There is a comfort in the sound of a distant scream, the ambulance siren moving further & further away, the misfortune of someone else just a little less lucky than you. Perhaps they deserve it, a consequence of error, misjudgment, or impatience. Surely our fate will be different if we learn to keep our distance. The clouds only seem so far away because we do not often touch them but space has always been misleading. Line of sight can be a powerful precursor to touch & we don't often look above us in fear, our skyborne predators allegedly wiped out many millennia ago. To revive a relictual terror, synthesize it with modern mythology, entertain & thrill all at once requires the work of a master bricoleur.
In order to train an animal, & we ourselves are undoubitably animals, you must learn to truly understand it, or you put yourself at risk of extermination. Thematically, Peele intertwines understanding with respect & finds them to be mutually exclusive. Just so, hubris is a lack of understanding of ones true place, otherwise it would simply be confidence. Misplaced confidence is self-destructive and incompatible with dignity. On the other hand, genuine respect can be used as a tool for the changing of our fate & delaying of our own destruction, perhaps in some ways indefinitely through willpower & the consequential manifestation, continuation or, if we're lucky, evolution of a legacy. To respect where we came from, how far we have to travel, and what we must be prepared for along the road is critical to the survival of the individual in the meantime & our species in the deep.
A giant monster movie somehow made personal & rife with originality, including the masterfully played absence of any kind of gun (with the exception of a single flashback). Thanks to Jordan Peele the day-lit sky has become a welcome home to new nightmares.