A trash America via beaches, zombies, and commercials

Rating: 10/10 (30 March 2019)

The soulless mount a 1970s style 'performance art' revolution, hand-holding into a great wall across the globe. When you stop and think how ridiculous this all is it can only be seen as satire. The seedling of the soulless one switching lives with the other, their own revolutionary leader 'Man in the Iron Mask' style, then leads them to claim what's hers. Their symbol of action is taken from some random t-shirt they see. Why do t-shirts hold so much symbolic power here? It's because they're in this trashy beach-bound American context; how the revolution goes on beneath theme park rides, sand and flip flops... as she says: "We are Americans." Us = literally United States. So of course rather than the great pyramids or monuments of humanity, it would be random garbage printed on shirts to imitate. Same how he knocks her out with the souvenir and Alexa is the closest weapon to defeating them. I'm reminded of the short story where aliens come down thousands of years after the apocalypse and reverse engineer humanity concluding McDonalds was their church of worship. The Africanism, the symbol of chains, the voodoo brings about its primal freight of replacement and reckoning by the underclass (with full on quotation of slavery and the 'underground railroad'). I don't think it's just race but 'us' in our luxury vs our shadows in iphone slave shops. 'We' are above ground enjoying the rides. 'They' are underground in dark tunnels and can only pretend. It is very modern day with immigration, migrant crisis, globalization. Have and have not's. The race to the top via a race to the bottom. And the art, the dancing, is the simple act of consciousness leads the tethered to some kind of awakening. Consciousness and unity is the way out only after uncomfortable violent revolution. How about the uselessness of the fathers across it as almost sitcom comic relief? The patriarch in power using it to no end. "You take it all for granted." (From Idiocracy: "Shouldn't I train him?" "I think he can pretty much learn to sit on his ass and watch TV.") 'They' are coming for your robes and vodka.
Think how the anti-hero mother could not ascend without the violent act of forcefully switching. That she could only assimilate into the host culture via the most silent, diligent mimicry, abandoning the culture of her own, showing the global unity leads to homogeneity. (Would like to see the same film again except entirely from her perspective.) Here we are all guilty and replaceable.
As usual genre is the only avenue directors have to tinker, tweak and consider the form. While art house audiences are puritan and pretentious about plot and tone. In the end, an audience member remarked, "I don't know what that was, I need to watch some YouTube videos about it." To me it's Peele's primal terror+satire via Ki-Duk Kim, a postmodern thriller. Tim is even in it.