When siblings O J and Emerald (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) inherit their father’s horse wrangling business following his tragic death, they are also forced to confront bizarre, ectoplasmic alien entities coming from the clouds, threatening earth’s very existence. What to do? Film it, or it didn’t happen, and put it on ‘Oprah’. They are, after all, tech savvy twentysomethings. Righto.
Jordan Peele’s set-up here is indeed a little contrived, unconvincing and on the nose. Hollywood is the alien, right? And we’re all voyeurs. Coming across as a cine-literate satire, but lacking the depth and layers of previous films ‘Get Out ‘ and ‘Us’, ‘Nope’ suffers from a general implausibility in plot and characters who are hard to invest in. They lack warmth and subtlety: O J is taciturn and lacking charisma; Emerald screechy and manic until the last half hour.
The nods to ‘Close Encounters’, ‘Westworld’, Lovecraft,anime and a slew of Hitchcock films often feels like ‘Scooby Doo’ for adults. It gets silly. Even a subplot involving Jupe (a fine Steven Yeun) who has turned his childhood trauma into a theme park, can’t save this uneven mess.
It’s not enough to say that it’s a broader critique on the need to document and profit from everything – we don’t need a meta sci-fi popcorn flick to tell us what we already know. Social media reminds us of this, constantly. Peele throws everything at the film: lavish cinematography,; creepy white guy, comments on colonialism, and strange FX, but sadly it’s all a little hollow. The good performances from Kaluuya and Yeun can’t stop it from being pretty dull.
Hit The North 