Movie Review: US (Spoilers)
So, I got to see Jordan Peele’s Us over the weekend and I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. A few things to note, Gabe (the husband) made my skin crawl with his antics. He was so oblivious and he did grasp the severity of the situation at all. That frustrated me the most. It didn’t surprise me when Adelaide took matters into her own hands.
When Adelaide decided to take things into her own hands and start getting rid of the doppelgangers and other threats herself, it made sense because Gabe was pretty much being counter productive the whole time.
But then when I found out the twist at the end of the movie, I was like it makes even more sense.
Spoilers below this line…
A young Adelaide wondered off from her father after her mom went to use the rest room. Her mother clearly asked him to watch her. Granted, young Adelaide was old enough to stay put. But her dad should have paid attention and she wouldn’t have had an opportunity to walk off. But then again if he had paid attention, there would be no movie, at least not in this capacity.
Again men in this movie are depicted as oblivious and and unhelpful. What a stressful mess.
Anyway, young Adelaide makes her way to a house of mirrors where she runs into evil young Adelaide and there is when the twist happens.
Evil young Adelaide ends up abducting the real Adelaide and taking her place in the sun. So now Evil Adelaide is above ground and the real Adelaide is below ground. Effectively turning the real Adelaide into Red and taking her place.
She legitimately lives out her entire life and comes back to her childhood home with her husband and children for a summer vacation in Santa Cruz.
Here’s where I start to get confused. The real Adelaide, Red and her doppelganger family come from underground, attack and hold the above ground family hostage.
Red never says, hey I remember when you choked me out and took me into the catacombs or whatever. She starts to talk about being her exact shadow and points out specific benchmarks in Adelaide’s life.
These milestones included getting married versus having to settle just because the husbands had the same face. And also their tragic differences in child birth. How above ground Adelaide needed a c-section, and underground Adelaide, Red needed one too, but had to do it herself.
This makes it seem like a spiritual connection in the outer realm, one being in the shadows and having to live through the above grounds choices on the dark side, plagued to only have terrible outcomes.
But then you find out it was a government operation gone array that was shutdown.
I’ll bypass the random questions I have like…
- When did the program shutdown?
- How many people were cloned?
- How did Red even find out what was going on?
- Who gathered the supplies for the revolution?
Because that’s besides the point, right.
My real confusion is, why wasn’t Red able to control above ground Adelaide because she was in fact the real one? Just because they swapped places doesn’t mean the chain of command changes. Does it?
Other questions I have include:
Does the tether get weaker the farther away you go from your clone? And if they share a brain bond, why wasn’t above ground Adelaide able to sense the revolution?
Confusion aside, this movie is deep and urges US to take a deeper look at ourselves, our values, and the things we take for granted because we could easily be in a terrible place and circumstance.
It’s a great movie and I’d recommend seeing the movie even if you’ve spoiled yourself. There are so many over arching themes that my head is still spinning.
And that is a good thing.
-ABD