I got involved in a wild and rather impromptu Super Bowl party so I don’t have the time or mental bandwidth to put together a spectacular post but I do want to remind everyone that the “ANYTHING GOES” Amateur Showdown is happening next week. “Anything Goes” means you can submit any genre of script you want. Entries are due at carsonreevese@gmail.com by Thursday, February 24th, 10pm Pacific Time. Include your title, genre, logline, and why you think it deserves a shot to be featured on the showdown. And, of course, make sure you attach a PDF of your script should I choose to feature it!
Okay, now let’s get to what I really want to talk about, which is the “Nope” trailer, Jordan Peele’s new movie. Before I get into what I thought about the trailer, I want to make it clear that I’m trying to be objective about this. Because what happens with every breakout success such as Jordan, is that the story has to evolve. You can’t just keep praising a director for every movie they make. It’s happened with, maybe, five directors throughout time. For everyone else, the masses need a new storyline to stay interested.
So when I think about Jordan Peele, that’s what I think about. I wonder if he’s on the same path as M. Night. M. Night had a great first film (I’m talking about Sixth Sense, not his two tiny indie dramas), a much celebrated second film (Unbreakable) that, in retrospect, hinted at his weaknesses as a storyteller, and then a third film (Signs) that made everyone rethink if Night was the genius they all thought he was. From there, his movies spiraled out of control.
Here’s how I see Peele’s career so far. He wrote an amazing script in Get Out. It was so good. Those of you who’ve been on the site for a long time know I praised this script well before it became a breakout hit. Now, what’s important to know about the Get Out script is that Peele had been working on it forever. I think he said he’d been rewriting it for 10 years. Which is why that movie was so tight and strong.
Peele didn’t spend nearly as much time on Us and it showed. What started out as a cool idea – a home invasion movie where dopplegangers try to kill a family – became an outrageous sci-fi horror flick that involved hundreds of miles of underground tunnels where doppelgängers prepared to kill their above-ground clones. And let’s not forgot about all the bunny rabbits that were, for some reason, in the movie. Us was a cool movie. I thought the overall experience was fun. But, on the whole, it felt untethered, odd, and way too raw.
Next up came Candyman, a film that Peele produced instead of directed. I tried to warn everyone that the original Candyman movie made zero sense and that there was nothing an update was going to do to change that. I mean, the main villain is named the Candyman and yet the movie focuses on bees. When a story tells you it doesn’t make sense, trust it. So it wasn’t a surprise when that movie did poorly.
Now comes this trailer for “Nope” and it’s a conversation piece, I’ll give it that. Upon first glance, it’s a strong trailer. It’s got some unique imagery. It feels different from films competing in the same genre space. And it’s got a great look to it. Peele knows how to create an event around his movies. This feels like something you have to see.
But if you look closer, there are some concerning things going on, a potential house of cards scenario. We have horses. We have men on motorcycles with mirror helmets. We have scary women with creepy fang mouths. We have… alien hands? We have a hole in the sky that sucks you up.
I’ve been doing this for some time. And when I see a bunch of things that don’t organically go together stuffed in a trailer, it almost always implies a film that will be messy. I hope to be proven wrong. But I already saw this brewing in “Us.” I mean, the bunnies, man. The bunnies! Great weird image for a trailer. Absolutely zero reason to include them in the film.
Remember when you saw the trailer for Get Out? You knew EXACTLY what the movie was you were going to watch. EXACTLY. Compare that to this film. Do you know the movie you’re going to see here? I don’t. And that has me worried.
