Film Review: Us

"They Look Exactly Like Us. They Think Like Us. They Know Where We Are. We Need To Move And Keep Moving. They Won't Stop Until They Kill Us..."

With the past two years boosting Jordan Peele into the cinematic stratosphere, the success of his 2017 excellent directorial debut, Get Out, a subsequent Academy Award win, and having a major hand in Spike Lee's equally superb, BlackKklansman, last year means that the American is on what's commonly referred to as a freakin' good roll. With a reinvention of The Twilight Zone set to arrive on the small screen at the beginning of April, first comes Us, Peele's second venture into the world of horror which very much like his critically acclaimed debut, takes the bold decision to weave in and out of varying genres, this time ranging from home invasion thrillers to paranoid conspiracies with a touch of the dark humour which made Get Out so frivolously entertaining. Reuniting both Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke after their success together on Ryan Coogler's Black Panther, Peele's movie sees the Wilson family head to a secluded beach house on the coastline of Santa Cruz, California, a trip which brings back haunting memories to Nyong'o's Adelaide after a horrifying incident during her youth. With Adelaide making her concerns known to Duke's Gabriel during the first night of their stay, the family suddenly fall under siege by four intruders who, in typical horror movie fashion, seem to have more in common with them then first meets the eye, and after discovering the life and death situation they now find themselves in, the Wilson family spend the rest of their interrupted holiday attempting to make it out alive. 

With Peele undoubtedly both healthily cineliterate and more importantly, a gigantic horror movie geek, the many successes of Us depend on you actively registering yourself accordingly into the film's tone, one which sort of crosses the boundary between horror and thriller but in a similar vein to Get Out, isn't terrifying in the way of say, Hereditary or The Witch, and instead is more an actively action packed popcorn movie in the same way that A Quiet Place falls more into the monster movie bracket than a straightforward horror. With this in mind, once the relatively straightforward set-up in which the background, key characters and beautiful setting are all aligned into place, the moment we are introduced to the overly ripe doppelgänger version of the Wilson family is when the action truly heats up, providing the audience with a home invasion set piece which rides a fine line between absurdist silliness and creepy psychological horror like a jumped-up hybrid of The Strangers and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with the latter clearly being referenced due to the uncanny resemblance between the screams made within Peele's movie and the alien duplicates from Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake starring Donald Sutherland. With Peele not afraid in any shape or form whatsoever to bludgeon the audience with overly graphic levels of violence, Us also benefits from the slasher type, B-movie esque traditions of people being killed in very nasty ways indeed, and with a middle act full with clear nods to The Shining and a hint of Adam Wingard's You're Next, the opening hour is undoubtedly a horror movie fan's wet dream. 

With the doppelgänger equivalents of the main cast offering the chance for everyone to have oodles of fun as they attempt to outshine each other in the kooky department, it's fair to say that each of the core members of the Wilson family all have moments to show off their talents, resulting in side characters such as Elizabeth Moss (The Handmaid's Tale) sort of being left aside for the role of easily pruned cannon fodder without any real element of depth. With Nyong'o given the most work to as she walks away winning the award for the year's best hair, her completely twisted performance is superbly entertaining, where even with a rather jarring choice to play her doppelgänger equivalent with a similar oxygen starved tone to that of Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending, still manages to convince you entirely that although both characters may indeed look the same, they are different entities entirely. Supported by a soon-to-be iconic horror genre score by long term Peele partner, Michael Abels, the soundtrack blends jukebox hits with strange, hypnotic remixes including a hauntingly effective version of "I Got 5 on It" by American hip hop duo, Luniz, and whilst at times the central narrative seems to be putting together almost too many ideas and themes regarding race, religion and identity, Peele's latest is a movie which is still rattling around my brain, and for a movie which is made with this much perfection and care, it's fair to say that Jordan Peele is quickly becoming the most interesting horror auteur of the modern age. 

 Overall Score: 8/10

Fury 2014 - REVIEW - SPOILERS

In December of last year when I worked on the list of stuff I shall be keeping an eye out for, I noticed an unnamed David Ayer project featuring Brad Pitt, Shia Labeouth, Jon Berthnal, Logan Lerman and Michael Peña as a five man tank team during world war 2 in Nazi German towards the tail end of the conflict. Seeing we haven't had a great war film in many years, the concept of approaching the conflict from the tank teams perspective was rather intriguing. As my love for Brad Pitt kept growing, my excitement for little titbits of news and information was building huge expectations in my mind. The trailer alone helped solidify what I was going to think of this film and to put it simply, the film was great.
During WW2, Nazi weaponry was typically far more advanced and their tanks were tearing into US units with ease. The tale doesn't have a narrative that drives the movie like an action movie. Documentation springs to mind with its portrayal of the lives of those who fought in these tanks and the hardships they went through. After loosing their machine gunner, the Fury team were given Norman (Logan Lerman), a young man with no combat experience, 8 weeks in boot camp, never been in a tank and never killed before. Quite common in the time but we follow him as he is forced into the deep end with a crew of hardened fighters who don't take kindly to having a weakness in the armour. The main character appears to be Norman. Over the 2 hours his character changes vastly and to see the conflict and infighting that gets him to where he needs to be is really engaging towards the audience. In this short period of time, we follow a boy become and man and what it makes of good men and the pain they went through to do their job. The final act is where the real action sets in with a convoy of tanks making their way too hold off a possible German advance but soon gets whittled down by a German tank. Upon defeating it, Fury stands on its own and carries its orders out until they hit a mine and lose one of the tracks. During repairs its found that Nazi forces are moving down the road and the final decision to fight or run is made. If I were to spoil it here, I don't feel that would be fair. It ends rather dramatically with a blaze of glory and a barrage of emotions which I can only describe as epic. With its character driven story, it can feel a little slow towards the beginning when Norman is reluctant to do much but it grows even bigger with each step he takes.

From what I'm aware, the tanks used for filming were genuine vehicles and a great addition when you consider the over saturation of CGI in modern media. Visually the movie was great. I didn't see any CGI that wasn't the obvious blood splatter and shots on the tanks. Everything was fantastic in the visual department. The only issues that I do have were a few of the goofs. More down to the cutting and editing but switching from day to night in one cut was rather jarring. With the ringing of bullets and the roars of engines, the sound was clear and crisp. Enough to excite but not to deafen. Although with excitement we normally have music to help ramp the scene up. I don't remember any of the songs and nothing really captured me enough to return home and search for whatever song was used (although I now probably will) like I enjoy and that's a real shame for a movie that has prided itself on great cinematography and prop work.

There really isn't much to talk about in the case of acting. We have a group of actors that have already proven themselves as adequate in many of their other appearances. Although Logan stands as the main, Brad Pitt steals it from him with a far superior performance and Shia was rather good. With his recent outbursts and nutty-ness, his career was in real turmoil but he has certainly managed to pick it up and be a part of something to really be proud of. The rest of the cast were brilliant too. There's really no fault on their part. So my overall conclusion is that the movie is brilliant. The goofs can be forgiven but they are rather drastic and shows sloppiness by the cutting crews and there were some rather lengthy chunks of space that felt rather empty that didn't achieve much for the flow. I seriously think the movie deserves all of the praise it is getting and I look forward to getting it on DVD with a few little extras and maybe a directors cut. My score for Fury is 8/10

Battlefield 4 - Quicky Review

I really don't know what I expected from a game that is only made for online purposes. Over the last few years, I only bought into Call of Duty and would spend time doing the campaign while sighing over the poorly developed story. This time around, I decided to get both. Seeing that Battlefield 4 was out in America before it was in the UK, it surly pissed a few people off. Alongside pissing off numerous amounts of Russians and Chinese nationals....

Around everything else I had to do, I didn't stick many hours into the game at all. Probably about 4-5 hours overall. It's really short and very confusing when you have no idea who "Chang" is. I still don't know if he has been a theme through the last couple of games but not addressing this to the new players is a really bad play on their behalf. With about six missions that are spread over a few days, everything moves fast. Perhaps a little too fast. The plot twists where predictable and lacked anything that would truly inspire or help you to interact with the characters on a deeper level. So throughout, characters were just distant. You are placed as a Sargent called Recker who doesn't actually say anything, even when he is being spoken too, a little anti-social if you ask me. It also appears that even when he is in command, everything is decided by everyone else. The rest of the characters are fairly annoying, you cannot relate to them and you learn nothing about them through the time you are with them.

For a game that competes with Call of Duty, every damn year, they should have a lot of effort and resources into the build and development of the game. However, the image was never clear. Surfaces looked fuzzy, AI's would glitch out, the environment never looked real enough to immerse yourself in. for my first outing, I had really high hopes for it, even with it's imminent next gen release bragging about higher visual specs.

Where the game shines is in combat. Plug in the headphones, crank up the noise and get ready for a shit show. Reserve ammo and steal what you can as enemies come thick and fast with little room for mistake and manoeuvre. Combat is quite fun, it's a bit of a switch from CoD but it's fairly easy to grasp. You cannot just shoot a moving target by sticking the dot on him, you have to consider that the bullet needs to travel to get there, this makes it feel very real and when you have bullets pinging around you, the only thing you want to do is pop the enemy quick before they overwhelm you. The glitchiness (if that's even a word) of the game got in my way a few times, lining up an enemy only to have it push you away several time, the enemies are also fairly spongy and do take accuracy to put down effectively. This isn't the case on multiplayer.

In total, it's a fun and enjoyable game to play, all be it stressful at times but it's weak and short story mixed in with the general glitches and underwhelming visuals, I have to give it a 7/10.
Tune in next week to see my CoD Ghosts review!