In My Humble Opinion: Us
Apologies ahead of time. This IMHO turned into more of a rant than anything else… it’s certainly longer than I originally intended.
So, one weekend… I think it was the weekend before last, at the time of this writing? I went and saw the movie Us. It was that or Captain Marvel, and I already knew most of the premise involved with Captain Marvel. Power set, general backstory, character personality(or lack thereof). Not to mention, Captain Marvel had been heavily politicized in its promotion. So, I decided to roll the dice on Us.
It was… bad. For a multitude or reasons. Oh, and spoilers ahead, so consider that your final warning. Though, if you want my opinion before all that; no, the movie isn’t really worth seeing.
Let’s start with the story. No! Wait… let’s start with the opening. An excruciatingly slow pan out from a bunch of bunnies in cages. This was rather terrible for multiple reasons. One, it was frustratingly tedious as I waited for the movie to actually start. Nothing is happening; just a bunch of rabbits slowly coming into view and opening credits play alongside music. A black screen with white text during this part would have been close to identical. But the imagery of the rabbits in cages conjures up the idea of cloning, which, spoiler alert… yeah, the movie has clones of people. I was hoping they would at least subvert this with something more supernaturally based surrounding the doppleganger’s origins, or at least a really creative scientific explanation, considering they were playing this imagery so heavily, but they don’t. They are just clones, a fact not dwelt upon to actually explain how the scientists did this. This really wouldn’t have been a big problem if they were a little more subtle, but they force you to stare at these rabbits in cages for an uncomfortably long time. It’s annoying, tedious, and rather insulting to the intelligence of the audience. If they don’t understand the association after a few seconds, stretching that out longer isn’t going to change anything.
Now, the story. We got an all black family vacationing on some beach. The mother suffered a traumatic experience when she was quite young at that beach where she saw a girl who looked exactly like her, after wandering off from her parent’s supervision. So, when her husband first suggests going to the beach, she naturally protests. And yet, rather than telling her husband she was LITERALLY TRAUMATIZED AS A CHILD AT THAT BEACH AND WOULD PREFER TO GO LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE, she kinda just dances around that fact, and eventually agrees to go to the beach. Because, basically, if she was to act halfway reasonable and state these objections clearly, there would be no movie at all, or at least no movie in the fashion they had wanted. So, we are already off to an absolutely fantastic start.
There’s some random bullcrap with coincidences occurring around them, and that being spooky. There is a small amount of relevant stuff mixed in, but the whole coincidence angle is largely a red herring. It means very little to the plot, so I don’t know why they draw so much attention to it, having characters stare at a frisbee that landed exactly on the same sized spot on a beach towel. Oh, and wow! The time happens to be 11:11, same as that bible verse the crazy homeless guy had been holding up at the start! That’s crazy, that time only happens twice every single day!
After some more meandering, the “monsters” show up. Is it just me, or is it kinda strange to have a movie specifically designed to feature an all black family as the main characters… have the monster be themselves? Am I reading too much into this? Probably, let’s move on.
First, they make a very big deal about the fact that the people outside are actually them. Even though it’s dark. And they are wearing different clothes. And, they are randomly doing a budget bin T-pose in a little chain for absolutely no reason. Then, the group uses a hidden key to break into the house, and… start killing them?(not really) After some hoarsely recited purple prose exposition by the main character’s double, everyone splits off into groups with their doubles. I don’t really know why, as later we see more doubles just straight up murdering people indiscriminately. I don’t know why the main characters get such special treatment, especially since that leads to them being the only people who survive. For as much of a threat as the doubles are painted, they are unbearably incompetent against the also quite incompetent main family. No one ever finds and uses a gun, as that would have shaved forty minutes off of the movie, and we can’t have that.
The doubles are never fully explained, which I find absurdly frustrating when they spend so much time talking about them in general. The doubles know everything their originals know… but they also can’t speak, other than the main character’s double. They all wear the same jumpsuit and carry scissors, with one hand wearing a glove, but the significance of this random getup is never really clear. They are seen in flashbacks as wearing clothes identical to their originals, so it’s not like it’s all they have. They are clones created in a lab and housed underground, used by the government(I think?) to try to control their originals, because of the… shared soul they have? I guess? Which is why the doubles want to kill the originals, so they can have a soul. But this experiment, to use the doubles to manipulate the originals… it is shown to work in a couple scenes, kinda, but the government still just abandoned the project for some reason. And rather than putting down all the doubles, putting them on ice, or just no longer caring for them, they are simply contained underground behind UNLOCKED DOORS while they are given nothing but raw rabbit to eat. Why raw rabbit? How is that easier than just having something like prison rations? I dunno. Never really explained.
I’m not even done with these doubles. They are insipid. One of them immediately kills her original, but then only restrains the main character, acting like she’s going to kill her but then not going through with it. Predictably, the double is eventually killed because she was screwing around putting on makeup instead of murdering and going to the T-pose chain. Oh, did I not mention that? After a double kills their original, they go join a long chain stretching out through the city and, presumably, across America. But they don’t do this immediately when the plot needs them to act differently. The rationale provided? None, they just ignore it. For that matter, why are the doubles or the main cast characterized as even slightly individualistic? The son’s double has a burned mouth, wears a mask, and runs around on all fours a lot while he acts like a dog. Why? No idea, the burn might be a reference to the spark magic kit thing the original kid is constantly messing with, but that doesn’t do much to make it less stupid. And the daughter’s double is described as sadistic while constantly smiling creepily, which is at first meant to be something unique, but that falls apart when you realize every single other double shown… that is, the ones that are not really focused on by the story… acts almost exactly like this. The fact they waste time on this frustrates me, as it is so meaningless while actually harming the cohesiveness of the story rather than doing world-building or making things actually scarier.
Now, I’m not much of a horror movie fan normally, as I enjoy being able to sleep easy at night. Luckily for me, this movie was not scary in the slightest. I was never immersed in it nor invested in any of the characters because the tone was awful and the premise was silly. You got people in orange jumpsuits stabbing people with scissors. Somehow, they aren’t immediately gunned down by gun toting citizens or police in full riot gear after the first dozen murders. No, somehow we have a bunch of mute psychopaths completely devastating a city’s population with scissors by simply walking briskly at people and stabbing them to death. This is not an exaggeration, they show this happening repeatedly. Every single person who died deserves to die for being completely incapable of recognizing a threat, and I don’t feel bad for them at all. I get paranoid if my neighbors are slightly loud, so I would freaking lock the doors and keep my back to the wall while holding the nearest weapon if I heard people screaming in pain with dead bodies lying in the street. I certainly wouldn’t approach the murderers with no weapon to try asking them what the heck they are doing.
As for why the tone was bad, I think it was caused by a variety of factors. Some of the acting just wasn’t very good, and as I’ve already explained, some of the characters just don’t act rationally. It’s also hard to take things seriously when the main cast is also joking around moments after MURDERING some doubles, talking about their different “kill counts” as being the reason why one should drive the escape vehicle over another. Say goodbye to any sense of urgency… the characters clearly understand they have plenty of time, thanks to their oh-so-sturdy plot armor. Too bad about their dead friends, though, but the main characters aren’t very broken up about them, either. Perhaps this movie was meant to be a dark comedy, but if so, it also failed at that due to any of the jokes being far to sparse and uninteresting while the plot also fought to be taken seriously. So… whatever. Let’s keep moving.
And then there is the twist! Through a rather obnoxiously drawn out scene, we have the main character’s double end up dead, and the son rescued from the underground… lab, I guess? The mother takes her son back to the surface, and the group leaves the city in their car, having survived the ordeal. But then! It’s revealed the mother was actually a double the whole time, having switched places with the original at that traumatic event in her childhood! What an amazing twist, we thought it was the original but it was actually the double all along, and the original is the one that is dead! Wow!
But… what does that really change? This kind of boilerplate twist was something I suspected near the start, which I discarded later in the movie for being rather stupid. I guess after all the other nonsense, I shouldn’t have set my hopes so high.
To be fair, there are some details that now make more sense. The reason the actual original speaks with a hoarse voice is because she was choked out by the double when they were both young. She was handcuffed underground while the double took her place, which is why she was the only one among the murderous doubles who could actually talk, as well as why the “double” handcuffed the “original”. She made the plan of the doubles T-posing across America because of a commercial about an anti-hunger campaign(though I still don’t know why she did this… “to make a statement”? What statement does this make, exactly?). But other than explaining some of these details, which honestly never mattered much in my opinion, it doesn’t really change the narrative at all.
What’s really the difference between a clone being isolated underground for her entire life, and a young girl being isolated underground instead due to being switched with a clone? Not much, both instances are human rights tragedies that turned what could have been a well adjusted individual into a murderous psychopath. The clone lived most of her life above ground, fell in love, got married, had kids, and otherwise… moved on. It’s not like the clone had some nefarious plan beyond that, she just seemed to want a real life. With such lax security, I haven’t the slightest idea why the clones simply didn’t leave the underground bunker and live on the surface. Very similar looking people exist already in everyday life, so if they traveled somewhere else entirely, they would be able to live their own lives just fine. The murder spree was entirely unnecessary, and can only be explained by vague supernatural nonsense. Did some supernatural force cause them to remain underground? What suddenly changed? The non-cloned girl realistically could have left at any time, and at least lived in an orphanage instead of the underground psuedo-prison. The rules on what the clones were actually constrained by are entirely ambiguous, their origin and purpose is rather nonsensical, their prison is just outright illogical, and their motivation is purple prose on two identical people sharing a soul or something.
The movie ends with the son looking at his mother suspiciously, but that’s the thing… that’s not an impostor, it’s his mother. The one who actually gave birth to him. Sure, she showed a bit of a dark side when the family had to fight for their life, but that’s the key detail… they were FIGHTING FOR THEIR LIVES. The movie could be almost identical with the original and the clone never switching places, or switching back shortly after the first switch. The only thing that would go missing are some of the stupid little “hints”, like the damaged vocal chords and the handcuffing to the table to mirror the handcuffing to the underground bunk bed.
This movie was completely ridiculous, and not in a good way. The characters were boring, the plot rather generic evil-twin kind of stuff, the twist predictable, and the story pretentious while being nowhere near as clever as it thought it was. I can’t imagine someone genuinely enjoying this trainwreck.