Jordan Peele has a lot going for him as a filmmaker. He has a feel for the uncanny, for just the right unsettling image. He has a sense of humor and knows how to use it to relieve or increase tension. And his films are visually arresting, particularly “Nope,” in which he works with “Tenet” and “Dunkirk” cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema.

What Peele doesn’t have in “Nope” is a story or anything close to one. He has a situation, but it doesn’t develop. It more or less stays where it starts, with grander and louder versions of essentially the same scene. For the first 20 to 30 minutes, the audience waits for “Nope” to start. Then it realizes:Oh no, this is it.

To compensate for the lack of story, Peele leans into his own considerable virtuosity. “Nope” has lots of digressions and lots of showing off. Peele is particularly fond of cutting all sound and having the screen go black. A showing-off spirit can be healthy in a director. Hitchcock was a showoff. Scorsese is a showoff, and who’s a bigger showoff than Quentin Tarantino? The main thing is never to confuse showing off for telling the story.

For example, in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Tarantino was able to digress and show off because everyone watching knew, or thought they knew, how the story was going to end, and they dreaded that ending and craved distraction. But in “Nope,” Peele lacks the solid story spine to play off of. The audience wants substance, and all he can give is filler, because this time filler is all he’s got.

At one point, Peele ventures so far into Tarantino land that he brings in a spaghetti Western-style soundtrack. But “Nope” ends up nothing like a Tarantino movie and everything like something by M. Night Shyamalan, with a handful of people stuck in a remote place, menaced by some malevolent outside force.

‘Nope’: The Bay Area’s peculiar connection to Jordan Peele’s latest movie

“Nope” tells the story of a family with a multigenerational connection to cinema. OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) are direct descendants of the jockey who appeared inEadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion”(1878), one of the first motion picture experiments. They work together in a business, run by their father (Keith David), that provides trained horses for movies.

Dad has one fairly decent scene, before he is killed in a bizarre occurrence on his ranch. The wind becomes fierce, and normal household objects become dangerous projectiles. Once they’re over the shock, OJ and Emerald don’t take long to figure out that the wind and the changes in the sky are the direct result of space aliens — and not the friendly, Spielberg kind.

In terms of story, that’s just about it for the next 110 minutes. The Haywoods face an alien threat, hiding behind an unmoving cloud just above their property. Everything that follows is people either talking about it or talking about something irrelevant, or trying to do something about it, but no one can ever do much about anything in themiddleof a movie. The action must be stretched.

There are a couple of good scenes. One involves a homicidal chimpanzee going on a rampage on the set of a sitcom. In a sardonic touch that feels very Jordan Peele, an “Applause” sign flashes on and off in the background. Peele gets some humor out of Kaluuya’s forlorn deadpan and mileage out of the eeriness of an abandoned theme park. And the sky, pale blue and vast — beautiful and threatening — becomes an ongoing and unsettling sight.

For those who want to feel smart, you can even distract yourself by catching movie references. For example, a sitcom actress, whose face was destroyed by the monkey attack, bears a distinct resemblance to Norman’s mother in “Psycho.”

But you know why we have time to look at the sky or notice movie references? It’s because “Nope” is a 135-minute bore, with Peele unable to make even an alien attack exciting. Every so often an obviously talented person makes a bad movie, and that’s what we have in “Nope.” The talent is there; the movie is dead on the screen.

K“Nope”:Science Fiction/Horror. Starring Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer. Directed by Jordan Peele. (R. 135 minutes.) In theaters Friday, July 22.