According to its production notes, Jordan Peele's Nope is a new take on "the granddaddy of genre movies: the summer event film." Saying this out loud sets a pretty high bar for the picture to clear. When you think back on the classics of the sci-fi/fantasy tradition—the neighborhood into which Nope hopes to move—you recall the all-time hits: Spielberg's Jaws (the original summer blockbuster, released in June 1975), John Carpenter's The Thing (June 1982), and Roland Emmerich's Independence Day (July 1996). These movies are still vibrantly alive—on streaming sites and in theatrical revivals—because they're filled with images (an inside-out demon dog, a space alien being punched in the snoot) and scenes (Robert Shaw's haunting monologue about a World War II shark attack) that people still talk about.
That Nope is unlikely to join this celebrated company is a disappointment, because Peele, a director of distinctive gifts with a cheerful affection for the B-movie tradition, achieved wonderful things with his first two features, fusing horror and sizzling cultural satire in the 2017 Get Out (for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay) and the scary but muddled Us (2019). Now, with Nope, he extends his creative reach, attempting to take in Hollywood class and race arrangements as well, while at the same time delivering a full-on, 1950s-style flying-saucer movie. This sounds like a fresh kind of fun, and the director does in fact assemble some wild sights for us. But the movie's concept never quite gels and the story doesn't knit together, and since the picture is overlong (at two and a half hours), we're given too much time to notice these things.
