Director: Jordan Peele
Writer: Jordan Peele
Stars: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, and Brandon Perea
Synopsis: The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.
Jordan Peele loves harking back to history and stitching it up with contemporary standards. His X ingredient is always horror, which concocted the perfect formula in Get Out and a strong sophomore effort in Us. Not surprisingly, his third effort, Nope, is bigger than the first two and makes use of the screen more than before. Just knowing the 132-minute running time tells you that and clips from the trailer hint at his new recipe. This is another film with social commentary within a horror story, but now mixed with a UFO and questions of what is above us.
But it isn’t a throwback to something like The Day The Earth Stood Still or Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Under Peele’s watchful eye, his own full-length movie of something from The Twilight Zone (of which he was narrator and producer of the latest incarnation) tries to pack in many visuals, but the motivation amongst his characters becomes lacking. His writing, arguably his strongest suit, weakens compared to the last two films, even though his craftsmanship does bump up a notch with a more special-effects-driven story. It, at times, does get exhausting when we change from the person to the eye in the sky.
The story revolves around siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) Haywood following the death of their father (Keith David) who died in a freak accident when a metallic object fell from the sky and struck him like a bullet. OJ has that killing object in a bag as he wonders while struggling to maintain the family business of horse wrangling for movies, what exactly is up there. He struggles to be like his dad and Emerald, a Jack-of-all-trades, but he is simply charismatic, but not into this business, especially when OJ lives in the middle of nowhere.
After OJ catches a glimpse of a UFO as the power fades out before coming back again, the brother-sister duo buys security cameras and gets help from tech clerk Angel (Brandon Perea). Angel brings comic relief with his geeky personality who uses the sale to be friends with the Haywoods, especially when he realizes the cameras are not just strictly for security. Michael Wincott plays the scruffy cameraman who is called upon by Emerald to help them catch their “Oprah shot” with an old-school, hand-cranked camera which he refers to as “the stuff dreams are made of.”
Peele uses the longer running time to hand us the clues in pieces and tether together the ominous presence from above and how they need to catch it in the act as proof of extraterrestrial presence. Hence, advertisements involve a fake horse, a rope of flags, and those inflatable dancing figures in front of car dealerships. And while it is entertaining and satisfying in the end, it leaves something to be desired, as well as questions that need to be answered.
One character that left this viewer wanting more is the performance of Steven Yuen. Yuen plays Ricky “Jupe” Park, a former child actor who witnessed a horrifying event during a recording of a TV episode, which serves as the prologue of the film. Ricky now runs, with his wife and three children, a Western-themed amusement park not far from where the Haywoods live as they do business together. His side story feels like it should have been its own movie rather than be sliced off into this one, especially when the prologue is expanded more later in the film. Is it an intentionally open-ended interpretation of Ricky’s witnessing that shocking event and what he sees with us in the sky? Or, is there more to it? With his storyline, Peele seems to dive into David Lynch territory and not give much away, if anything.
This is where the film gets loose with the story and extends itself too much, becoming too smart for its own good. Sure, Peele drops film history and references that movie nerds (including me) would pick up on, but the story becomes arbitrary. The plot is shortened and the last half is about its chaos and the group capturing that “Oprah shot” they talked about before. However, Poole’s Director of Photography, Christopher Nolan collaborator, Hoyte van Hoytema (Interstellar, Dunkirk) does make his mark with these shots, in both night and day, when the power drops and the winds pick up from above. Its vintage score from Michael Abels adds the twang to the Western akin to something from a John Ford film, even though I wouldn’t call OJ a character equal to John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.
The film opens with a quote from the Bible: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” Peele, even if it’s a bit messy, fulfills that promise. Nope doesn’t give its message as clearly as his earlier films, but it never falls down to mediocre levels.
Grade: B-
