ask. Again, the curtain is peeled back just enough that a ton of very obvious questions arise, none of which seem to have any remotely reasonable answer.
Had a placeholder soundtrack
Didn't have the pre-title of the 'tunnels' stuff
Didn't have the speech at the end
The later two things I think would've improved things. I just think the movie would be so much stronger if it worked with nightmare logic instead of trying to make it more real
It's not a ridiculous question but it's definitely completely irrelevant to the plot of the movie and is easily handwaved away.
Good thing this movie wasn't about aliens that had acid for blood, that would be ridiculous and too unrealistic for my taste.
Those people all loved then mitachlorians explained the force I'm sure
Yeah, that illustrates how answers are not necessary, but doesn't mean that the millions of Star Wars fans who liked speculating on how the Force worked before that were doing something wrong. Discussing this stuff is part of the fun of watching a movie.
As to getting answers, it's totally a double edged sword; sometimes I want those answers, other times ....fuck it, just leave the enigma. Why do the Vex do the things they do in Destiny? I hope we never find out. Midi Chlroians were sort of a weird quirk that I didn't really fuss over and my loss of interest in Star Wars as I've gotten older meant I just wasn't invested enough to get fussy about 'em.
Like above someone mentioned aliens with acid blood. If the movie shows me that an alien has acid blood, then I'll go along with it. It could be a thing I guess. But if the movie explains to me the alien physiology in such a way that makes the acid blood no longer make sense? It will be a bad spot on the movie.
Or like a villain like Jason. They just show he doesn't die. He's got some crazy evil in him and its supernatural. Sure. I'm with ya. But if they try and explain how Jason can do all these supernatural things? Thats probably where you lose me unless you can make it really convincing.
US? I love the movie. But easily the worst part was when she was explaining exactly how it all went down in the tunnels. I was good with it being these doubles from underground. Because its just something the movie asks us to go along with. I was even fine when they said it was a cloning experiment gone wrong. I'm also fine with the explanation that clones and the original share a soul. The Tether idea is fine because its just a rule that the movie establishes. But when you start trying to convince me that they lived on rabbits and also planned out gathering all these jumpsuits and scissors and also these tunnels are like pristine. It starts to fall apart.
2) Oh, more families have doppelgangers
3) OH, everybody has a doppelganger! How does this work? I wonder if they'll explain it or not.
*long explanation scene*
4) Wait, the fuck? This explanation makes no sense!
In contrast, one of my favorite Junji Ito stories is kind of similar to Us:
That scenario is even more fantastical than what Us presents, but it also doesn't try to explain or justify it at all, so I don't question it.
general spoilers - also none of this is really complaining, I've actually warmed to the movie more the more I've thought about it, and most movies rarely stick with me this long so it has that in its favor.
The X-Files approach: Adapting some old DUMB (deep underground military bases) conspiracy theories into a horror movie. They roughly line-up with the beginning of the film. They're a nightmare conspiracy theory too, but they require a different starting point, where you figure out the lore of the place and work backwards. It doesn't need to be rock solid, but it requires some more explaining. I've even seen YT comments were conspiracy theorists are like OMG PEELE KNOWS. But this requires a different set of aesthetics, if this were mulder and scully investigating it, the threat is that at any moment their doppels could pop out of any sewer or secret basement door and attack them before scuttling back under. There's an old scientist explaining how the whole thing went tits up. The underground area is vast, dark and terrifying. Its a bigger, less personal story (or you could restrict the mechanics to just Santa Ana bt 89 and 2019) The synchonicity and mimicking (to the literal level of the carnival scene) is more jarring. The other side of this approach is that all the tethers are more 'real', they're tormented by the experiment, shunned by the world and without proper speech and all that.
Peele seems to have been mostly working at a symbolic level with what exactly the underground was, you can even see it in the use of color/arrows when Adelaide is descending. I can't remember the color logic, but I think there's red arrows pointing down to the underground (becoming more red symbolically meaning becoming more like the tethers). The class room at the culmination of the movie is a representation of TEACHING Adelaide of her wrongs, its not a classroom in the blue prints of some military base you know? The synchronicity stuff showing out throughout the whole movie, the symbolism, and even explicit dialogue from Adelaide the family shows up seem to skew to this side. But then at some point either the producers or Peele felt that it wasn't good to leave things so ambiguous so added more exposition in the least obstructive way possible (intro text, the villain speech at the end, Zoras mention about the flouride in the water that never goes anywhere, they even added that shot of Adelaide looking at Jason after the test screenings).
Couple few things though:
It's also weird to me that in a story with a secret government project with fictional mass cloning technology, and even more fictional quantum entanglement of the soul, that folks are getting hung up on how the Tethered survived on rabbit and seem to have some enhanced physical abilities. An extremely unethical government created them, who's to say they're 1:1 copies and not enhanced? Where did the rabbits come from? Same automated vat cloning operation as the humans obvs.
For all the explanation we got; we really didn't. We have the assumptions of an adult who was abandoned down there as a small child. Red's an incredibly unreliable narrator.
Also while there's definitely a lot of class metaphors in the movie, I thought this article about the Native American imagery and tropes was pretty interesting. https://www.vulture.com/2019/03/the-native-imagery-of-jordan-peele-s-us-explained.html
My biggest complaint is that the exposition near the end was delivered in a clunky fashion. I could've used a little less specific detail, but I might have minded it less if it was delivered in a more organic fashion.
Also, I'll say that the twist was easy to see coming, but I felt that it was thematically important that it happen, so I didn't mind. It would've been a very different message without that bit.
WATCH OUT FOLKS, OPEN SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT
ALSO MAKE SURE YOU TAG ANY SPOILERS FOR GET OUT
It's not about the twist. It's about the implication of what that twist means for what we've seen over the past 2 hours or so.