Christian Albanese

Let me start by saying that I’m a fan of Jordan Peele and I consider myself to enjoy a wide variety of films. You can put on a movie packed with action/gore or an incredibly slow-burner and I’d be engaged in either so long as the stories are worth being invested in. That being said, I gotta give this one a low score. If you’re expecting a film similar to Get Out or Us, save your money. I went to see this with 5 of my friends and we all walked out of the theater feeling incredibly underwhelmed and, in all honesty, disappointed. First of all, the movie was advertised totally wrong, at least from what I had seen. I kept reading articles/headlines that Nope was “Jordan Peele’s spin on an alien invasion”, which made me expect a film similar to Independence Day or War of the Worlds. To be clear, this is NOT a film about an alien invasion. The movie is about a UFO that is shaped like a flying saucer. However, the flying saucer isn’t a spacecraft or any kind of vehicle, but rather a creature that’s living in the airspace over a ranch in California. And…that’s basically the entire movie. My friend described the movie as “Space Jaws”; 95% of the movie consists of the main characters (who aren’t very likable IMO) staring up into the sky looking for this UFO while trying to catch it on camera so that they can make a quick buck. That’s literally it. From the first sighting of the UFO up until the final few minutes of the film, the characters are just hellbent on recording the UFO. This of course takes away from the horror aspect of the film when none of the characters act like they are afraid of the creature. To give some credit, the movie has a couple notable scenes throughout the 2 hour runtime, but they’re few and far between. There’s also a subplot about a killer monkey that I thought was more entertaining than the main plot itself. However, the subplot’s relevance to the main plot is never really explained, and so it feels out of place at times. Overall, I believed the movie was a massive downgrade compared to Peele’s previous two films. The story seems to be all over the place and the film also appears to be confused of its own genre; its a weird combination of a horror, comedy, action, sci-fi, and thriller. I found myself constantly checking the time on my phone in the last hour of the film.