[8]
Writer/director Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) delivers his third solid horror-mystery with Nope, the story of sibling horse wranglers (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) who discover a UFO hiding in a stationary cloud above their gulch ranch. At first the pair decide to get rich by capturing the first high-resolution photographic evidence of the phenomenon. But when the UFO reveals itself to be a hungry monster intent on eating horses and people alike, their mission becomes more simple: kill or be killed.
Nope contains a good number of nail-biting moments, including the UFO’s arrival at a nearby western-themed sideshow where the park’s owner (Steven Yeun) tries to capitalize on the saucer-shaped creature’s frequent visitations at his peril. There’s also a very inspired visceral sequence when the creature spits out what it can’t digest — including coins, keys, and even cars — in a rain of blood on the siblings’ home. Effects, music, sound design, and photography are top-notch, and Peele artfully renders his set-piece moments with Spielbergian panache.
While I enjoyed Nope, I can’t help but feel I would have enjoyed it more if Peele would have shortened the script by a good twenty or thirty minutes and created more engaging characters to take us through this adventure. Kaluuya’s character is so reticent and emotionally guarded, it takes a while to warm up to him. Palmer’s character feels more like the goofy neighbor of a ’90s sitcom than a real person, as do supporting players Brandon Perea and Michael Wincott.
The film’s first act takes a long time to set up a house of cards that ultimately isn’t necessary to enjoy the movie’s more straight-forward second half. Yeun’s supporting character is given a lot of screen-time with a bizarre backstory involving a sitcom he starred in as a child, and a tragedy that occurred there when a chimpanzee went crazy and hurt people. The subplot is interesting and seems to have a thematic correlation with the film’s main storyline, but after three viewings of this movie, it remains somewhat elusive or irrelevant to me. Nope is essentially a good old-fashioned monster movie (one of my favorite subgenres), even with this extra, puzzling padding.
With Keith David.