Released on July 22, 2022, thriller movie “Nope” has received some mixed reviews, averaging 2.8 stars out of 10 from an audience rating review. The cast of this movie had a great lineup: Keke Palmer, Daniel Kaluyya, Steven Yeun, Brandon Perea and Barbie Ferreira. After his debut in “Get Out” in 2017, it was exciting to see Daniel Kaluuya acting in yet another thriller movie.

Although this movie is placed under the “horror” category, I really didn’t find it particularly scary. Sure, there were a couple of jump scares here and there, but overall I never felt like I got a good scare, which is something I expect going into any horror movie.

Aside from the scare factor, I thought the cinematography, being mainly sci-fi oriented, was impressive. Most of the shots in Nope include wide-open landscapes and cyclone-filled skies that create a mysterious feel for the viewer. The film forces the audience to experience space and its vastness, and by supplying the viewers with that, they get to experience something like unique.

For the majority of the movie, scenes were filmed on a huge ranch in Santa Clarita, California, where the only things surrounding the frame were gigantic mountain ranges and a big, unknown sky. I thought the movie did a nice job of supplying that unnerving feeling to the audience, solely based on the cinematography.

Aside from the well-thought-out filming, the thing that caused this movie’s ratings to plummet, in my opinion, was the plot– specifically, the ending. Horse-wrangling siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) trying to capture evidence of an unidentified flying object in the sky is obviously the main idea of the movie, but I found that the ending of “Nope” left me feeling extremely confused and almost like I needed to look up an explanation as to what had just happened. All in all, I would give this movie five stars out of ten–not the best thing I’ve seen, but most certainly not the worst.