Genre: Horror/Sci-Fi/Comedy/Monkey Massacre
Premise: A couple of horse ranchers attempt to capture a UFO on camera, but must avoid being eaten up by the pesky flying saucer before doing so.
About: Nope is Jordan Peele’s third directing venture and is performing quite a bit lower than Peele’s previous outing, Us, which made 70 million on its opening weekend. As of the latest numbers, Nope has a 45 million dollar opening (off a 70 million dollar budget, Peele’s largest). The film received a B Cinema score, which is the same that Us received.
Writer: Jordan Peele
Details: 131 minutes
I haven’t thought this hard about how I was going to write a review since, probably, Inception.
There is so much to say here in regards to the director, the industry, the movie, the screenplay, the budget, history, influences, and, overall, the way Hollywood props up auteurs in a way they can’t possibly live up to.
It’s so overwhelming, I don’t even know where to start.
Since this is a movie review, I’m going to focus on the movie, which, ultimately, doesn’t live up to expectations. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the huge swing Peele took. If there’s one good thing that can be said about Nope, it’s that we’ve never seen anything like it. And that’s worth something in SamenessWood.
But the film is ultimately sabotaged by its screenplay, which is so shoddily cobbled together, that, at times, if feels like a first time filmmaker stumbled onto set and started shooting the script he and his buddy wrote over the weekend.
Jordan Peele wrote Get Out over the course of ten years. He whipped “Nope” up in half a year. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the result isn’t as good. I guess I just expected it to be better than this.
Spoilers abound by the way.
After their father dies when a nickel that was accidentally ejected from a plane, flies down and slices through his skull, horse ranchers OJ and Emerald struggle to pick up the pieces of their father’s business, which is built around lending horses to Hollywood productions. In one of the many barely explained components of the film, it appears that they’re running out of money and *might* (it’s important to note that this is never clear) have to sell the ranch.
By the way, the family dynamic of OJ and his sister, Emerald, is never adequately explained. They work together. We know this because when OJ takes a horse to a commercial set, Emerald shows up and helps out. But Emerald does not live on the ranch. She lives somewhere else entirely and, I guess, meets OJ whenever there’s a Hollywood job. It’s all incredibly confusing. Anyway, for reasons that are still unclear, she decides to start staying at the ranch with OJ. So I guess she’s living on the ranch now.
OJ, unconvinced that the nickel that killed his father (I can’t believe I’m typing that sentence) came from a plane, starts putting together this theory that the nickel came from a UFO, which he believes hovers around the ranch every once in awhile. Out of nowhere, his sister becomes infatuated with this idea and figures if they can get the first clear footage of a UFO, they can sell it to the news for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Meanwhile, a former child sitcom star, Ricky, has put together a fun little theme park nearby where the featured act is a, sort of, goofy rodeo. Peele spends most of the script’s creative energy on Ricky’s backstory, which involves the day the monkey from Ricky’s old sitcom went berserk and started killing everyone. It even ripped off the face of his young co-star. That event ended Ricky’s TV career, which is why he’s here, out in the middle of nowhere, doing this.
Ricky, it turns out, has been buying horses off of OJ to supplement his act (one of many plot points that is so lazily explained, we only barely put it together after the fact) which, it turns out, involves using the horses as bait to lure in that UFO, which then eats them.
Side note: Ricky has apparently done dozens of these shows already to audiences that, presumably, all own a smart phone. The entire point of the movie is for Emerald to get this UFO on video to sell the footage for thousands of dollars. Yet, apparently, all of these audiences that have come here before and watched the UFO snatch up horses – they have never thought to record the UFO themselves. But I digress…
So the big, sort of, twist is that the UFO is not actually a ship, but rather a predator in our skies. A predator who especially likes horses for some reason (I thought aliens were into cows). Emerald and OJ decide to hire one of the best cinematographers in the world to come and get the footage of the UFO that they’re then going to sell. They then set up an elaborate trap to pull UFO Animal Thing down and… well, a lot goes wrong. The End.
Okay, where do we start?
I think we start at the beginning. Cause that’s usually where you can tell if a movie is going to work or not. The monkey killing backstory is definitely memorable. It’s probably the only thing this movie will be remembered for. But it feels so distant, so disconnected from the rest of the film, that we don’t know what to do with it.
I’ve noticed people saying that it’s setting up the fact that, at a very young age, Ricky learned that you can’t control animals. Yet here he is, trying to control animals once again (if you think of the UFO as an animal) for entertainment purposes. So he never learned his lesson. I mean… I guess that sort of makes sense. But it certainly doesn’t come across naturally. I never would’ve made that connection if I hadn’t heard somebody else explain it.
In my many years of analyzing screenwriting, this felt more to me like one of those really sexy ideas that you want to get into a script even though it has nothing to do with the story. So you move mountains to somehow cram it in there and then try to find enough connective tissue to make it make sense.
But to Peele’s credit, it does lead to one of the most tragic and affecting images of the screenplay, which is the actress who got her face ripped off still coming to Ricky’s shows, hanging out at the top of the bleachers, her skinless face occasionally being revealed when the wind whips up her protective veil.
That opening is followed by the dad nickel-killing scene. I mean… it’s just a weird scene all around. It’s not clear what’s happening so we’re more trying to figure out how this dad is bleeding than we are mesmerized by his unique death. (Wait, what just happened? Wait, he got killed by a random nickel falling from the sky?? Does that sort of thing actually happen???).
The plot here is so wonky that it’s easy to overlook the most catastrophic mistake that Peele makes, which is his main characters. OJ is one of the least likable people you’ll ever meet. He mumbles all the time. He’s depressed all the time. He never does anything that makes us like him. Some people have pointed out that he just lost his father. That’s why he’s such a downer. I’m not buying that. He seemed just as sad and depressing before his dad died.
Then you have Emerald, who’s a better character than OJ for sure, because at least she has energy. But she’s still kind of annoying. And she’s the one with this really stupid idea to capture this footage of the UFO. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a lot of respect for annoying stupid people. These are the two people taking us through this story.
Oh! And there’s this guy Angel, who is a Best Buy installer guy. He helps install the elaborate security system that Emerald needs to track the UFOs (wait, I thought they didn’t have any money) and then just decides to hang around the whole movie. I’m laughing as I type this but nothing in this movie makes sense. Since when do the installer people just keep hanging out at your house?? That’s the lazy logic Peele uses throughout the writing of this script. He wanted a comedic relief character in the mix. He just didn’t want to do the work to come up with an organic way to get him in the script. So he created a brand new first-ever way to make friends: Order stuff from Best Buy and have them install it.
Speaking of sloppiness, the stakes are never clearly established here. I can’t emphasize how important this is. It’s never made clear that they need money. It’s implied. But you never outright hear it. And because of that, the goal – to capture the UFO on camera – seems trivial. A goal without stakes is cereal without milk. We need to understand why the characters *need* to do this. If we’re unsure whether getting the footage saves the farm or not, then why would we care about getting the footage?
Go watch Goonies again. They establish that the entire community is selling their houses to the golf course developer. They’ve got less than 24 hours to stop this from happening. They hear about a treasure buried within the area and go searching for it. We now know, with extreme clarity, that if they find the treasure, they don’t have to sell their houses.
We never get anything approaching that level of clarity here.
In addition to this, the world-building is never clear. At a certain point in the story, OJ realizes that if you don’t look at the UFO, it won’t eat you. Once you tell the audience that, that’s an established rule. However, throughout the movie, the characters are racing away from the aliens, and yet the alien is still trying to kill them. I thought if you don’t look at the alien, it doesn’t kill you. So that… changes… sometimes???
This leads to one of the clumsiest climaxes I’ve ever seen. They try to lure the alien down so they can get footage of him. That’s the goal. Again, we’re not clear why they need the money this footage is going to bring them or why the hundreds of people who saw Ricky’s show haven’t already got the UFO on camera, but whatever. That’s the goal. However, midway through the climax, it appears they now want to kill the thing. So the goal becomes killing it. But then, in the very end, they want footage of it again. So they’re trying to kill it but also get the footage of it???
It’s so confusing.
Finally, Emerald leads the UFO over to Ricky’s adventure park, and the big moment revolves around this odd picture-taking mechanism. I guess there’s a fake Old Western water well that you look down into and it takes a picture of your faces looking into it. And so Emerald realizes that if she can get the UFO to fly directly over that well, she can take a picture of the UFO. So that’s what she’s waiting for and she keeps trying to take pictures but the UFO is never directly over the well.
Meanwhile, she releases this giant float into the air by accident that the UFO tries to eat (I’m not making this up), which ends up exploding the Ufo (I’m not making that up either) and right as that’s happening, she’s able to take the well picture of it. And she’s so freaking happy that she got her photographic proof! She’s going to be so rich now! She’s got the proof! She’s got the proof!!!
Except, um, there’s now the remnants of a GIANT UFO A MILE AWAY THAT EVERYBODY IS GOING TO SEE AND IS GOING TO BE ON THE NEWS FOR THE NEXT YEAR that sort of kind of makes your little picture worthless?
I’m verifiably confused about some of the positive reactions this movie is getting. It’s so sloppy it’s almost embarrassing. The only thing that keeps it from being a total embarrassment is that it’s shot so well, has a couple of fun creative ideas, and has some memorable imagery. But the story and main characters are so poorly conceived that the film is, sadly, really bad.
The defining moment when I realized Peele was high during the majority of his writing process was when, out of nowhere, at minute 115 of the movie, a brand new character enters the story named Tron TMZ Tesla Motorcycle Guy. This random TMZ journalist who dressed like he’s in a sci-fi movie, just shows up out of nowhere and becomes a major part of the climax! What are we even doing here????
It’s sad, man. Because I would rather live in a moviegoing world where we get the occasional big budget original idea like Peele’s. But Peele has to understand that, in order to stay in this prestigious position, you need to take more time on the script and get more people vetting the screenplay to show you where it’s weak. If he had 3 strong script guys look at this script, it would’ve been a thousand times better.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You can’t be theoretical when it comes to stakes. Emerald randomly coming up with the idea that a clear video of the UFO would be worth 100,000 dollars… what is that based on? She just makes these stakes up. Stakes can’t be theoretical. They have to be actual. This would’ve been so easy to fix, too. Because there was actually a guy, for a while, offering, I think, half a million dollars for verifiable photographic proof of a UFO. All you needed to do was have Emerald go online, see this guy offering this money, and us see it as well, then establish that if they don’t get that money, they lose the ranch, and boom, you have your stakes. It’s frustrating because Get Out is such a well-written script and yet, here, it seems like Peele doesn’t understand basic storytelling principles.
