‘Nope’ Is Jordan Peele’s Most Ambitious Project Yet
And it hits the mark if you know what to expect
Get Out arrived into the world as a rare cinematic anomaly. It was a directorial debut that single-handedly cemented Jordan Peele as a figure worth following. Despite minimal advertising, it took the world by storm as one of the few must-see horrors of the decade. It was the rare undertaking within the genre that inspired even my weak-stomached mother to brave cinemas. She had to see what could inspire such an inescapable critical frenzy. What sort of spectacle could bridge the gap between desensitized horror lovers and her most artsy progressive friends.
Both my father and I had been prior Key and Peele fans. But even knowing Peele’s writing was brilliant, his first foray into the horror genre is one that caught us both by surprise. His sophomore film-making effort, Us, was also advertised modestly. Despite being a more ambitious film in every regard, and requiring nearly five times the budget to produce, it still arrived into the world with relatively little warning.
But Nope nearly quadrupled even that 20 million dollar undertaking. It marked the first Peele movie whose advertising campaign left the film’s influence feeling difficult to escape in the months and weeks prior to its release. From the ads to the teasers, billboards, and promotional posters, the movie successfully cultivated a cultural Zeitgeist. Having seen and loved both of his prior two films, I anticipated this third entry so eagerly that I was prepared to see it on opening weekend.
There was something about the imagery within the promotional material for the movie that was equal parts cryptic and irresistible. I loved the idea of a horror film being framed around something as novel as the night sky. If there was any director who could pull off something so brilliantly innovative, it was Jordan Peele.
Of course, there are plenty of movies since Alien that enter into the realm of sci-fi scares based on the unidentified objects and creatures from foreign worlds. From Jordan Peele, though, I expected something far more than formulaic flying saucers. I expected a puzzle so grandiose that I would leave the theater jaw-dropped and desperately trying to unpack the film I’d seen.
But the advertisements for the movie were as unrevealing as they were enticing. I went into the theater with little to go off of besides a few oblique images of colorful flags blowing in the breeze of a colossal sky. They were strange and evocative and haunting. I think I was always poised to be a little disappointed by Nope, and that isn’t because it doesn’t rise to the same Jordan Peeleian heights of ingenuity featured within his prior two movies. In many regards, it surpasses them.
Nope is more atmospheric, the plot is more intricate, and the cinematics are far more ambitious. The visual intrigue soars beyond anything viewers saw in his earlier two entries combined. The movie’s drawn-out night sequences are mesmerizing displays of IMAX technology. Watching Daniel Kaluuya’s character, OJ, speed through the desert on horseback is enthralling.
Leaning again on black lead actors, Peele was sure that representation remained a consistent thread between his movies. Keke Palmer’s Emerald is possibly Peele’s most fully developed, honest, and realized character yet. His decision to name her acting counterpart OJ (Otis Haywood Jr.), is one of the film’s few subtle political statements. He decided to subvert negative associations around OJ Simpson and give this likable protagonist the same name.
But the biting societal and racial commentary that many have grown to expect from Peele is by and large absent in Nope, and so are the horror elements that people may have gone into the theater expecting to see. It’s more genre-bending than a simple sci-fi, but it’s enough of a thematic departure from his prior two films that it drifted astray from large swaths of fans’ hopes.
To be an action/horror/sci-fi/thriller isn’t inherently problematic. It’s territory that Peele excels in as he did with his prior two movies. But there can at times be a slight feeling of discordance between the flashbacks and a few of the more disparate themes at play. Some of the points that Peele tries to drive home about our obsession with spectacle, the exploitation of trauma, and our fear of the unknown get lost in the noise. As with horror director Ari Aster and his third project, Beau Is Afraid, Peele’s third outing is turbulent enough to obscure some of its more pointed messaging.
One of the film’s high points centers around a horrific instance in which a chimp went mad during a studio recording of a TV show, and it stands as one of the most viscerally chilling moments from any of his films yet. But it seems almost as though that part of the plot would have been better stretched into its own movie than integrated into this third Peele film as a semi-hanging side plot. Neither that part of the story, nor OJ’s time as a member of a stage crew appear so directly relevant to the arc of the story for their inclusion to strike me as truly essential or warranted.
The film draws clear comparisons to Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind and Jaws. But it seems to largely ignore the great rule of those two earlier films: never let the movie’s threat spend too much time on screen. It’s in building up the off-screen peril of that murderous shark in viewers’ minds that it starts to feel most terrifying.
But spending a significant portion of the film directly watching that saucer-shaped UFO has a significant way of diminishing the fear factor that both of his prior two films managed to elicit. Peele shouldn’t be forced into making movies that fall within only one genre, but given the psychological heights of Us and Get Out, it’s easy for audiences to walk away with a little less than what they were hoping for in Nope.
Knowing what to expect, there’s a lot to love. I think that much of the movie’s initial failure to land with viewers hinges strictly on the expectations they’d built up for the movie, and the intriguing opacity around its advertising. If you go in expecting something similar to the prior two films, disappointment is likely. But if you walk into the movie knowing it represents one of the great visionaries of a generation beginning to explore new creative terrain, you’ll find a fun, sardonic, and innovative genre-bender that stands proudly on its merits.
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