Movie Review : Nope (2022)
Comedian turned film director Jordan Peele loves to tell personal stories on screen. By that, I don’t necessarily mean stories about his own life, but rather stories with themes that have a personal meaning to him and that express themselves almost solely metaphorically. In other words, he uses problems like racism or social inequities as creative levers to make fun and unpredictable movies that offer you a welcome respite from Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey movies love to constantly pelt you with.
His latest effort Nope is harder to pinpoint than its predecessors Get Out and Us, but it also delivers the heck out of being just an efficient, old fashioned horror film about a flying saucer.
Nope tells the story of OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer), descendants from the horse rider featured in the first ever moving picture who are still raising horses over a century later. When their father (Keith David) is killed by a random object that flew out of the sky, strange occurrences start happening around the ranch. Horses run away. A cloud seems stationary in the sky. There's something out there and it's not being nice.
Reality, Business, Spectacle and the Blurred Lines in Between
Nope is a movie about the movie business. It is populated with semi-desperate characters who are looking for the one great, enrapturing story to tell. Whether it’s OJ and Emerald, the nihilistic cinematographer Antlers Holst (played by folkloric nineties villain Michael Wincott) or their child actor neighbour Jupe (Steven Yeun), every character is looking for that one real close encounter with the third kind that will bring them legacy. No one is interested in JUST surviving that event.
OJ and Emerald are trying to get a "money shot" of the spacecraft in order to save and eventually moneytize their ranch. Holst wants to make his documentary. Jupe organizes a roadside attraction on his ranch where he treats the spaceship like a wild animal he managed to tame. Everyone wants to tell a story without knowing exactly what that story is. They’re attempting to colonize reality for their own gain, whether they’re acting out of despair or out of selfishness. But this movie itself is a really well done spectacle.
I believe the genius of Nope lies right there. A spectacle can be inspiring and uplifting. It can alter destinies and therefore the fabric of reality itself. How many of you were inspired to write or become an artist after being moved by a spectacle? Right. Jordan Peele’s thorough investigation of a phenomenon that is quietly defining the parameters of out lives and the desperate freight train of an industry that supports it draws ambivalent conclusions. It is a loving indictment of our basic, often ignored need to dream.
The Spectacle Itself (yes, it’s a great movie)
Outside of being Jordan Peele-smart, Nope is just a fantastic, original and unpredictable movie about a flying saucer. Drawing inspiration from 1950s science fiction without sacrificing an ounce of storytelling integrity to the "Gods of Camp and Wink-Wink Referentiality", it anchors its credibility by treating the most dated, outlandish premise in cinema with a straight face. In the age of irony and internet-fueled disbelief we live in, making a flying saucer scary is some type of Olympic achievement.
OJ and Emerald are very much isolated with their problem on the ranch, which creates an alternate reality (or a netherworld) where anything is possible. Their encounter with the flying saucer is not circumscribed by the rules of reality or society. It's just a duel that happens in the desert, where no one is watching. That makes the idea of fending off a flying saucer as credible as fending off any Hollywood monster. The domineering camera angles of simple people looking at an object in the sky really help selling it.
I wouldn't want to end this review without mentioning Jupe's mysterious and subtly disturbing storyline. A child actor and survivor of a massacre committed by a chimp on a television set, Jupe is torn between his trauma and his sense of identity which is deeply engrained in the public eye. He's both silly and tragic. A victim and a low-rent peddler of the entertainment industry. I know that I always tend to like side characters more than protagonists in movies, but Jupe had a complexity to him that I don’t see often.
*
Nope is a really, really great movie. It has every element I love in a film: it’s accessible, but has challenging elements; there’s metaphor; it has emotional scope (its gets from funny to dark and dark to funny fast); it doesn't shy away from brutal visuals, etc. Right now I'm still debating whether or not it's my favorite Jordan Peele movie to date, but I believe it might just be. I understand if you weren’t AS enchanted with it as I was, but if you thought it sucked, I really don’t want to know you as a person.
