Critics are absolutely raving about Jordan Peele's latest horror comedy, Nope. At the time of this writing, the movie has just been released. And critics are already calling it a 'masterpiece' and comparing the director to Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock.
Yeah... that's pretty high praise...
Of course, there's been a lot of buzz about Nope thanks to a brilliant and highly secretive marketing campaign that's kept fans guessing as to what Jordan's latest movie is really about months before its release. The cast of the film has also been waxing poetic about Nope.
But is the film actually as phenomenal as everyone is claiming? While the vast majority of critics think it is, there are quite a few notable voices calling it one of Jordan's lesser films. Here's why...
Caution: Minor Spoilers For Jordan Peele's Nope Ahead...
6 What Is Nope Actually About? ...Apparently WAY Too Much
One of the biggest problems that Nope nay-sayers have with the 2022 film has to do with the sheer amount of content in the film. In short, it lacks a cohesive theme and story.
As acclaimed critic Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian wrote, "Jordan Peele’s strange, muddled, indigestible new UFO mystery looks like it had a good fairy and a dodgy fairy present at the birth. The good fairy is Steven Spielberg, to whose Close Encounters and Jaws the film pays an overt tribute. The dodgy fairy is M Night Shyamalan, of Signs and The Happening: the sometimes brilliant, sometimes exasperating high-concept showman whose influence is also present – but unacknowledged, un-homaged. It feels like an event movie billboard in the Shyamalan style, all about the prerelease conjecture and trailer buzz: what on earth can it be about? The answer, at the end of two and a quarter hours is … a great deal. Tons. Peele’s script is crammed with about 210% more material than he can meaningfully cohere into a single script with any dramatic weight and point. Front-loading a movie with witty imagery and narrative premise without enough of a satisfyingly worked-through plot to come behind was what made his second film, Us, less than his sensationally scary and funny debut Get Out."
5 Nope Has No Story And Is Repetitive
Building off of what Peter Bradshaw wrote, Mick LaSalle at Datebook claims that Nope really isn't about anything. On top of this, it's overly repetitive.
"What Peele doesn’t have in “Nope” is a story or anything close to one. He has a situation, but it doesn’t develop," Mick wrote. "It more or less stays where it starts, with grander and louder versions of essentially the same scene. For the first 20 to 30 minutes, the audience waits for “Nope” to start. Then it realizes: Oh no, this is it."
4 Keke Palmer's Character Is Underdeveloped
One of Polygon critic Robert Daniels' biggest issues with Nope has to do with Keke Palmer's underdeveloped character, Emerald, who is a descendant of a forgotten Black actor who was instrumental in the creation of cinema.
"[The backstory is] partly why Emerald is so captivated with breaking into Hollywood. She doesn’t want to be erased like her forefather, or like the other Black creatives who’ve inhabited Hollywood for decades," Robert wrote. "Peele’s script should let the audience in on feeling her desire. There’s a justness to her frustration and hope that should prompt a swelling of the heart, or at least a rooting interest. But her rapid-fire pitch to a film crew about her artistic passions flies by so quickly that the audience can barely hold on. Who is Emerald, apart from being a classic showbiz grifter? Peele is only moderately interested in the answer to that question."
3 Nope Contradicts Its Own Message
Much like Get Out and Us, Jordan Peele has attempted to create a genre film that reflects society's foibles back at us. In this case, the cinema audience's desire for spectacle over character, heart, and meaning. Nope attempts to skewer our addiction to reality TV, big-budget films, sensationalized news, and, of course, social media. While this theme is touched upon, critic Richard Lawson at Vanity Fair claims that it holds no emotional weight because the characters are so brutally underdeveloped as well as Jordan seems to contradict his message.
"Nope seems to want to call out the failures of modern media while also reveling in its capacity. At least Peele’s version is not empty maximalism, unlike so much other entertainment and manipulated reality rushing at us at all times. There are real ideas in Nope, albeit ones that frequently circle back on themselves, that exist in confusing contradiction to one another. Such confusion is certainly the prerogative of—and even welcomed in—a film as dense as this one. But Nope’s concluding minutes don’t bring the film to any satisfying place; it hurries to an ending in a way that suggests many minutes, if not hours, of movie left on the cutting room floor."
2 The Alien Doesn't Make Much Sense
Without getting into heavy spoilers, Nope does involve an alien. This is pretty clear from the marketing material. All the best alien films have very clear rules of the world. That's to say audiences know why the alien is there, what they want, what its weaknesses are, and how it operates within a space. According to Alonso Duralde at The Wrap, Jordan doesn't quite nail this aspect of the film.
"The rules of how one does or does not attract the alien’s attention don’t make all that much sense, and the resolution feels rote and random."
1 Is Jordan Peele's Nope Like A Steven Spielberg Film?
Jordan Peele's Nope is being compared to the work of Steven Spielberg. But does he get anywhere close?
"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," Todd Gilchrist wrote for AV Club. "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."
Todd went on to say, "While he could benefit from the purposeful specificity of Spielberg’s direction, Peele’s pacing feels like M. Night 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."