White Liberal Elite America's Worst Nightmare

Rating: Null/10 (12 April 2017)

"Get Out" is going to make some people very uncomfortable -- if they ever even watch it, that is -- and that is the movie's point.
Coming out in this racially charged time and amid outrage over the whitewashing of Hollywood, "Get Out" gives us a horror movie that ends ***spoiler alert**** with a young black man brutally murdering an entire clan of affluent liberal elite white people....and he's our hero! He's our hero because these liberal elite white people are anything but sympathizers to the Black Lives Matter movement. On the contrary, they use their white liberal status and privilege to convey an image of tolerance and acceptance while systematically capturing healthy black people and performing scientific experiments on them in order to hijack all of their best physical characteristics.
This premise might sound outrageous, and it is, but it's handled exceptionally well in this rather goofy horror movie that isn't afraid to go for it. Director Jordan Peele shows mastery in ratcheting up mystery and tension, and the first three fourths of the film, which are all build up, are gripping. It's unfortunate that the last quarter of the film doesn't show any of the creativity that the lead up to it does -- it's a rather pedestrian resolution to what up to that point has been anything but a pedestrian movie. But disappointing ending aside, the overall impression the film left on me was positive.
"Get Out" is easy to pick apart in retrospect. The plot doesn't even really make that much sense once one has had time to reflect on it. I'm still unclear as to what exactly the scientific experiments in the film were accomplishing, and a last-minute surprise reveal did nothing to clarify that point for me. But sometimes a movie is more important for being the right kind of movie at the right moment in time than for any of its individual merits, and "Get Out" feels like that kind of movie to me. Good as movies like "Moonlight" and "Fences" were, they were always going to have a limited audience. But "Get Out," by virtue of being a genre film, might actually pull in more of the audience who actually needs to hear its message. It's the first movie released since the Black Lives Matter movement that suggests that, from a black person's perspective, the liberal progressives who are championing black rights are no more to be trusted than the overtly racist. They're all variations of a system designed to maintain white dominance.
Grade: A-