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So I saw this last night, and as much as I hate to get this thread started out on a negative foot, I really disliked it. It looked good, and was funny at points, but everything else landed way off the mark for me. You could tell Peele loves the genre, and you can see a ton of influences in Us, but the execution wasn’t there. It tried to be simultaneously campy, high concept, and genuinely scary and ended up being a mess. Maybe I went in with miscalibrated expectations or something, but I really wanted to like it. I spent a ton of time last night reading reviews trying to see if I was missing something and honestly I felt like a lot of the critics saw a completely different film than I did. For context I thought Get Out was alright, not bad, but not standing up to all the praise on its own. The main thing exciting about it to me was that it was a decent first film for a new and unique voice in the genre.
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Mar 21, 2019 16:44
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 21:10 |
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I was thinking some more about it, and I think my main issues with the film are that it can't really decide on what it wants to be. Peele clearly wanted it to be a conceptual film, heavy on metaphors and symbolism, but instead of just feeling confident in that he writes in a bunch of purely expositional monologues and flashback scenes. Once you're trying to explain the mechanics of these things, it opens the film up to be engaged with a literal level because suddenly the mechanics matter. A good point of comparison I think, since Peele cites it as one of his influences, is It Follows. There is just enough of an explanation of the "thing" in that movie for the audience to grasp the "rules", and the rest of the film is engaging with the concept. He does the same thing mixing the comedy and horror elements. There have been a ton of comedy/horror films, so I know it can be done well, but this one doesn't seem to have the grasp on tone that's needed to pull it off, which I find surprising since I'd imagine Peele would be good at it. He's constantly undermining any tension he builds with jokes, which is fine if he was going for a straight horror comedy, but everything else leads me to believe he actually wants to terrify people.
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Mar 24, 2019 19:54
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