I didn't understand the plot to Us (2019).

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Maybe I missed something, as a lot of people like this movie, but it feels to me that the plot was full of holes.


SPOILERS

Why did the families doubles not want to kill them but teach them some sort of lesson. The doubles wanted to hold them there alive for some reason, but we never find out what this reason is, since the family escapes and kills the doubles.

However, the doubles of the white married couple in the other house kill them immediately. Why did the white doubles want to kill the white couple immediately, but yet the doubles of the main family, want to keep them alive?

Also how is it that the male kid was able to control the double's movements and get his double to burn, when he had no control over the double's movements before? This seemed very inconsistent to me, and how did the kid figure it out, when he had no control over the double before?

Also, when Adelaide remembers that when she was a child that she switched with her double, why is it that she only remembered it right at the ending? Switching with your double when you are around 9 years old, and then living the rest of your life in a different dimension does not seem like something you would forget. It seemed to me that the only reason why the writers had her forget, is so she could remember right at the end, since that was the most convenient time for her to remember, just to give the twist maximum oomf. But it came off was too convenient, to the point where it felt gimmicky to me.

And also, who are all these people in a different dimension? Why do they live in this underground building world. They give us the who, what, where and when, but not the why it seems. I feel that the writer really needed to spend more time on developing the story world, rather than focus so much time on chasing, violence and killing, only to rush and pile on an explanation to everything in the end.

But what do you think, did I miss something?

Read this: Description of the plot to the movie "Us" (2019).

It's a complex and convoluted plot, but basically it's a movie of the "Slasher" sub-genre of the "Horror" genre.

So it doesn't have to make sense.

Last edited by Fnord on 09 Apr 2019, 7:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Oh okay thanks. I actually already read that but it didn't really go into any of the questions I had.

Those questions pertain to "Plot Twists" -- cheap tricks the director plays on you to keep you off-balance and keep you from guessing what happens next.

I will see if I can be of help with you.

Well, we do know that Red, Adelaide's double, was special, that she helped organize the whole thing, and especially her inner circle was not just killing straight out, but making a statement. One of the first things she did was handcuff Adelaide to the table, an echo back to what was done as a child. Red truly wanted them to feel the fear and pain she felt all those years back, as the only one being able to speak due to being the original Adelaide, she was in a unique situation.




There are a few possible reasons. It could be because they were young, so were not as untethered as adults. It could be as mentioned earlier that he is a little bit weird, which could go that he could sympathise a bit and take advantage of the link. Could also be a mix along with being a child of a normal human and originally tethered.



It was made pretty clear that Adelaide was suffering from PTSD, afraid of the truth of what she did, where she came from, and that she might go back, she locked the memories away. Only leaving a fear of another her. You might not have caught it, but the nursery rhyme Adelaide whistles in the movie is "Itsy Bitsy Spider", a rhyme about a spider climbing a drain pipe but being flooded down, but later climbing again, which is a little into the symbolism. But moments of tension such as her seeing a spider along with a fake spider was a fear she was feeling about a double coming up, and her falling down.



The opening words of the movie talked about unknown tunnels being all over America, spread all over for unknown purposes. Red posited that the whole doubles thing was a cloning experiment by scientists to control the populace, but failed because it did not work the way they wanted, so they abandoned the clones in the tunnels, along with rabbits that I think have a history of connection with cloning.

To really understand the plot of the movie though, you are going to have to accept some level of "plot holes", and look at it in terms of symbolism. The director has said that the movie is and can mean a lot of different things to different people, but I think that there are a few that stand a little higher. "Us" can be directly linked to the US(A), it is a statement on the way things are there. The tethered I think can be directly linked to a difference in class, my personal favourite being financial class. Notice traits about the family as they fight of the Tethered, such as the daughter's main weapon being a golf club, the son has a shirt that looks like a suit, that they have a summer home, a relatively expensive car, a boat. In fact the kills against doubles are also done with the boat and expensive car. It was all signifiers about being kind of higher class, that they have money and well off, and by contrast the Tethered are not that. The tethered were the downtrodden, those with so little and were stuck bellow, maybe even forced to painfully try and match lifestyle elements of those of privilege.

The 11:11 we see so often was in reference to a bible quote about god saying he would not answer the calls of those who worship false idols. The false idol in the movie probably being commercialism, continuously looking at your phone, caring about your stuff, that it is the only thing you do on the beach rather than have fun, and so on. The Hands across America thing that kept showing up, was a reference to an event in the 80s that should have had goo intentions, but did not raise as much as they might have hoped from participation, and the $30 million raised had $17 million taken out for administrative costs. Really work as a symbol of even something that could say to mean well, like the American dream, can be totally hollow when people are distracted by their stuff and there is so much inequality.

Did any of this help you understand better?

Okay thanks, but I guess the reason why I wasn't convinced of Adelaide not remembering until it was convenient for the plot, is because it felt convenient that she didn't remember to till the end, like the writers wanted her to remember at the end. If felt kind of gimicky that way.

But this is a bigger plot hole for me unless I missed something. Red's plan was to have all of the underground counterparts, attack their above ground counterparts. Red and the family goes after the above ground family, where as the white underground couple, goes after the above ground white couple... etc.

But this seems like a huge flaw in Red's plan. What if all of the underground people's counterparts, lived in different parts of the country, nowhere nearby any of them? They would all have to split and travel a lot more, thus making Red's army weaker, cause of all the travel inconveniences. If they want to make the above ground counterparts suffer, wouldn't it make sense to just kill the nearest ones, rather than all traveling around to find your own?

Another thing I do not understand is, how were the underground counterparts able to locate their mates? Like how did Red, locate the husband counterpart to have kids with him? What if the husband counterpart lived in another part underground and they couldn't find each other? Same with the white couple... If the tethers copy each other and choose the same mates, how do they know where to find the same mates?

And when they have the same kinds, how is it that the kids would still come out boy and girl? How are they born at the same time and age? Do the government scientists make them breed if the above ground counterparts are doing it as part of their study, or do they do naturally, if the above ground ones do it?

I think most of those parts are just thinking too hard, as things they knew would be questionable, but just need to be ignored for the purpose of symbolism, that is to understand what the movie was about.

You already have to assume trouble in logistics that both families had travelled to their summer homes, away from their normal homes, you could only assume that the tethered had a connection that they knew where they would have to go before going up. The tethered must be drawn to the correct person, but we also don't know how powerful that force is that maybe even without the other person with them they could just conceive the child with the genes through the connection.

They really are not important facts. Thinking logically you would have to question how the tethered thing reversed between young Adelaide and Red. This movie and Get Out as companion films are just supposed to be about more than what is actually happening in the plot, and understand the signals. You can look up some videos on YouTube that go into theory territory at even connections between the two.

It becomes more interesting when you take into account things like the Thriller shirt could be linked to Red having dressed all the Tethered in red and a single glove, a reference Michael Jackson. That the opening bit in the 80s could be also linked with the VHS tapes you see nearby, like Nightmare on Elm Street with the type of glove and maybe scissors, C.H.U.D. which is about mutants coming out of the sewers to kill, The Man With Two Brains, and The Goonies which has plots about going underground and Red even paraphrases one of the big speeches. Rather than look for answers in the how's in the movie, you would do better to explore the why's.

Like Why the director would want the family to live, but show others just slaughtered. Which leads into getting insight into what tethered did once killed their others, taking items from the other to then try and be them. The daughters doing cartwheels like their originals did on the beach, the father trying to act cool and lazy, the mother putting on makeup, doing faces and trying to do own surgery. The story depth is in those parts, not in the mechanics.

Okay thanks. I have on problem with the story's symbolism or depth, but the mechanics I feel are keeping me from enjoying the deeper parts.

But I feel the story is not really that deep anyway. It's about underground clones who want to seek justice on their above world that created them. We've seen this before like in movies like The Island (2005), which was a better movie I thought, cause the plot held together somewhat better I thought.

But I feel that the story is not that deep though to begin with, to the point where we can enjoy the whys over the hows. It's more like a monster wants revenge for being created story, which we have seen before, and it doesn't really seem to bring anything deeper to the table.

Things like referencing old movies, is not that deep, is it?

But I feel that no matter what the whys are, they all come out of the hows, and since the hows are poisoned all the ways that branch out of the hows are therefore poisoned. The story seems like it suffers from fruit of the poisonous tree, from the tree trunk up. Or at least I am missing something, since so many others seem to like it.

Maybe I am looking at it the wrong way.

I mean as far as the tethers have psychic connections to the counterparts and can tell where they are, why didn't Red come up with a plan and tell them to not bother seeking out their counterparts as that would take too much time, and instead, just kill whichever humans are nearest instead?

I get what you're sayiing about the muddled mechanics of the story. I would have preferred it if they had just left it all unexplained, but then, some of the images, like the human-chain across the country would have been difficult to pull off ... no one would have understood what that should have meant to be....

Still looking fwd to seeing it!