Not Your Average UFO Sighting: Nope Review

Rating: ★★★★☆

Jordan Peele's new film Nope was not everything I expected it to be, though I don't honestly know what my expectations were. After his 2019 film Us left me with more questions than answers, I should have known Peele would confuse me all over again, but this time with aliens instead of doppelgängers. I struggled with my rating for this movie being more like a 3.5/5 stars, but for the purposes of the visual rating as well as my love for the director and his cast, I bumped it up to 4/5.

It's definitely not a terrible movie. Keke Palmer, Daniel Kaluuya, Steven Yeun, and Brandon Perea crushed it. I couldn't look away. The cinematography was beautiful. The visual effects were creative and fun. When there was color introduced to the otherwise mostly desert landscape, it was vibrant and intentional. As far as being a horror story, there were certainly moments where I felt the fear and intensity that the actors brought to life on screen.

However, there were also plenty of moments when the story felt slow or confusing. The constant back and forth with Jupe (Yeun) flashing back to his traumatic past where a chimp costar murdered other actors on set as a shoe stood straight up on its heel by itself. There just didn't feel like any payoff to that plot, especially the shoe.

Another storyline that felt almost wasted was the distance between the Haywood family members. OJ (Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald (Palmer) seemed nearly estranged at the start of the film with tension from differing ideas for the future of the family business. By the end of the film, I suppose the two seemed to have a closer sibling bond with nothing worked out between them. The trauma from dealing with aliens can heal family relationships, I guess.

I do want to acknowledge, though, that this film wasn't made with a white audience as the primary intended demographic, with Peele noting to CBS Mornings, "First and foremost, I wanted to make a UFO horror film. And then of course it's like, where is the iconic Black UFO film? And whenever I feel that my favorite movie out there hasn't been made, that's the void I'm trying to fill with my films."

What are your thoughts? Did I miss the point of the film? Should I do some reading now that I've seen the movie, then rewatch it from a new perspective?