look, i’m not going to shit on the average person for coming out of Nope confused and a bit lost. it’s got a lot of layers to it! there’s aspects that require a good degree of thought to pick apart and really truly understand, especially if you’re not someone who likes to hyperanalyze your media. like literally all media, it’s not for everyone, and people are allowed to dislike things.

that said, i feel like professional film critics whose job it is to Understand Cinema should be able to do a decent bit of that. but it seems like a bunch are dismissing Nope as meandering and thematically incoherent because they can’t assign a clear-cut objective meaning to the shoe or figure out why the gordy’s home plotline was significant or they’re upset that peele didn’t wrap all his thematic throughlines up in a neat little bow with a moral and a thesis at the end of the movie and it’s like. this is- you get PAID for this???????????