In Nope, the sky is the limit for Jordan Peele’s ambition
With his latest, the director of Get Out and Us lets his metaphorical aspirations get ahead of the nuts and bolts of clear, cogent storytelling
Film Reviews Jordan Peele
As contradictory as such a description might sound, Nope is a great mess. Shifting gently from horror to science fiction, Jordan Peele’s latest evokes the work of Steven Spielberg and M. Night Shyamalan—in ways both good and bad—with must-see spectacle whose dots don’t all connect around its biggest ideas. But even if the film doesn’t work (and it feels guaranteed that it won’t) for every moviegoer who rushes to see it as much because of his name as the intrigue of its premise, Nope irrefutably advances Peele to the ranks of his crowd-pleasing, superstar predecessors, despite the fact that his ambition and his discipline as a storyteller haven’t fully fallen into lockstep.
Peele’s Get Out leading man Daniel Kaluuya plays OJ (“as in Otis Jr.”) Haywood, a rancher attempting to shepherd his family’s Hollywood legacy as horse wranglers into a new era when his father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), unexpectedly dies. Despite recruiting his self-promoting sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) as a mouthpiece to keep their business going, the Haywoods soon face the prospect of selling their ranch to their neighbor Ricky “Jupe” Park, a former child actor who already acquired several of their horses for his Western reenactment village. But when OJ confesses that he saw some kind of alien object in the sky, Emerald becomes determined to capture it on film—whatever it is—in order to earn enough money to save the ranch and burnish their fortunes.
Purchasing a truckload of surveillance equipment at a local electronics store, OJ and Emerald recruit their salesperson, Angel (Brandon Perea), to install it around the ranch. But after Angel learns of their plans, he joins their ragtag team of supposed UFO-hunting documentarians—only for the three of them to make a discovery that confirms their suspicions, but also wildly exceeds their expectations, and threatens to risk their very lives in the process.
Peele is somewhat clearly aiming for a story that echoes the adventure, and danger, of Spielberg’s Jaws, with a slightly mercenary soupçon of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind thrown in for good measure. The reason he doesn’t achieve his version of those films isn’t because he lacks the ambition or the creativity, but because he seems to be working backwards from the metaphors he wants to explore and only later defining them in a concrete narrative. At heart, this is a film about a group of people who have been in one way or another eaten up and spit out by Hollywood; even poor Angel was discarded by his girlfriend after she landed a role “on a CW show.” But for a film that on its face is about trying to photograph a UFO, Nope doesn’t satisfactorily explain how and why too many basic elements occur, much less converge in the way they ultimately do.
The film opens with a shot of a chimpanzee sitting next to a body on the set of a television sitcom, both of which are covered in blood. Peele revisits this throughout the film to reinforce that notion of people victimized by the entertainment industry, but also to showcase an element of unpredictability that becomes relevant to the Haywoods (but we won’t spoil here). Flashbacks to the incident not only amplify the overall intensity of the film, but provide some of its most shocking imagery; but they also elongate the running time, primarily as exposition or back story instead of driving events directly related to what the Haywoods are doing, and why. By comparison, it would be like Spielberg shooting the U.S.S. Indianapolis shark attack that Quint describes in Jaws, and then cutting to key moments every once in a while instead of presenting it succinctly and effectively in one chilling monologue.
Further to that end, while he could benefit from the purposeful specificity of Spielberg’s direction, Peele’s pacing feels like Shyamalan’s—which is to say, unhurried and increasingly self-indulgent. One sequence which takes place at night and in the rain, and it feels impossible not to think of, say, the T-Rex escape in Jurassic Park, given the distance between the characters and the threat that looms over them both. But Peele never especially bothers to set up concrete exterior shots of what in his scene is a car and a house, and as a consequence, there’s never a moment of true urgency. And yet his skill in constructing certain kinds of set pieces remains as vivid as in his earlier films; although its relationship to, well, anything else proves specious at best, a scene where OJ becomes convinced he’s experienced something in the family barn is just brilliant, mass-audience, edge-of-your-seat entertainment.
Of course, that has quickly become Peele’s defining quality as he has progressed as a director, although one reasonably assumes that an expanded latitude from his financiers, even fully earned, has probably played a part in the shagginess of his second and third films. In Us, for example, it’s unfortunately true that the whole conception of “the tethered” does not work logistically (how precisely would they mirror their counterparts everywhere they went?), even if it offers the filmmaker an amazing theme to explore. And quite frankly, that’s totally fine, although if you’re any kind of stickler for (even internal) logic, niggling questions like that can unravel the whole experience, as they unfortunately almost do here.
Kaluuya gives the defining performance of the film, providing a kind of inherited reticence from his cowboy father that makes OJ’s moments of intuition and sensitivity that much more powerful. Palmer’s Emerald is OJ’s outgoing counterpart, the sizzle to his steak, but the throughline of the character is so thinly defined that her convergence towards their mutual fearlessness and heroism feels less convincing. As Jupe, Yeun carries a weight that the rest of the film can’t support, but even with those flashbacks squarely unveiling his mental state, his present-day choices feel tenuously connected at best. Playing Angel, meanwhile, Perea effectively suggests a person desperate to inject himself into affairs that are none of his business, while delivering two or three too many cliched responses (“they’re he-eeere”) in moments where it’s best not to evoke the likes of earlier genre classics.
In spite of the distressingly familiar practice of audiences mercilessly tearing down filmmakers after they’ve put them on a pedestal (for a recent example see: Taika Waititi), Peele earns his criticisms for the film honestly—this is a pure and exciting work of creativity, but it isn’t a perfect one. There’s also the larger matter of genre movies trying to bear the weight—constantly—of complex, traumatic, contemporary issues that often get mistaken, or wrongly prioritized, over the efficiency of thoughtful, measured, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other storytelling. There will, undoubtedly and appropriately, be dozens of think pieces written in the weeks to come about what Peele is saying, or trying to say, in this movie and at this moment. But what Nope lacks is not ambition or ideas, but clarity, which is why the appropriate response to it is not a resounding yes, but alright, not bad—what else have you got?
196 Comments
As someone who liked how odd and messy Us was, I fully embrace Jordan Peele’s stranger, messier impulses.
same. Them was a clever metaphor for the guilt sometimes felt around striving, and I thought it was executed well thanks to some great performances. Seems like he brings out some amazing performances at the very least.I don’t know how much involvement Peele really had in The Twilight Zone, but oof that was some heavy handed ham fisted stuff.
Pretty sure that Twilight Zone reboot got the boot.
Thank merciful what-have- you; that show was garbage. I’ve tried and tried and tried to like Peele outside of ye olde comedy duo, because he has some interesting ideas, including readdressing horror tropes through the black experience in America. But the movies by and large don’t work. For me, anyway, and I don’t think I’m alone in this view.
I don’t think he had anything to do with Them.
sorry I meant Us lol lol lol
Us and Them? Maybe you’re thinking of Pink Floyd.
Get Out is more cohesive, but I enjoyed Us more for its stoner logic – it’s like a bad dream.
See I felt “Get Out” to be an okay movie, but “Us” was super bad and all pretentious and silly and stuff.
That was my assessment; Get Out was an incredibly tight film. Every piece of it was there for a reason. Not a frame of film was wasted.
Us was more sprawling and nebulous. The symbolism and metaphors were tied to things that had no single origin or easy answers. But oddly, that made the horrific imagery more effective because you couldn’t easily explain it.
In terms of logic, it falls apart a bit. But as an experience, I still really enjoyed it.
There used to be a poster on here who would get riled about Us and It Follows, which similarly had very squishy logic. It was funny. It’s not that horror movies can’t be logical, and it’s not that they shouldn’t be logical, it’s just that they don’t have to be logical to work.
‘It Follows’ fucked me up for a few solid weeks.
I mean, I love Kubrick’s Shining over the King book because it explains so much less, and that makes it scarier.
The guy in the bear suit blowing the businessman? Explanation in the book, none in the film. So with the latter you’re just left thinking “What the fuck was that?!!”
Isn’t everything at this point?
yeah this review sold me even harder. movies don’t have to make sense for me to love them!
You should get directors to send you raw footage.
He isn’t able to tell a concrete story, and thus, will not be invited to my birthday party this year.
lol
Agreed US wasn’t as good as Get out but I still loved it and I am looking foward to Nope!
I’m not sure I’d call Us messy. It was clear what was going on, what different characters’ motivations were, etc. The main “messiness” is that the concept of the raises a lot of weird logistical questions, but nearly all horror movies count on you to just sort of accept the antagonist’s existence.
Us could have given less explanation and as a result been a better movie.
It wasn’t just weird logistical questions, though – it was that the origins of the tethered and how they lived made exactly zero sense whatsoever. The only thing that would have worked would be a supernatural explanation. As it was the backstory felt like a placeholder that Peele stuck in there until he came up with something that held up at all to logical scrutiny. “I don’t know, they were created for some government program and escaped or some shit. We’ll figure that part out later.”
See for me that wasn’t an issue. Like we know the CIA was up to a bunch of shady shit even though we don’t know the how or even that it would be impossible (I thought the why of the tethered experiment was pretty clear). I just accepted that the tethered was something the CIA did in the MKUltra times and that they were successful and then it was abandoned. Like a lot of speculative fiction Us is more interested in the consequences of something like tethering and it just asks you to accept that it was possible so it can get on with what it’s really interested in. I mean it’s not like the “procedure” in Get Out is super plausible either, even with the brief explanation they give.
Yeah, and for me that wasn’t a huge problem for enjoying Us. It’s not like consciousness transfers don’t have a lot of conceptual problems even with how they explained it in Get Out.Nope is very straightforward in the sense that by the end you know the nature of the sinister thing and it’s whole deal for the most part without it feeling spoon fed. There’s also not really a twist like in Get Out or Us. Node’s overall themes initially seem a little more diffuse than Get Out or Us, but I just got out from seeing it a few hours ago and the more I think about it the more I realize how everything was of a piece with everything else, even when it seemed like it wasn’t (I completely disagree with this review’s take on the chimp aspects of the movie. If anything, there are a couple storylines that seemed like they had been edited down in the writing process, which results in a few things feeling like they came out of nowhere or didn’t amount to much, but other than that I thoroughly enjoyed it and can’t wait to see Nope again.
Usually I love those kind of “ambitious but messy/flawed” movies from good directors, but Us was not one of those for me. The last third of the film just went off the rails as I recall, after a highly intriguing first couple of acts. Nope sounds more up my alley though with the sci-fi/UFO stuff.
Same, Us is a surreal masterpiece.
“Us” was utterly chilling to me, especially in regard to that one key character. I find I can’t shake that chill.I far preferred “Get Out” but… maybe that says more about me than it does Jordan Peele.
I couldn’t agree more, as the review states, “this is a pure and exciting work of creativity…” I kind of expect it not to be ‘perfect’ and have internal flaws etc, and that’s fine, even welcome. It’s new cinema, made a fascinatingly talented dude, I’m all in…
You will like this one. It’s not as ambiguous with what’s going on as Us, but it definitely has that exciting ambitiousness, even if it’s a little messy, that makes a Jordan Peele movie and opening day thing for me. Also he makes amazing use of his expanded budget. It’s one of the best looking movies I have seen in awhile.
In spite of the distressingly familiar practice of audiences mercilessly tearing down filmmakers after they’ve put them on a pedestal (witness Taika Waititi)… this was the best example you could come up with?
I mean, it’s the most prolific example of recent note.
I mean, some people thought his most recent film was too cartoony? That going back to the same well produced diminishing returns? That seems like a wiiildly tame example of mercilessly tearing someone down.
I have been feeling lately like Waititi is on the cusp of a Joss Whedon – style fall from grace, but I don’t think it’s happened yet.
Is he an abuser?
That’s a shit comparison. Joss would still be working today if he hadn’t turned out to be such a manipulative, abusive asshole. Taika is nothing of the sort.
Yeah, maybe it is a bad comparison. I was more thinking of the earlier fall from grace, where Whedon said some weird stuff about feminism and then made a couple of bad superhero movies, which sort of knocked him off his “ultimate feminist” pedestal and brought the more serious stuff to light. I certainly hope Waititi isn’t abusive or assholeish in any way! I really enjoy his work (but then, I really enjoyed Whedon’s TV series too). I’m just seeing the effusive praise he’s getting, especially wrt queer representation/masculinity, that reminds me of the way people used to talk about Whedon’s feminism. I’m also starting to see people reacting to that in a way that suggests his appeal is about to wear thin.
Again, the only reason Joss’ career shit the bed is because he was outed as being a manipulative, abusive prick whose past statements about feminism and whatever else came back to haunt him when he was outed as being anything but. He could’ve continued making ‘bad superhero movies’ (of which he really only made one in ‘Justice League’ – ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ is nowhere NEAR as fucking terrible, and wasn’t an embarrassment or a financial debacle for the whole goddamn studio) and still had a career today. What, you don’t think a middle-aged white guy in Hollywood is going to continue to fail up? All the complaints about him and his subsequent downfall came after Justice League. Feel free to check the timeline.As for Taika, I don’t really give a shit about all these serial adjective abusers on the raging toilet fire that is Twitter who are currently finding it in fashion to dump on a guy who made a movie meant for 14-year-olds they didn’t like. Next week it will be someone else. If I ever find the need to spew that many 50-cent adjectives at someone because I didn’t care for their most recent movie meant for 14-year-olds, shoot me in the fucking face. The world’s falling apart, and they’re spending their time bitching into the bottomless void of the internet because a recent kids’ movie wasn’t gay enough for their liking. My only advice for those people is to watch something else, for chrissakes, and when they’re done with that, to fuck all the way off. These English major motherfuckers can’t even put a period at the end of their sentences, and yet I’m supposed to be glued to their every word so I know how and what to feel about everything they deem important from their thrones on high. Fuck them. All of them. Forever.
it’s even more ridiculous by Disney announcing he’s directing the next Star Wars mere weeks before knowing the reaction to Thor. It’s such lolz.
In spite of the distressingly familiar practice of commenters mercilessly tearing down reviewers after they’ve put them on a pedestal (witness Todd Gilchrist)
In spite of the distressingly familiar practice of commenters mercilessly tearing down other commenters after they’ve put them on a pedestal (witness JohnCon)
Saw it last night and, while I agree with the points above overall, I think I just enjoyed it more. I think Yuen’s characters background was probably unnecessary, but it did increase the unsettling feeling overall.With the comparison to Shyamalan, the most knee-jerk side by side thematically is likely Signs. I believe the logic in this is more sound than that one (as enjoyable as Signs was, especially on first viewing) because it is less specific and the “twist” such as it is comes midway through.Worth seeing with an audience if COVID concerns are not high for you.
Internet opinion on Shyamalan is so weird – there are far fewer turds in his filmography than people pretend. If Jordan Peele closes out his career with a few great movies, a bunch of watchably bonkers ones, and some real pieces of shit, he’ll be on par with John Carpenter.
Yea, it’s the internet’s opinion of Shyamalan that’s weird
Shymalan’s turds are particularly rancid, though. Lady in the Water, Last Airbender, the Village, The Happening, and After Earth are all dreadful. And most of his other movies aren’t exactly great.
Yeah I don’t really get the reappraisal of him. His bad films are terrible and his most recent ones are a mixed bag still.I sort of get the Peele comparison, but I feel like Peele’s more abstract approach (as obtuse as it can be) still works better than Shyamalan’s more direct messaging.edit: now that I think about it, that more direct messaging in the Twilight Zone reboot is what killed it for me. I could definitely see Shyamalan helming an awful Twilight Zone reboot.
Actually The Village works as a conventional horror-thriller period piece. But like what Peele supposedly did with Nope, Shyamalan reversed engineered the premise into a weak and undeserving twist ending.
The Village is a lot better than it gets credit for and The Happening is so nutso that while it’s not good and everyone, particularly Zooey Deschanel, seems like they are in different movies it’s still totally entertaining. If nothing else it’s impressive how he comes up with new and absurdly elaborate/stupid ways for the trees to kill people for its running time. Also after reading and loving Richard Powers’s The Overstory, the premise of The Happening is not nearly as dumb as it seemed to be when it came out.
LEAVE THE VILLAGE OUT OF THIS!I love that movie, just because its reveal isn’t great and gets dumber the more you think about it, on subsequent watches, the breadcrumbs you uncover are all the better. Also, you understand it better as a romance than a horror or thriller.
Sure – but those turds are so runny, foul-smelling, and corn-studded that they’re unforgettable.(To be clear: I didn’t like Us much but it stands a thousand miles above incoherent trash like Lady in the Water)
I remember seeing Lady In The Water in theatres back when I was still holding hope that Shyamalamadingdong could regain his Sixth Sense/Unbreakable form. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.
It is one of those rare purely bad movies. Not like “oh, I can see what they were trying to do, they just did a really crappy job” bad (like most of the Star Wars sequels) – and not like “wow this is so bizarrely terrible that it is almost campy fun to watch” bad (like Tommy Wiseau). Just pure, incoherent, boring, smug badness.
I’ve loved Shymalan’s work and somehow I just never ended up seeing Last Airbender or Lady In The Water After Earth etc. I can’t remember why but somehow I just missed all of his bad ones.
The trailer for the Village is probably the most scared I’ve ever been by a trailer. I never saw it and I hear it’s bad but woooow did that trailer screw me up. We had a forest in our backyard when I was in highschool and I couldn’t look at it for months. Closed curtains etc. The idea of something coming out of the trees to attack me was horrifying to me for some reason.
Out of fourteen movies, about six of them (The Village, Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth, and Glass) are memorably terrible, which is a bit over 40%. I can’t speak for his first two but they’re barely known in comparison to everything since, and Wide Awake got a mixed-to-bad reception at release. And his reputation as a garbage director hit its apex about eight years ago, post After Earth but before The Visit, when the total number of movies most people had seen (subtracting his first two) was 8 and the total number of awful movies was 5.It’s not like he released one dud and one mediocre flick and the world turned against him.
I liked The Village, otherwise, those were stinkers, or looked like it anyway, didn’t see all of them. The Happening was so bad I walked out on it, I didn’t finish Lady in the Water either, but that was at home. I know a lot of people say Signs didn’t make any sense because of the water thing, but I thought that he covered that in the movie, the little girl keeps mentioning the chemicals in the water, so I’ve always thought that it wasn’t just water that would kill the aliens, but water treated with chemicals. But I’ve never heard M. Night say that in his defense, so I don’t know if I’m right, but I don’t know why the character would keep mentioning chemicals in the water the whole movie if that wasn’t a plot point.
It is weird right? Shyamalan has so many hits but because of a couple turds people give him such a hard time.
I claim to have liked “Glass”, whatever that means.
but also Glass looked insanely cheap. I remember at being one of the cheapest made big blockbusters Ive ever seen. It looked like it was all shot in some pink warehouse with Bruce Willis sleeping the whole time.
I wanted it to be so much better than it was.
Really. Because by my counts he’s made a lot of turdsHis first two films were just meh. You get the Sixth Sense which is great. Unbreakable which is almost perfect until it shits the bed in the last minutes. Then you get six terrible movies in a row. The Visit is at least a return to more horror and gross fun. Split is fun too. Then Glass just kills the momentum again and Old is crap. So four out of 12.
I wouldn’t even say there really is a “twist” in Nope. Like you start with the protagonists engaging with a mysterious thing they don’t understand, and after repeated interactions with that thing, they figure it out. Unless you reject the premise of aliens and UFOs, everything pretty much checks out and is plausible. Also without saying too much for people who haven’t seen it, I have the sense that Yuen’s storyline was initially bigger (the cinematographer also felt that way too) and had to get cut down in the writing process due to length. Even then I completely disagree with the reviewers take on the Gordy/Yuen elements not working and feeling extraneous. I can’t get specific due to spoilers, but I have thought about Nope (I got out of it 5 hours ago) and the more the Gordy element enhances ties into and enhances many of the movie’s core themes. The thing about Peele is that his movies are very dense and he’s often layering in subtle things early in the movie that are not possible to understand or even notice without information you get later.
If there is anything Peele did here that Shyamalan has done, it’s take a character and have them singularly represent their entire sect of an industry. mainly the TMZ guy and the cinematographer. They seemed like human metaphors. Kind of like the critic in “Lady In The Water” representing ALL critics.
There’s been discussion that Yeun’s backstory and Gordy actually choosing to fist bump him at the tail end of the massacre made Jupe feel invulnerable to the wildness of nature. Hence trying to act like JeanJacket was another spectacle for him to make bucks off of. Hence, as a thematic exploration, IHMO it fit.
“Saw it last night and, while I agree with the points above overall, I think I just enjoyed it more.” Couldn’t have worded it it better haha
“he seems to be working backwards from the metaphors he wants to explore, only later defining them in a concrete narrative.”That’s pretty much his m.o. though, isn’t it?
Yeah, and it’s why Us was dumb.
Well, gosh, it must be… with such a lucid, convincing, and detailed argument against it. (JFC.)
I didn’t realize I’d provided my argument rather than my opinion.I’ll give you the short version that works as a criticism of both Get Out and Us: Jordan Peele has a bad habit of staging twists that completely undermine character (so far both have been women, but with limited evidence I’m choosing to see this as a coincidence). In Get Out, everything we thought we knew about Allison (I think that’s her name, the girlfriend) turns out to be completely irrelevant and she’s just a mindless racist sociopath. In Us, the reveal that our protagonist is in fact Red does exactly the same thing, except with even less insight into who she actually is as an adult. The metaphors in both movies hinge on those reveals happening the way they do, but at the expense of character and thereby also nuance.So yeah. It’s dumb.
I don’t think everything you know about the girlfriend in Get Out turns out to be irrelevant? I think she’s playing a role, and we find out she’s playing a role. Character development can serve a number of different purposes, and one of the most boring purposes possible is “To allow you to be able to predict everything the character will do for the rest of the movie.” An interesting use of character development, by contrast, is getting you to think a character is a certain way only to throw you for a loop when the character behaves differently later on. The deception of the girlfriend was pretty important to the plot of Get Out.
Character development is not “sike, this person was playing a role and they are in fact an unfeeling sociopath.” I just don’t know how else to put it. The fact that it’s so important to the plot is exactly my point.
I guess I don’t understand what you’re saying. The character development where she’s this sweet loving girlfriend who is embarrassed by her family and friends’ casual (if initially seemingly benign) racism and creepiness is in service of helping trap the protagonist, which is the story. I don’t see that as a weakness in the story. That Alison Williams’ character is, in fact, nothing like how she portrays herself initially is the point, that’s one of the ways that the protagonist gets trapped in this horror film. Her deception is the point. I agree that character development is not “sike, this person was playing a role and they are in fact an unfeeling sociopath,” but that a character has been deceptive about their true nature can actually be a narratively satisfying result of character development. That’s how I felt about that aspect of Get Out.
It’s dishonest to the audience not to telegraph that shift in any way. I’d agree that it’s a satisfying result of character development if her character developed to that point rather than it being an on/off switch that isn’t possible to predict based on her previous behavior. By that point, we understand the other family members’ motivations; we don’t understand hers.
I don’t necessarily agree that the shift wasn’t telegraphed (maybe you’ve just never been able to pick up on it?). And even if I didn’t think it was telegraphed, I’m not sure what it means to say it’s “dishonest.” She’s supposed to be deceptive, that’s the point. Her motivation is that she’s part of this family that is doing this thing. And the on/off switch is kind of the point. That’s how she plays her role successfully in trapping the protagonist. He didn’t really see it coming either, not sure why the audience needs to (although, again, I don’t think it was all that shocking when she turned).Also, I don’t want every big plot twist “telegraphed.” That’s usually a criticism of stories, that they telegraph too many twists. Is it entertaining for you to be able to easily foresee a key plot development?
Key character development and key plot development shouldn’t be the same thing. But I don’t think we’re changing each others’ minds here. You’re not really addressing my criticism.
Because your criticism doesn’t make much sense? The movie is supposed to be entertaining at the very least and the twist that Rose is in on it adds to that. What fun is the movie if you can see that moment coming?
I think Us was pretty good
His M.O. is lame, dude. He’s a capable director, but needs a real game changer. And I mean pronto, holmes.
I like how you criticized his work without providing a single concrete example or detail. In the immortal words of Matt Ruff, “A strong opinion and a bad mood aren’t evidence.”
I don’t know who Matt Ruff is, but I know what I like.
Yes, but do you have any understanding of why?
You need to recalibrate your expectations of people on the internet. You aren’t owed an explanation for anything.
Wasn’t Pronto Holmes a cowboy from The Old West?
Indubitably, Watson!
I say old man, jolly what? Rather, yes. Scrimshaw.
Like M. Knight, he should let someone else do the writing. He can create the story, but he needs someone who understands structure and is willing to write drafts 2 through 15, which Peele himself obviously isn’t doing.The best idea in the world has to be worked and worked to iron out the coherence and continuity issues, which are Peele’s absolute downfall. Get Out and US are good ideas, but nothing more and the execution sucks. Both are offensively silly and underbaked.
Yeah it’s pretty telling that people still talk about “Get Out”, his next one needs to be at that level.
Reporting in from the other side of Nope: He changed his game. It’s a very smart response to criticisms of his last two films and I was surprised to find I loved it.
Yeah, and it’s why Get Out exploded off the screen and became a culture-defining moment.
It exploded off the screen, sure; but can you name a single character?
Rose and Chris
Except Get Out made sense as a film while also having a whole lot to say about racial interaction. Whitford’s virtue signaling, the fact that wealthy white people want the experience of being a cool black guy, black people being inherently suspicious of well-meaning white people (and cops), etc. were all in service to the story.
It did, but it was pretty obvious he started with the metaphor and worked his way backwards. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
And that CAN work is your metaphors are tight and meshes well with your story ideas, but can be a mess if you’re just trying to shoehorn messages into your story in clumsy, ham fisted ways. It’s the difference between early George Romero and latter George Romero. Dawn of the Dead is regarded as a classic commentary on mindless consumerism while Land of the Dead was a shotgun blast of various ill fitting metaphors that were so hammered over your head that they were insulting to the viewer.Peele obviously nailed it with Get Out. Hopefully this isn’t his Land of the Dead.
That’s pretty much every writer’s MO to some degree. The difference is in the execution. Get Out was much more tightly written than Us, the plot and the ideas being explored were interwoven naturally. Us, on the other hand, felt like writing backwards, often shoving metaphors into single scenes and then dropping them, at the expense of logical coherence. Which, for me, has the effect of making the characters feel like cogs in a plot machine. Rather than being invested in them as characters you start thinking, what’s the “reveal” going to be that will, at least, bring home some coherence to the obviously dangling metaphors? I found Us to almost comically stumble near the end in that regard.
Maybe Get Out was a fluke.
“Us” was very overreaching and dumb too, so this doesn’t surprise me.
I never trust ANY critic who’s that confident that the issue was with the film and not with themselves. Nobody with a simplistic enough outlook on the world to believe a film is objectively “Good” or “Bad” can be expected to have anything interesting to say– and you didn’t, so congratulations.
Yeah, it was pretty bad.
I mean, judgment calls on quality are kind of the whole point of critiques? I’m not sure how much difference it would make to add “subjectively, I feel…” in front of every thought. This review conveys (the reviewer’s opinion) that the film had some great moments and ideas, but some structural and pacing issues. That’s useful information to me.
I’d ask if this was Jordan Peele’s burner account but I don’t think he’d be as big of a baby about someone not liking his films as you are.
Yeah, like…that’s freshman film major shit he’s spouting up there.
So you don’t believe in critical thinking? If something sucks you blame yourself? You should get out more.Also: US is silly nonsense cloaked in racial politics so people gave it a pass.
must be fucking exhausting to talk film with you
Nobody with a simplistic enough outlook on the world to believe a film is objectively “Good” or “Bad” can be expected to have anything interesting to say I…the fuck? QUESTION: Where does opinion (of an individual) end and a unilateral declaration of quality (for everyone) begin? Do you even distinguish between the two?
Great – no one anywhere cares what you think.
Just like M Night, Peele peaked right out of the gate.
Except for all the hits that followed? Peele needs more discipline though. Get Out was a tight script and film while Us was a hot mess. I’ll watch this via stream but the reviews seem polite.
unbreakable is better than sixth sense
Unshakeable is better than Unbreakable.
Agreed
Unbreakable is an amazing movie with maybe one of the worst ending in cinema history
Ah, how refreshing, a fellow Wide Awake enjoyer. Rosie O’Donnell is really something, ain’t she?
So Peele has graduated to being a legend in his own mind. Got it.
It feels like the author’s expectation that he would love this movie is at war with his actual experience of seeing it. The word “but” appears 17 times in this review, and almost every sentence careens back and forth between the author saying, “This is bad, but maybe it’s OK, but maybe it’s not.”
This movie elevates Peele to the status of Jaws/Close Encounters-era Steven Spielberg. I give it a C+.
This is the AV Club! Not liking everything is strictly forbidden!
I saw it last night and loved it. It was incredibly bizarre. I’d rank it as one of the best movies I’ve seen this year, second to Everything Everywhere All At Once.
As much as I wanted to love Everything Everywhere, it was just okay for me. Too chaotic for my liking.
I honestly just think I don’t care for this current multiverse craze.
You know there may be another universe where you love it!
you are white and gave thor love and thunder a high rating
“Lets his metaphorical aspirations get ahead of the nuts and bolts of clear, cogent storytelling” – so it’s Us, Part II then.
What a disappointment that turned out to be, all blame on the completely baffling ending. It was an awesome horror movie that kept you wondering what the fuck was going on, right up to the explanation at the end.
Agree with this. I still would call Us a success because it kept me entertained but the ending was just not good.
Unfortunately is sounds that way. There are some reviews that are highly positive, but even those note the lack of consistent logic. I was supremely disappointed with Us after the brilliance of Get Out. It has some really good individual sequences, but taken as whole, it’s just… a bit silly.
I think there are a lot of critics really pulling for Peele, against mounting evidence.
Right, agreed – I certainly don’t need my horror/fantasy/sci-fi movies to be super logical or realistic overall (I love Star Wars despite its fiery explosions in the vacuum of space and a world where they have faster-than-light travel and fully AI robots, but seemingly no internet or cell phones.)But movies need to make sense by their own internal logic, otherwise it’s unclear what the stakes and motivations and risks are for characters.
Us was structured like a mystery but functioned almost exclusively as an allegory, which is just asking for trouble (see also: Lost). It needed to either sort out its internal logic and make all the pieces fit or fully commit to magical realism, be the fairy tale it always wanted to be and stop trying so hard to keep explaining the inexplicable.
100% I want a mysterious work of fiction to either go Knives Out puzzle-box-with-unpredictable-but-logically-clever-ending, or I want full David Lynch dream logic vibes.The uncanny valley inbetween is deeply unsatisfying.
Us had a lot of the same problems. The moment you really start thinking past that film’s implications, it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny like Get Out does. Saying that, I eagerly anticipate this film.
The first paragraph sounds like a review of his Twilight Zone reboot.
One sequence which takes place at night and in the rain, and it feels impossible not to think of, say, the T-Rex escape in Jurassic Park, given the distance between the characters and the threat that looms over them both. But Peele never especially bothers to set up concrete exterior shots of what in his scene is a car and a house, and as a consequence, there’s never a moment of true urgency. And yet his skill in constructing certain kinds of set pieces remains as vivid as in his earlier films; although its relationship to, well, anything else proves specious at best, a scene where OJ becomes convinced he’s experienced something in the family barn is just brilliant, mass-audience, edge-of-your-seat entertainment.There’s also the larger matter of genre movies trying to bear the weight—constantly—of complex, traumatic, contemporary issues that often get mistaken, or wrongly prioritized, over the efficiency of thoughtful, measured, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other storytelling. There will, undoubtedly and appropriately, be dozens of think pieces written in the weeks to come about what Peele is saying, or trying to say, in this movie and at this moment. But what Nope lacks is not ambition or ideas, but clarity, which is why the appropriate response to it is not a resounding yes, but alright, not bad—what else have you got?FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, AV CLUB, HIRE AN EDITOR! The irony of that last sentence…
(To be clear, I don’t blame the writers. I make mistakes when I’m writing stuff all the time, including the exact kinds of mistakes shown above. But this is why editors exist.)
I blame the writers
I blame the Jews, the Illuminati, the World Economic Forum, the Bilderbergs, the US government, the Lizard People and the Moon Nazis.For starters.
They’re all just having their strings pulled by the gingers
Even just one proofread by the author before clicking submit would catch a lot of the AV Club grammatical errors. They just do noooot care. It’s all about pumping out constant content.
Editor? A $249 Lifetime subscription to ProWritingAid would do wonders. Baby Steps.
An Editor can help, but a writer should still be able to read that back and fix it. But this reviewer seems to think word sandwiches means more profound criticism. A good portion of this review is utterly meaningless, and indicates a lot of this movie went over his head (the purpose of the chimp). Which isn’t surprising, because it reads as if they went into the film with the intention of taking Peele to task, and reverse-engineered the review.
I think Us is a very good film; it’s unfortunate to see so many commenters hating on it. You have to watch it more than once. The desire for repeated viewings used to be a standard of excellence (for all forms of art). Now audiences are just lazy. If you need everything explained for you just stick to Marvel productions. On the other hand, their plotlines are all over the place so just enjoy the same old hackneyed themes along with your explosions and bro-jokes.
Nobody needs anything explained to them about Us, or watch it multiple times to understand it. The themes are obvious, but unlike the far better Get Out, they are haphazardly executed, and the underlying premise is downright goofy, really.
Ah yes, the old “if you don’t like it, it’s because you’re lazy and dumb” argument. Let me guess, you also loved Midsommer?US is idiotic and silly. I don’t need things explained to me; in fact, some of the best movies are the ones that explain the least (Alien and Upstream Color would be good examples). But US is a failure because it’s impossible to imagine any scenario by which it makes sense. Call it the Rollerball syndrome, if you like: in Rollerball, they don’t explain the game of Rollerball to you, but as you watch it, you can’t make sense of it for yourself. There are no facts you can insert that make the game make sense. I say Get Out is equally stupid. Racist want their brains put in the bodies of the people they hate, a doctor can do the operation in her living room, and then those bodies somehow overtake the brains to plead for mercy? Huh? Silly. Peele’s a lazy writer, ten more drafts of any of his scripts could have made them good.
I didn’t hate US. The film just absolutely baked my brain in. It’s like that movie was designed to ruin my stoned mind. I was sat in the screen, just actively wanting to leave because of how anxious it made me feel. I’ve never had it in me to rewatch it.
If you were buzzed I’m not surprised if you freaked out. The second time around should feel more like an analytical exercise – like figuring out a puzzle.
Yeah this isn’t what movies are about.
Or people just didn’t like it, dork
What? Nah I disagree with your opinion that some films have to be watched more than once to appreciate them. Watching films more than once is cool Ive seen Uncut Gems like three times but…. I’m sorry… if a film requires me to watch it multiple times to understand it then it is not a good film.
To speak to what you said about Marvel films, I think endcredit scenes don’t count. As much as I love them if a filmmaker’s message isn’t clear to me from the opening moment to the start of the credits then that filmmaker failed me. Maybe they didn’t fail overall, but I seriously believe that if a film requires me to go beyond it’s run time to appreciate it, it didn’t succeed.
Here’s an example: I really wanted to like Crimes of the Future, but I didn’t really. It was interesting, but, I’m not planning on re-watching it endlessly until I find a way to like it. That sounds maddening. I’m just trying to relax when I watch a film – chill out.
What a hilariously stupid take, and you even managed to fit in a criticism of Marvel movies! Be honest, how hard were you sniffing your own farts when you wrote this?
I’ve only seen it once so far, but I really enjoyed Nope and I think I will like it even more on second viewing. Even in just the few hours since I left the theater this evening, I’m finding a lot of things I found questionable (including some things mentioned in this review, like the Gordy plot) already work a lot better the more I think about them in the context of the complete film. Peele likes to pack details in that seem so unremarkable when you see them that when you learn things that should change your perspective later in the movie you don’t initially make that connection. That’s definitely the case with this movie.
Thank you for posting your impressions. That’s exactly how I felt about Us. I think I watched it three times and my appreciation deepened considerably. We’re seeing Nope tonight. I think it’s going to be worth it.
Care to share your thoughts? I was left feeling a bit confused/disappointed after the movie. I can see the threads there but it doesn’t add up to anything that interesting imo, but I’m sure there are things going over my head.
but having everything explained at the end of Us is what ruined it for me
“If you need everything explained for you just stick to Marvel productions.”
shorthand for film snobs…I should know, I used to say “stick to Transformers” when I was one *reminisces*
i like a good rewatchable movie, but as I get older i want a movie that hits you the first time, and you rewatch it again to chase the dragon, not study it. Therein lies some form of craft. Or maybe a movie the lingers in your mind whether or not it got in your guts on the first try. I’m too tired to try and understand, say, David Lynch on a deeper level, although i’ve been able to enjoy trying to make sense of his movies on a surface level.
that being said I thought “Us” was cool and wanted to rewatch it when it came out. So well done IMO, Mr. Peele. And the fact that everybody is stating their OPINIONS over objective facts regarding this flick tells me it’s pretty darn good on some level.
From what I’ve gathered, the theme of the movie isn’t Hollywood, but spectacle in general, and how trauma becomes spectacle in a process that’s harmful to everybody.
Yeah the reviewer more or less misses the whole point and then blames the movie for it.
I’d say that Hollywood hurting people is a subtheme to the film, but the main theme feels like its more about, well, animals not being given the respect for how dangerous they can be. It’s why the Chimp Attack is so important and gets called back to so often, its why the film starts off with a horse in a shoot that goes wrong in a more subdued way due to the crew not understanding how to act around it, and……well, it’s why the UFO isn’t a ship but instead an alien, one that OJ learns how to handle and manipulate, because its not something you can tame, its something you need to understand to deal with.
***spoilery discussion***That was my takeaway too. Or more generally, the importance of respect for animals as individuals. I think it’s notable that OJ works in partnership with the horse in the big showdown. Also that Jupe was ready to sacrifice said horse to the alien for his show, but ironically he and the audience all get gobbled up while the horse is the only one left.The spectacle of trauma that OP mentioned is an interesting theme that is touched on but didn’t feel explored enough to be the main focus. There’s the aforementioned show that attempted to make entertainment out of an animal getting eaten, the morbid curiosity around the chimp attack, and TMZ and news crews trying to get the scoop on the mysterious disappearance of people at Jupiter’s Claim, but it felt secondary to the taming the alien stuff.Respect for animals is something I agree with (or maybe it’s the obvious message to me as former wildlife biologist), but I don’t think what he had to say in the movie about it is especially poignant or noteworthy. Thematically the film is muddled but I can appreciate it on the surface level as a sci-fi thriller/caper and for the performances.
That’s what you got? I thought it was about how everyone’s too damn ready to throw away their entire damn self for some fame and money. And too many opportunities to do it.
I saw the trailer on the big screen last weekend. It looked like a sci-fi/alien movie with a rancher who appeared uncomfortable, and more painful social media ‘stuff’ that tries to be topical.It looks like that is exactly what this is.
Wow, lots of reviewers bending over backwards to praise Peele while tacitly admitting this movie, like US, is a big underwritten mess that insults the viewer’s intelligence. You write:
“Nope doesn’t satisfactorily explain how and why too many basic elements occur, much less converge in the way they ultimately do.”
Right, which makes the movie a failure. If the movie asks questions that literally can’t be answered in any coherent way—which is US top to bottom—it fails as a movie.That the movie also blatantly rips Close Encounters, and tries to rip Jurassic Park from your summary, is just lazy. Nope is right.
So, nope to seeing Nope in the cinema.
I loved Us, so I’m looking very forward to this.
“The reason he doesn’t achieve his version of those films isn’t because he lacks the ambition or the creativity, but because he seems to be working backwards from the metaphors he wants to explore and only later defining them in a concrete narrative.”Yeah, this really confirms my feeling about Us.
Wow I really didn’t expect a C+ after reading that headline.
it’s an absolutely terrible review lolit somehow raises Peele to the level of Spielberg and Co. while also being a C+?
.
C+? I guess that the black fetish is replaced with the tranny one.
Well, gosh, it must be… with such a lucid, convincing, and detailed argument against it. (JFC.)https://sarkariresult.com.co/
I only have two takeaways from this review: “Todd likes art that looks like stuff” and “I think it’s time to finally give up on the AV Club.” I’m just not interested in the opinions of critics who can’t deal with ambiguity or with “bad logic” in a *fantasy* premise. Wizard did it, sport.
As soon as I see “specificity” they’re dead to me
What are you on about? Movies establish “rules” or internal logic all the time. I was watching 1899 the other night and there was a reveal from a character who waited 6 fucking episodes to unveil to the person who asked her. Why? No reason at all. No self preservation, no big secret or problem associated with it. Nothing. She just didn’t say because it didn’t serve the story. That’s lazy and it’s shit writing. You dismiss it because you don’t care about good writing. That’s who you are but some of us want more. We actually try to understand character motivations and breathe the world. You just want your attention to be diverted for a couple hours. That means your opinion sucks.
Alternate Headline:Peele’s Reel Seals Deal
If hollywood is only going to bankroll original genre films from a handful of directors then I think those opportunities should be parceled out to more people. Jordan Peele has proven himself to be a medium talent; it’s time for someone else to get the opportunity to write and direct an original genre film with a decent budget. Jordan: thanks for your contributions but it’s back to TV for you.
Hilarious how this review bends over backwards to kiss Peele’s white woman ass. The movie stinks, you don’t see the alien, you don’t know why it’s there attacking. Peele stinks.
In Nope, the sky is the limit for Jordan Peele’s ambitionRan this headline through the translator. It means “we really, really wanted to like this more than we did, just like we really, really wanted to be seen liking a Jordan Peele film.” I bet myself $10 million that A.O. Scott would give this one a laughably unearned rave. I’m now a rich man.
He gave it a C+, what the fuck are you babbling about?
Read the review.
Longtime Jordan Peele skeptic; I loved this movie. Very original stuff.
As Aziz Ansari noted in a standup special, ‘niggling’ is not a racial slur, but it’s still …kinda weird when someone deliberately chooses to use that word (especially when they’re reviewing a movie written, directed by & starring Black artists). That + the condescending tone of the review is really not the greatest look, fyi.
Oh do shut up. Aziz cornered a girl for sexual favor and you’re going to quote him about using a fucking word.
My point stands, regardless of who may or may not agree with me about it.
I wish there was a spoiler space for this movie because, wow.
addendum: this movie fucks
IMO, after the brilliance that was Get Out Peele could release garbage for the rest of his career and he would still be one of the greats. This isn’t garbage but it is messy yet entertaining, and honestly that’s enough for horror movies these days.
I saw it last night. I guess you can insist on a bigger metaphor, but if you watch it as a combination of Jaws and anime (specifically thinking of the non-anti-Semetic parts of Attack on Titan), you can enjoy it as much as I did, which is a lot.
Todd completely misses the anime feel of the whole. When you have an outright Akira homage in your flick, it can’t be ignored.
It didn’t feel like anime to me, but perhaps I was being oblivious. Besides the Akira reference, what else is it similar to?
Vague Spoilers Ahead: The design and movement of the creature fully extended at the end is very Final Boss, Let’s Kill God Anime. It’s hard to explain exactly but if you know, you know.
Touch grass dude. I love Akira and anime but holy shit what are you talking about.
C+? What are you talking about?
We saw Nope over the weekend. I enjoyed it but didn’t think it was his greatest of all time. There were some scary moments, some good jump scares, some unease underlying a lot of it. I left a little… let down. Maybe I was looking for a more linear plot – so many cut scenes that felt a bit like vignettes. The Gordy stuff was very interesting but it felt removed from the rest of the film. I almost feel like we didn’t even need Jupe’s character in the end. I dunno. I actually adored Us… saw it probably 3 times. Really enjoyed Get Out, too. Everyone’s got an opinion. This is mine.
Us was pretty good until they tried to explain everything. With Nope, Peele learned his lesson and didn’t bother, and I loved it all the more for it. It scared me more than Get Out, even if the latter is the better film.
Sounds to me like this movie needs a script doctor. I know just the guy:
I kinda fully disagree on the shots during the storm; I think some very defining outside establishing shot would have hurt the scene rather than helped it. It’s supposed to feel as claustrophobic for us as it does for OJ, and to a lesser extent Angel and Emerald in the house. We know how close the terror is by his quick peek outside the door, by the sheets of heavier rain cascading off the sides of the ‘object’.
Your need for “clarity” is more indicative of shallow reading. Anyone who bases assumptions on your petri-dish review should stay home.
This was a bad movie filled with great performances. C+ feels generous.
“There’s also the larger matter of genre movies trying to bear the weight—constantly—of complex, traumatic, contemporary issues that often get mistaken, or wrongly prioritized, over the efficiency of thoughtful, measured, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other storytelling.”Did we just become best friends? I’ve had this thought lingering in my head for a while now without the vocabulary to elucidate it. I don’t know if it’s audience pressure or studio pressure or what but I would kill for a good movie or series that wasn’t half contemporary politics, half corporate diversity meeting. This review is stellar. Absolutely stellar. You were right on every single point. Though my review would have been “acts 1 and 2 are absolutely thrilling and act three makes you wonder why you watched it at all.”
Stellar observations
[Gratuitous name-checking ahead. Editor’s response: You’re welcome.]Other films/filmmakers and cultural artifacts in Nope’s DNA: Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin; Steven Spielberg and Richard Matheson’s Duel (a far more important intertext than Jaws); Plato’s Allegory of the Cave; the surreal cine-romans of René Magritte and Alain Robbe-Grillet; Tom Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls get the Blues; Guy DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle; Samuel Becket’s Film; Baudrillard’s Simulations and Simulacra; Susan Sontag’s Imagination of Disaster; Aristotle and Northrop Frye on diegesis, genre and the mechanics of storytelling and representation; and, perhaps most glaringly and enjoyably: the opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Oddyssey (the chimp sitting amongst the destruction and carnage he’s wrought, with the impossibly upright shoe standing in for the monolith).Yes, Nope is “uneven” and “too caught up in its own symbolism” and almost Brechtian in its “IN WHICH THE HERO RETRACTS HIS GAZE” thuddiness, but it’s also wildly exhilarating, exquisitely cine-literate, sharply subversive Wizard of Oz-level genius that demands proper attention and exegesis. It makes me cry that my favorite sci-fi and horror critic, Robin Wood, passed away before he could write a book or at least a Cine-Action piece on Jordan Peele.Here’s a thought, or rather a plea: With all the cine-literacy readily apparent in every single frame of a Nope or an Under the Skin (its distaff twin), can we please consider raising the critical ante and not pretending we’re starting from ground zero? It’s not wrong to expect the likes of The AV Club or Sight and Sound to bring a hell of a lot more critical acumen to the table for a film like this, even if it means having to explain some basic Althusser, Lacan or Laura Mulvey to its audience. It’s embarrassing to read a serious dissection of this film that doesn’t take advantage of seminal, neon-lit jumping off points such as Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave;” Freud’s Uncanny and Return of the Repressed; Laura Mulvey on the Gaze and the implications of looking and being seen; Vivian Sobchack’s key text on Sci-Fi iconography, ‘Screening Space;” or anything by the Canadian high priest of horror/sci-fi criticism, Robin Wood. Instead, unwitting readers are lead on a tour of a post-Alexandrian intellectual dark age or alternate universe where the symbolic language and thematic ambitions of Peele’s films (and visual storytelling in general) haven’t already been breathlessly discussed, explored and debated in thousands upon thousand of pages of theory, criticism and deconstructive analysis. It’s time to step it up, folks. You’re not starting a conversation; you’re joining one, and it’s been going on for decades.
Good criticism is half the “text;” it’s the ‘other’ side of the Möbius strip; or do we really need another Nouvelle Vague or Kino Eye to remind us that every film is both a narrative and a meditation on its own form and language? Concepts such as Susan Sontag’s Imagination of Disaster and Laura Mulvey’s Gaze are extremely low-hanging fruit and don’t require graduate study for an AV Club or Sight and Sound reader to grasp. Speak to the brighter students in class, and if your criticism is honest and unpretentious enough, you’ll reach everybody and spark lots of honest discussion and debate on these core ideas and a whole lot more. Continue to position your subjects as children who exist in a Robin Wood-free zone, and all we have to look forward to is half-assed (and poorly edited) “think pieces” like this and months of specious click-bait from the likes of Looper and Screenrant, promising much (“Ending of Nope Explained!!”) and signifying nothing.