Think About It, But Don't

Rating: 6/10 (22 March 2019)

First let me just start off with some basic pros and cons. There are a lot of great ideas here, and the actors all do a superb job of bringing them to life. On the other hand, the movie is too long. Clocking in at just over two hours, the repetitive cat and mouse, to-the-death struggles between people and their doppelgangers started to get down right boring, like "let's just determine who stabs who and get on with it!" Some of the humor was genuinely clever, some was out of place and ineffective (they go from being deeply traumatized to comical bickering over trivialities and back with no emotional authenticity). And the cutesy use of pop songs started to wear thin by about the third one. The "I Got Five On" it chat in the car? Cool. The ironic mass murder set to The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" scene? Great. By the time we got to the the life and death struggle to the tune of "F- the Police," though, we'd gone to the well too many times. So, overall, a perfectly watchable, decent but unexciting little horror flick.
But okay, now let's get deeper into the weeds and SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. Unlike his last film, Get Out, I think Jordan Peele spent so much time on meaning and metaphors of the subtext here, he let the superficial plot blow in the wind. It's exciting to contemplate just what he's saying with this movie... is this a statement about classism, or are both "sets" of people really two sides of the same individual? "Us" as in the U.S., how we as a country treat each other, the idea of some kind of self-wrought biblical judgement (i.e. all the Jeremiah 11:11 references) coming to all of us? That's fun to digest and debate.
On the other hand, just thinking about the literal premise is a frustrating experience. Theoretically, the government ran and abandoned a cloning facility underneath a public beach? And the entrance is a boardwalk entrance that anybody, even an aimless small child, can just wander into at any point? There's not even a closed door to discourage this... and indeed, by the fact that it's an open attraction, you'd think bunches of people would walk in every day. But nope, over decades, it only happened that one time.
Meanwhile, the government cloned... every single human being in the country? And gave them all matching clothes of their counterparts, plus identical red jumpsuits and a pair of scissors each? Maybe the scissors were for eating the live rabbits they were left to live on as a bizarre little eco-system. I get the idea of scissors cutting the ties that bind and the rabbits as intriguing visual imagery and even some kind of metaphor... a population growing out of control, and/or a little Alice In Wonderland going down into the secret underworld allusion. Again, great subtext, it just fails on the superficial textual level. I think perhaps Peele should've went with a supernatural premise rather than trying to sell us on a practical, real-world explanation.
Because if we're just talking about some kind of mystical, unknowable force at work, then okay fine, anything goes. But since we're being told it's a contemporary government project, then things should make some kind of sense. How come sometimes the kid walking backwards makes his clone walk backwards, but other times they act completely independently? Who kept the underground facility so spotless after it had been abandoned? The girl said she spent years planning her revolt, and then her plan was just for everybody to run up the escalator and stab everyone with their scissors? Ugh, I could go on and on, but it's clearly all just a sloppy mess the filmmakers never bothered to think through before dumping in the audience's lap.
We're just not supposed to think about it. Like the Mystery Science Theater guys say, "it's just a show, I should really just relax." And fine, except with it's coded messaging and metaphor signalling, this is a movie that's begging us to think about it, making for a really frustrating contradiction. On the one hand, "whoa, this is so deep when you think about it," but on the other, "it's just a fun time, don't overthink this stuff." Get Out got absurdist, too, when you followed its logic all the way to the end; but it still worked on both levels, where Us does not.