Nope (R)
Bloody Disgusting; Break Room of Geeks; Dread Central; IMDb; Monkeypaw Productions; official website; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Universal; Wikipedia
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Written and directed by Jordan Peele. At the start of the film, we meet Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David) and his son, Otis "OJ" Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya), who run a ranch where they train horses for movies. Then random junk starts falling out of the sky, one piece of which kills Otis Sr. Six months later, OJ is struggling to keep the business afloat, and has already been forced to sell a number of horses to Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yeun), who runs a western theme park called Jupiter's Claim. OJ's sister, Emerald "Em" Haywood (Keke Palmer), comes to stay at the ranch for awhile. One night, when a horse runs off, OJ goes after it, and witnesses what seems to be a UFO. He and Em subsequently try to obtain footage of the phenomenon, to sell to the media. They get some new surveillance equipment, which is set up by a Fry's Electronics employee named Angel Torres. He turns out to be a UFO enthusiast/conspiracy theorist, who takes an interest in what OJ and Em are doing. The two of them (and Angel) also get help from a cinematographer named Antlers Holst, who uses a non-electric camera, since the UFO disrupts electrical devices. Eventually, it becomes clear that the UFO is extremely dangerous, but I don't really want to say more about it. (I mean, I do want to say more about it, but I also don't want to spoil anything.)

So, I'm not sure what else to say about the plot. There's a bit of a side story about how Jupe used to be a child actor on a 1990s sitcom called "Gordy's Home", about a chimpanzee named Gordy, who one day went berserk on set and attacked his human costars, all except for Jupe, who was hiding. At one point, Gordy found Jupe and seemed to be about to fist bump him, which could contain all kinds of symbolism, but it mostly just made me think about the name of Peele's production company, Monkeypaw. Anyway, that whole side story felt to me to be pretty disconnected from the rest of the plot, in the present. I'm sure it played into the underlying themes of the movie, but most of that kind of went over my head. Um... I also wanted to say that it seemed to me as if OJ might have social anxiety, the way he's often not comfortable looking directly at people and usually doesn't say much. And I liked how that (possibly) tied in to his eventual realization that it's better not to look at the UFO, though I don't think looking away from it actually helped much. And I'm sure that's all tied into the main theme of the movie, which has to do with "spectacle" (so I've read). I don't know what to say about that, but you can read a bit about it on Wikipedia and probably elsewhere, if you're so inclined. Though I did want to mention that there might be some kind of symbolism, like history repeating, in how OJ was filmed riding a horse to lure out the UFO, considering we previously got a little history lesson about the first motion picture being a brief clip of a Black man riding a horse. I expect both things tie into the subject of spectacle, and cultural erasure, and maybe other things. But I didn't give too much thought to those sorts of things. I mostly just enjoyed the movie for its surface entertainment value... and it's probably ironic that I did so. But it's a decent movie on that level, and probably an even better movie on other levels. Oh, and I liked the relationship between OJ and Em. They were definitely believable as brother and sister. And I don't know what else to say.