Direction: Jordan Peele
Country: USA
Nope is Jordan Peele’s worst show; a completely missed shot by the director of Get Out (2017) and Us (2019). Limited in scope and visually unattractive, the film is presented with a messy structure and anticlimactic developments. On top of that, the contrasting performances by the leads, Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer (he is hyper passive; she is annoyingly electric), are both debilitated and forgettable.
They pair of actors play siblings - OJ and Emerald - whose remote horse ranch at Agua Dulce, California, becomes a UFO hotspot with intriguing daily activity. To discover more about it, the siblings enlist tech expert Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) and renowned cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) as allies in their attempt to capture the occurrences. Yet, the threatening flying saucer, nicknamed Jean Jacket, abducts showman and former child actor Jupe (Steven Yeun) as well as his audience and animals.
The film, besides being emotionally handicapped by its ridiculous ambition to get near Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, feels interminable. Its tempting science-fiction concepts are overwhelmed by an apathetic atmosphere, plot inconsistencies, and sequences of pretentious gibberish and empty silences. Thus, the meek mysteries are meager for real enthusiasts of sci-fi, while the script is too cautious for the ones who look for a consistent, good story.
Peele expects us to react to disturbing energetic fields and intermittent power outages that never cause uneasiness. More audacity was expected from him. Do I recommend it? The answer is in the title.
