Us is the second horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele. Coming off the heels of Peele’s last film, Get Out, Us uses its premise of a family terrorized by clones of themselves in order to comment on the socio-economic status of modern-day America. However, while Us has an interesting and unique premise, major flaws plague the movie. Because of its focus on message over a logical narrative, Us contains major plot holes and an overabundance of motifs, which cause the movie to fundamentally suffer.
The major obvious flaws of Us are in its storytelling. Firstly, there are countless plot holes throughout the movie. The extent of the clones’ mimicking of their above-ground counterparts changes dramatically throughout the film. Many times the underground clones exhibit free thought and independent actions, yet at one point Jason kills his clone by walking backward, thus forcing the clone to seemingly unintentionally walk backward into a blazing fire. The mimicking makes less sense by the fact that the clones were able to follow their counterparts so precisely that everyone vacationing on a boardwalk has their clones directly under them, somehow able to follow the originals across the country despite no cars, planes, or other methods of mass transportation. The extensiveness of the cloning operation, and the clones living underground only surviving by eating rabbits is so impractical it borders on humorous. Despite the clones living underground in narrow tunnels, the revolution is successfully organized nationwide despite being led by one individual person with presumably limited access to technology and the ability to communicate also seems impossible. While many movies can survive and thrive with plot holes counter-intuitive to the story, the movie fails to tell a compelling story due to the sheer amount of major plot holes undermining the main premise of the movie coupled with the fact that the movie extensively attempts and fails to explain these plot holes, thus drawing the audience’s attention to them. The question then becomes why was this movie successful with audiences and critics?
Many reviewers and fans of Us look to its message and the delivery of that message as the major driving point behind the enjoyability of the movie. To summarize, the main message of the movie is that people are built by the opportunities they are given and many are born with inherent advantages that allow them to thrive in society more than others. The movie also deals with issues regarding the taking advantage of the lower class and Americans’ obsession with material wealth. To its credit, the movie deals with these topics well using a unique premise. Utilizing its premise of underground clones who rise up and attack their above-ground counterparts, the movie draws the attention of people who are well-off and forces them to contemplate the similarities between them and those who they see as “the other.” The movie even effectively uses the final twist, in which it is revealed that the main character Adelaide was, in reality, the underground clone, to emphasize that the differences between classes are primarily based around the environment in which they grew up. The movie also uses various humorous moments, such as Gabe’s obsession with his boat or the dying Kitty’s pleas of help to Alexa, to show the focus by many privileged Americans on material goods as symbols of status. The line “We’re Americans,” uttered by the main villain Red when explaining who the clones are, drive home the movie as a powerful statement on the state of America in relation to class.
Audiences and critics valuing the Us based primarily on its message is due to the writer and director of the piece, Jordan Peele. Since his mainstream breakout success of Get Out, Peele has become an icon of horror movies and social statements, often using the former to promote the latter. That is the precise directorial technics Peele used when creating Us, framing it, like his other film, as a horror movie used to promote a social message. This is the perception of the movie that people had when viewing it. The value put on this piece was not as a traditional movie, but rather as a soapbox from which Peele could promote his message. This value can be seen from the initial reaction to the movie as an “African American” movie. Because Peele’s first movie was a commentary about the treatment of African Americans in America along with the casting of a black family as the main characters of Us, many initially believed that the Peele’s film was once again about race. Peele himself had to vocally explain that his movie was not about race before people accepted that fact. This phenomenon demonstrates the viewing method of most of the audiences and critics — they went in looking for a message. The question that determines whether or not this film is good is whether or not the focus on the message both by Peele and by the audience overrides the major faults of the narrative.
There is an argument for the importance of message over narrative, as some successful movies and books in the past have had little to no narrative at all. The Big Lebowski, an intensely popular movie, has no definitive story or character arcs, being a series of inexplicable events that happen to the main character that end up resolving themselves in order to promote its themes of absurdity and nihilism. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five has a narrative, but it is presented out of order and the main character acts passively through most of it, a cardinal sin of writing, in order to emphasize its message about the mindset of PTSD victims. However, the main difference between instances like these and Us is the fact that these use the lack of traditional narrative in order to emphasize their own points. Us does not use the inconsistencies in its narrative to further the message but rather ignores those inconsistencies to do so.
The message of Us only works if the audience ignores the inconsistencies of the plot, evident by the Peele’s knowledge of the fact. There are several attempts throughout the narrative to explain the logistics of the movie’s plot. The movie opens with a fact about the mass amount of tunnels under America in which the clones live. The movie then focuses on the mass amount of rabbits that the clones eat to survive, putting the image of the rabbits over its title sequence. The movie also mentions a conspiracy about the government putting mind control chemicals in the water in order to plant in the audience the idea of a government mind-control experiment from which the clones originated. Each of these points has some kind of double meaning in order to get the social message across, such as the tunnels representing the lower-class, the rabbits representing how Americans ignore the individuality of the lower class, or the mind-control conspiracy representing the governments hand in the socio-economic divisions in America. However, even if they exist as metaphors, they first and foremost exist as explanations of the movie’s plot and in that regard, they fail, as they do not make logical sense. In these instances, it seems that Peele focused more on the metaphorical nature of these explanations more than the narrative purpose of these explanations. This major flaw of prioritizing the message of the film over the narrative leads into a second major flaw.
By focusing too much on the message over the narrative, the movie finds itself becoming cluttered and overfilled, attempting to comment on too many subjects while creating convoluted plot points in order to be able to have these commentaries. As previously said, Us is able to effectively comment on the socio-economic state of America, yet there are other major themes that the movie attempts to comment on as well. The movie brings up themes of family dynamics, genetics, communication, government, social statements, and charity, on top of its main topics; yet do not focus enough on these extra points to justify their presence in the film. And again, because of the illogicality of the film, Us must lengthy periods of time explaining why and how the events of the movie are occurring. A significant portion of the climax is spent having Red explain her origins, reasoning, and methods to Adelaide, all of which are overly complex and confusing. Other imagery and motifs of the movie, such as the repeating visual of masks, fire, hands across America, or the Bible quote Jeremiah 11:11, among many others, are obviously put in the movie to support the messages and themes but are so numerous and so frequent they serve to distract the audience from the main narrative and further confuse them.
The end result is a heavily flawed movie. Although Peele’s vision is powerful and the method in which he enacts that vision unique and interesting, the core narrative of the film is too nonsensical to ignore. While a narrative film can have multiple meanings, themes, and metaphors, it must first establish a strong story that feeds those elements. Because Peele focuses too much on the deeper meaning of the film, he fails to fully explain its premise. This failure causes him to put in too much underdeveloped information in an attempt to either double down on the socio-political commentary of the film and futilely attempt to create a logical narrative. Because of these fundamental problems, Us is not a good film.