Nope - Movie Review

Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yuen, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea and Keith David.

Written & Directed by Jordan Peele.

★★½ 

Jordan Peele knows how to take a benign setting and make it sinister, be it a WASPy dinner party in Get Out or Hands Across America in Us. Here, he points his camera at the outskirts of Hollywood. We follow the Haywood siblings (Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer), who train horses for TV shows and commercials, and we have Jupiter's Claim, a third-rate theme park centered on Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yuen), a child actor now making his living exploiting the projects of his youth.

If you've seen the preview, you know at some point aliens come into play. I'm glad that's the extent of what I knew about them, so I won't reveal more than that. This movie is about how these people on the ground deal with what's up in the sky. It's hard to pin down one theme of the movie. "Spectacle" is one. "Bad miracles" is another. There's also a theme about animals who can go wild, be it the horses who get spooked, or as we see in the opening scene, a chimpanzee gets triggered on a TV set and attacks the crew.

The chimp was on a 1990's sitcom where Ricky was one of the actors, one of the only ones the chimp didn't attack. It's obviously affected Ricky, but I thought the movie would tie the past and present together in some "everything falls into place" way in the third act, and that moment never came. Peele leaves a lot up to the audience to interpret. 

While it had some decent scares in the middle, I'd say Get Out and Us were more suspenseful overall. This is his Signs. Signs was M. Night Shyamalan's third movie, and while it wasn't as good as The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable, it was still okay. There's a lot I liked about this movie, but whenever I think about it, its problems are what I think about first. About coincidences, and characters jumping to conclusions that only movie characters would do. And that shoe. We see a shoe unnaturally standing upright in a scene, but it's never explained what made it stand up and why that matters. But it apparently does, because they refer to it a couple times. For some reason...

I think my expectations were too high.