Nope movie review: are we not entertained?

Is there an American filmmaker working today who is more in tune with the blockbusters of the past, the movies he is building on, than Jordan Peele? I’m not sure there is. I’m even more confident that no one is doing anything like what Peele has been up to with the three films he’s given us so far: he’s actively reexamining genre tropes, reframing the cultural contexts in which they exist, refocusing their perspective — reconsidering, well, everything about the kinds of stories they’re telling.

Peele keeps giving us more of the stuff we’ve loved for the past 50-plus years without simply xeroxing what has come before. He put a racially aware spin on paranoid science fiction and body horror with 2017’s Get Out. With 2019’s Us, he consciously called up 80s Spielbergian wonders, then interrogated and replied to those fantasies. Now, with Nope, he probes and pumps the blockbuster profoundly deeper. Peele’s stories, like Spielberg’s, have been very particularly American — in a more clear-eyed, more stomach-sickening way than we’re used to — and here he dares to poke at perhaps the most all-American institution: Hollywood.

This comes first built into the characters his story is about. Siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya: Widows, Black Panther) and Emerald (Keke Palmer: Hustlers, Ice Age: Collision Course) Haywood run a horse ranch in the rural California mountains training animals for advertising and movies. They’re the only Black people doing this work, and they claim a legacy that goes back to the jockey in the famous Eadweard Muybridge motion-picture study of a running horse (who really was Black but whose identity is lost to the past). Their mere presence as protagonists here is an unspoken rebuke to the erasure of Black horsemen and women in movies about the American West, and of Black artists in the history of film itself.

A secondary protagonist is Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun: Burning), a former child star who now runs a goofy Wild West attraction near the Haywood ranch called Jupiter’s Claim. He left TV work as a kid after a bizarre, violent incident on the set of the sitcom he starred in that left him traumatized; the notoriety of it draws visitors to his little theme park even decades later.

Peele plops these three into a situation that invokes two classic early blockbusters: Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws. (Spielberg again!) Something — something “big,” OJ tells Emerald, ominously — is buzzing the area from the skies, causing intermittent electrical outages, occasionally mysteriously raining down objects like keys and coins, and definitely scaring the horses. The Haywoods and Jupe separately hatch the notion to taunt whatever it is, to draw it to them and harness the spectacle of it. Jupe wants to turn it into a live attraction-in-action at Jupiter’s Claim. The Haywoods want to capture it on film — video, digital, celluloid, all of the above — and finally find the fame and fortune that has eluded them.

This does not go well for anyone, and leads to horrors sometimes of the funny-suspenseful kind — I laughed as much as I gasped with this movie — and sometimes simply stone-cold bone-chilling. One bit here, brief though it is, rivals the much longer, hugely terrifying alien-abduction sequence in 1993’s otherwise unconvincing Fire in the Sky for existential nightmare fuel.

This is a movie that is, on its surface, just plain enormously entertaining, peopled with characters who are easy to like portrayed by an incredibly charismatic cast. And Peele is — more like Spielberg than ever here — very adept at creating unforgettably strange and wondrous imagery that sears itself into your brain… cinema-stuff that you’ve never seen before and that is sure to become iconic. So I don’t mean to sound like I’m damning with faint praise when I say that, even given the delicious popcorn-movie vibes of Nope, by far the most intriguing thing about this movie is the twistiness of how it grapples with its own existence.

Peele opens the film with this quote: “Nahum 3:6: I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” In the Biblical context, this is God threatening the city of Nineveh. In the Nope context, it’s difficult not to see this movie as Peele commenting on Hollywood’s love of spectacle, which often minimizes real violence and real human pain for the sake of amusement and diversion. The risks that those who make art, even low art, take in pursuit of it, is a running motif: Michael Wincott (Ghost in the Shell, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) as a cinematographer with the magnificent name of Antlers Holst whom the Haywoods bring out to the ranch to help with their project brings piquant, grumbly arrogance to the chase to capture a UFO on IMAX film. (Note: Some of Nope is shot in the IMAX format.)

But the eldritch thing in the sky engages in some literal casting of abominable filth onto the Haywood ranch; Nope is itself spectacle, of course. How are we, the audience, as we gape and thrill to see it, any different from Jupe’s visitors, with their perverse interest in the horror he experienced as a child?

Peele puts a generous spin on Jupe’s motivations: Jupe embraces his past, in some secret lurid ways, in order to cope with it, perhaps. His plan for the UFO would appear to be another coping mechanism, an attempt to wrangle something incomprehensibly scary, to bring it under his sway. So Peele is being generous with us, too, as we revel in his cinematic parade of terror and brutality. Aren’t we all just trying to find a small measure of control in the face of a world that increasingly feels like it’s reeling dangerously into chaos?

Not too generous, though: Much of Nope’s terror and brutality comes in the reminder that we are deluding ourselves by imagining that all things can be made subject to our will. And if the safety of a scary movie allows us to temporarily wring some sense out of the apparent senselessness of *waves hands around helplessly*… Well: all movies end, and we have to head back into the real world eventually.

more films like this:
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• Super 8 [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | HBO Max US]