BEFORE: Well, damn it, because I'm locked into a chain that will get me to the end of the year, and the new "Black Panther" film comes out in 10 days. With a little more foresight, I might have found a way to end my October chain with tonight's film, take a few days off, then go see "Wakanda Forever" as soon as it opens. Well, then I'd have no outro for that, in addition to shaking up my chain at essentially the last minute, so I'm not going to do that. I'll just put the new Marvel film on my list and I WILL get to it ASAP in the New Year. Considering that I caught up on Marvel this year, by watching "Shang-Chi", "The Eternals", "Doctor Strange 2", "Venom 2" and "Spider-Man: No Way Home", and even the "She-Hulk" series, I think I've done pretty well in 2022, no regrets. Tomorrow I'll list all the horror movies I didn't get to - but hey, I'll need some material for next October, too.
Elisabeth Moss carries over from "The Invisible Man".
THE PLOT: A family's serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgangers appear and begin to terrorize them.
AFTER: Well, here's the good news - if your whole family is stuck for Halloween costumes, or decides at the last minute that they all want to do something together, then all you need are some red jumpsuits and long pointy scissors, and you can all just go trick-or-treating as your own doppelganger family. You just need to mess your hair up, open your eyes real wide and learn how to smile like a crazy person. Problem solved.
This was the hot horror film of 2019, I think you can see from my choices this year that even if I put a horror film on my list and try to fast-track it, it still can take me two or three years to get to it. I got very lucky this year and found slots for "Morbius", "Last Night in Soho" and "Hotel Transylvania 4", but the rest have been around for a couple cycles, at least. And "Tales from the Darkside", how long has THAT one been on my list? Possibly since the beginning, it's tough to say. But I'd been trying to get to the "Purge" franchise and "The Amityville Horror" for a while, thankfully it's the newer films that allow me to use the older ones as linking material, or perhaps vice versa.
But if I think back, it was two years after "Get Out" was the hot movie, and literally everyone was waiting to see what Jordan Peele would do next. The answer turned out to be "Us" and then "Nope", but neither one really struck gold in the way that "Get Out" did - then Peele became the latest filmmaker to fail at trying to revive "The Twilight Zone", and I think we all wished him well, but let it rest already, stop trying to make "The Twilight Zone" happen. It had its day in the 1950's, and a movie in the 1980's, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I don't have time for another anthology TV series that I have to watch. I made it through all the Rod Serling episodes when I was a kid, learned a lot about dramatic irony, sure, but I committed them all to memory so that I'd never have to watch them again - because it turns out that when you play everything for shock value, there's not a great desire to watch that movie or TV show again. Once you learn the "Big Twist", you'll see it coming the second time, and its lost its impact.
And there is a "Big Twist" here, but it's buried in a very confusing, convoluted plotline - I still saw it coming a mile away, probably because I trained myself as a kid to figure out all those "Twilight Zone" episodes. Don't get me wrong, there's a great set-up here in "Us", the opening half-hour is 100% solid - it's the last half-hour, the time during which everything is supposed to be revealed and explained, where things just kind of fall apart. Oh, umm, how about a mid-review SPOILER ALERT here, if you don't want to learn the whole plotline of "Us" then please stop reading now, there's just no way to talk about this film without giving it all away. Anyway, a family on vacation gets a visit from their creepy doppelgangers, which is a German word that means "I look just like you, and I'm here to replace you."
The Wilson family is no match for their doppelgangers, who wear those red jumpsuits and carry those long pointy scissors and talk about "the Untethering" in a creepy way. Actually, only one of them talks, the others are either silent or make creepy growling or bellowing noises. Creepy, right, and what are they going to do with those scissors? At the same time, we're shown flashbacks of a little girl at a California beachside amusement park, wandering away from her parents and finding some kind of hall-of-mirrors in a funhouse, as one does at an amusement park. But within the hall of mirrors she meets her own reflection, that is to say, a little girl who looks and dresses just like her. Also creepy. So, umm, what's the connection between the stories? Is the little girl from the hall of mirrors the grown-up doppelganger, and if so, how did she get a whole doppelganger family that looks just like the real Wilson family?
Before we get any constructive answers, there's a drawn-out fight where the Wilson family has to defeat their doppelgangers, which isn't easy because they're suburbans, not really the killing type. Put anybody's back up against the wall, however, and they could be made to defend themselves - and any parent might have it within them to defend their children if needed, so deep down, perhaps we're all killing machines, when push comes to shove. Would you kill somebody to save your children, or your parents? Who can say what can happen in the heat of the moment? Would you kill a home intruder in the middle of the night, to protect your family?
But then it turns out that what's happening to the Wilsons is happening all over the city, maybe even all over the country. Crazed people in red jumpsuits are turning up all over the place, and if left unchecked, they're finding their human counterparts, presumably killing them, and then taking their place in a long, protest-like line of doppelgangers, what gives? A reference early in the film to the failed 1986 public event "Hands Across America" gives another clue to what might be going on here. The film also opens with the strange fact that there are miles and miles of tunnels under the United States, many of which don't have a known purpose.
But the big problem here is that even after the big reveal, when you try to put all these little narrative pieces together, it doesn't really make any sense. It's creepy, sure, but it still has to WORK as a story, and this just doesn't. If you tell me there's a guy who lives in a shack in the woods and he's killing people with a machete, I can understand that. If you tell me there's a vampire who lives in a castle and he sleeps in a coffin during the day and turns into a bat at night to drink human blood, it's a big ask, but I can still get behind it. But then if you tell me that the government somehow cloned everyone and made the clones live in the underground tunnels, where they all constantly mimicked the actions of the citizens living above because they don't have complete souls of their own, and this was some failed program to try to control the population, well, sorry, I'm not coming along on that ride. This seems even more far-fetched than saying that celebrities and politicians are drinking the blood of frightened babies in the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria.
How does this even work, anyway, if the government is no longer in control of the project, then who's feeding the clones, who's getting them the jumpsuits, how do they learn English or take showers or get supplies on a regular basis, and why don't more of them come up the stairs or the giant escalator and escape through the amusement park on a regular basis? And then who decided that completing the Hands Across America project was the ultimate goal, the thing they should be focused on? If they're all about the Untethering, and replacing their counterparts, why isn't THAT the main goal? Wouldn't it make sense for them to come up above ground one by one, initiate the take-over gradually, like the Skrulls in "Secret Invasion", rather than do it all at once, thereby revealing their presence to the world and tipping their hand?
Sure, I get it, mirrors are creepy and amusement parks are creepy, empty beaches are creepy, and rabbits in cages are creepy, but the pieces of the puzzle just aren't coming together for me here. And twins are creepy for sure. People who look a bit like you are definitely creepy - if you let them be. I've got photos of myself encountering my doppelgangers at comic-con - this happened when someone came to my booth who was also wearing a baseball cap and a similar Hawaiian shirt, and at that point what can you do but hug that other person and have your picture taken together? To me that seems like a much better way of handling things than just killing them outright.
I suppose there's a big metaphor here for the class system in the U.S. - as there's one group of people who get to live above ground, have jobs and houses and cars, while another group of people lives "underground", and doesn't have all of those things. That's fine, I get the race-based metaphor, but it's somewhat contradicted by depicting an upper middle-class African-American family, so the whole message gets kind of muddled. Sure, we all expected Jordan Peele to make another horror film connected to the Black experience, but there were scarier alternatives out there - gerrymandering, for example. I can't think of many things more terrifying than a whole group of people losing their voting rights and representation, but I guess that would be a lot harder to translate into a horror-movie plot.
Also starring Lupita Nyong'o (last heard in "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker"), Winston Duke (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Shahadi Wright Joseph (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019), Evan Alex, Tim Heidecker (last seen in "Brigsby Bear"), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Anna Diop (last seen in "Message from the King"), Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon, Madison Curry, Ashley McKoy, Napiera Groves, Lon Gowan (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Alan Frazier, Duke Nicholson, Dustin Ybarra (last seen in "Ted 2"), Nathan Harrington, Kara Hayward (last seen in "Paterson") and the voice of Jordan Peele (last heard in "Toy Story 4")
RATING: 4 out of 10 whacked moles
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