Brief Story Line
Otis Junior/OJ (Daniel Kaluuya - Get Out, Judas and the Black Messiah etc) and his younger sister Emerald (Keke Palmer - Lightyear, Scream Queens TV series etc) inherited a big ranch owned by their father Otis Senior (Keith David - Pitch Black, The Thing etc). However, it required a lot of money to manage the ranch. Hence OJ started to sell the horses to owner of a theme park and former child actor Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yeun - The Walking Dead TV series, Minari etc).
One night, OJ and Em witnessed something they suspected as UFO and wanted to capture them on camera. With the help from a technician of a tech department store named Angel (Brandon Perea - The OA TV series etc), they set up the cameras all around the ranch.
So what would happen to OJ and Em and how would the story conclude? You could find out in this movie.
End of Brief Story Line
As mentioned above, I was intrigued by the trailer to this movie which seemed to have lots of suspenseful scenes involving aliens (a premise that I am big fan of). And the opening scene at the ranch was quite good with a bit of intensity and mystery. However, subsequent to that event, the story was moving at a very slow pace that bored my wife and me as frankly it focused too much on the sibling relationship of OJ and Em while facing their financial trouble.
After waiting for very long time, slowly the mystery was revealed a bit. The movie itself was divided into few segments that did not seem to really correlate but I thought would make more sense in the end. So I waited a bit impatiently till finally more than half way of the movie things started to get more exciting. There was one scene at night that was quite intense. But unfortunately the pace again slowed down until the conclusion that was not half bad.
I know that the movie was written and directed by Jordan Peele whose prior works including the critically acclaimed Us and Get Out that I enjoyed. And looking at those films, I should have guessed that this film was more like them than the alien invasion story. After seeing this movie, I could foresee it would be liked by critics and upon reading some articles, I found out that indeed it was. I could understand their fondness about this because it did have a unique story telling, but it was not what both of us were looking for, especially with such trailer.
The thing that disappoint me the most in here was the overly detailed story and unrelated segment which to me was utterly pointless. I would have liked it better if there was no such segment and focused more on the alien as that was what made me and my wife interested in the first place. Having 130 minutes duration where probably only one third of it was exciting was not entertaining enough for us. Now I know that this might seem too shallow for all, but that is our own opinion. One good thing though was the sound effect which was surprisingly awesome even for a standard Dolby surround sound instead of Dolby Atmos. Btw, the movie also felt dark and gloomy with very few lighter scenes that were not memorable at all and it did not have any mid or post end credit scene.
Overall this movie might be liked by people who adore Jordan Peele's style of work and the unique story telling would be appealing for those appreciative of such attributes. However, audience who expect a suspenseful alien vs human movie like my wife and I would be disappointed by this. So if you are interested in seeing a movie where it has a simple story where the focus was more on the people than the aliens, you probably would enjoy it. But if you are like us, chances are you would prefer if it the movie was differently made.
Mike's movie moments rating: 2 out of 5 stars
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