The title to this film refers to the answer writer, director and producer Jodan Peele was planning on giving when someone asked if his next movie was going to be a horror movie…. Nope! . So far all of his movies have felt like re-makes of other movies. This one is basically “Cowboys vs Aliens”. However, Peel must have really been inspired during recess in elementary school when during recess, his class played the game where every kid grabbed a parachute then collectively throws it in the air, before running under it to envelope you. The most creative thing about this film aside from some of the marijuana induced pondering, was how the footage was edited for the trailer to make this look like something it is not. The rest is Peele marketing a brand to fans eager to ride a bandwagon, wanting the idea of his films to be more than they really are.
When reviewing music, a common theme I find are musicians trying to make a song out of a few cool ideas, rather than writing it in a way that allows for the arrangement to be a seamless flow. The same can be said for Peele’s attempts at storytelling with this movie. At best it followed the plot line of an episode of Scooby Doo, where the third act turns to “Ok guys, let's make a trap for this monster”. To get there we have a reference to the song “Flying Purple Eater '' and a scene where it rains blood, which was one of the movie's highlights. The climax of the film where they were trying to lay the Scooby trap was very boring. I kept thing, when the fuck is this movie just going to be over. With that said this is people's best film, but the bar could not have been any lower.
Yes, the killer chimp was a cool part but aside from the moral of never look an animal in the eye, as you never know when they might snap it did not add much to the story itself. Not the only plot point that was not developed much but one of the most glaring. I did like how it gave winks to popular UFO lore, and normally like movies that focus on close encounters, this just did so in a manner that might have brought new things to the table, but not in the most effective manner, this forced the movie to rely on humor. In order to be scary a darker overall tone might have worked better. If you're a fan of his other work, I think what this does is come at things from a different angle than his other films. But did we need a black version of close encounters of the third kind? The answer is “Nope”. [Perhaps there is a better version of this film that got left on the cutting room floor. It starts off entertaining, and then things fall apart, the longer the film lasts. Not that I expected much from this film, and it is unlikely fans of Peele’s work are going to be able to step away from the hype and watch this in the more objective manner it needs to be seen in.
