i give jordan peele credit for really pushing the envelope here, but he didn't think this story through enough to pull it off. there are some great atmospheric scares and the first 20 minutes of the film had me on the edge of my seat, anticipating this to unfold.
the first shot of the "tethered" family is, like juiced said, very disturbing. and well done. the movie is shot perfectly. but there are some bad tonal shifts (i.e. the awkward jokes) and i attribute this to a growing trend of modern writing habits in which they can't help but write their characters with the minds of audience members, rather than keep them in the story. this happens a lot in movies and tv shows of recent years and it drives me nuts.
the suspense is top notch, and i hope peele keeps making horror films. just like "get out", the mood was pitch perfect.
where it falls apart, is the ending. i will address spoilers below, quoting juiced's issues...but really, peele just didn't put all the pieces together for the "twist" to work. i have read some articles where the writers really want to give him the benefit of the doubt. but sorry, you turn in a script like this and you're a nobody...it gets tossed.
out of
SPOILERS BELOW
Quote:
The problems I had with the plot was not that I couldn't suspend disbelief, it was because I couldn't settle into a mood that let me suspend disbelief. With each of the three movies I listed, each called for suspending disbelief in different ways. Scream was silly and fun but not serious. Night Of the Living Dead was the first introduction to Zombies. You could lose yourself in the disbelief that the dead were coming back to life and eating people because Romero beautifully setup the illusion of a zombie apocalypse.
Hills Have Eyes was the most unbelievable of them all but it still took on the illusion that the desert cannibals are real.
These films each mastered different elements of disbelief and were a huge success in the horror genre. US was a jack of all trades and master of none.
SPOILERS.....
None of the family dies from their doubles when the white family doubles took out the whole white family in 2 minutes. This is a small detail but still annoying.
The biggest flaw was the reasoning for the doubles. We are suppose to believe they lived in an underground mall and caves for 30 years copying the actions of their upper world twin? Surviving on rabbits?
How did they all get red suits, scissors and gloves?
Enough of these doubles lived underground to form a "hands across the world" human chain?
If they copied the actions of their upper world twin, then how did they kill them. Why did they copy actions and then not copy actions? They didn't have free will. That is the point of the whole movie.
exc exc... The whole movie made no sense.
actually, i could handle buying the "tethered" story as outlandish as it was. it was enough of a backstory to fill in the gaps yourself. all of that storyline serves as a metaphor anyway, and could be accepted.
where it doesn't work, and why the film ultimately fails, is because of the twist. adelaide getting switched with "red" flat out doesn't work. because now, you have to explain more about how the "tethered" backstory can work. now we have to believe that a "tethered" person suddenly learned how to adapt like a human, fall in love, have a family, get through high school, all of that. but not only that, we have to believe that a human girl lived like a "tethered" person, and that doesn't add up at all. during the "dancing" scene, why would a human who had only been there a short time suddenly make "tethered" movements? how could a human girl survive on eating raw rabbits, with no supervision (since the project seemed to be abandoned by the time she got down there)--and even if the project hadn't been abandoned...wouldn't the people running it see immediately that adelaide was human, and return her to the world? and if not, wouldn't they have just killed her so she couldn't escape?
the twist raises all of these questions because now you're making an implausible story become part of reality. if you kept the "tethered" world as this bizarre, unexplained underworld, it would've fit better. i watched "the autopsy of jane doe" recently and that too had an impossible story that, once explained, could come off as stupid. and probably some people thought it was. but it served as a metaphor as well, and while baked into the premise, it worked.
but here, peele forces us to swallow too much that doesn't stay down. it's a shame too because the film could've been a really strong follow-up to "get out". there seemed to a place where the story was going that this human family was enjoying killing the tethered. that could've been a great commentary on society. juxtapose the image of these innocent rabbits slaughtered by tethered people, now tethered people slaughtered by humans. and in the end, the tethered take over the world.
instead, we get this slapped-on twist at the end that would make m. night cringe.
the biggest problem with it, besides all the other questions it raises, is that it has no effect on the story in the end: the family is still living in a world now taken over by tethered people. what difference does it make if adelaide is actually one of them? either way the family is doomed. it doesn't change anything.