Stringer Bell’s review published on Letterboxd:
This was a solid first draft but I expect about 5 more rewrites before anything this ridiculous gets funded.
Yet here we are.
One of the biggest disappointments of the year, continuing 2022's absolute shit streak.
This generations "The Happening" or "Signs".
This film offers absolutely nothing. This film could literally have not existed and my life would have gone on just fine if I never got a stupid story about a jellyfish curtain spaceship in the sky eating people that look at it.
Like I'm supposed to be scared of a floating large bottom of a cowboy hat? The fuck is this shit.
There are ideas about animal exploitation, about the hypocrisy of wrangling and taming nature for the sake of showmanship and spectacle, about the lengths humans will go to for the "perfect image" but none of these ideas seem to have anything more to offer beyond the tip of the iceberg. Yes we know exploiting animals is bad, so what? These ideas could have been explored in so many better ways by extending Jupe's storyline. We see the cinematographer looking over footage of animals preying on other animals - like...come on lol. It's just so basic and heavy handed
Peele makes us feel bad for Gordie for all the exploitation and makes us resent humans for growing up not having learned lessons from the effects of this trauma (Jupe), but we're cheering for humans at the end of the film for killing another creature of nature... what kind of stupid logic is this?
What boggles my mind the most about all this tomfoolery is that Peele is clearly a very capable writer and director but his last 2 projects suffer from having too many darts at the board with very little coherence, resulting in finales that are often jumbled messes with very little narrative payoff.
A dichotomy between Kaluya and Palmer would have been nice as well, one seeking the perfect shot, one still grief barren over the loss of their father and the burden of the farm. I didn't get this at all from Kaluya's one-note performance. His facial expression never changed once.
That MAD TV chimp scene could have literally been taken out of this idiotic film and the film would have remained unchanged. It was the best part of the movie, but didn't fit. The whole Gordie sequence could have been its own film.
Nothing comes together in the end, and many of the ideas that were setup in the first half had zero payoffs.
Sure, an AKIRA SLIDE shot is cool but what in god's name does it serve to the overall theme or message of the story? Is that what passes as "good cinema" these days? This is the death of the auteur. Auteurs used to put so much meaning and thought behind every single shot and now we have Peele and The Daniels who put anime references or butt plug jokes just because THEY think it's funny yet it serves no grander purpose. I hate this so much.
"Get Out" is an oscar winning script that shows how to foreshadow and reward your audience, a screenplay to study.
"Nope" is an absolute buffet of "what not to do" in screenwriting; offering many examples of filmmaking fumbles.
What a shit show.
We are suffering the darkest times in cinematic history.
Jordan Peele's 3rd feature shows 0% originality, 0% artistic purpose, 0% vision and 0% deeper meaning.
I'm furious with the state of films today.
The more I think about this, the more I hate it. This is such a ripoff of so many better films.
There are so many issues people are just overlooking because the movie "looks pretty" but truly I can't ignore them. 2nd watch was unpleasant. The pacing really suffers and many more glaringly stupid moments just take me out of this film.
Consider me not on this bandwagon
