NOPE Review

Jordan Peele has created another distinctly unique but inevitably divisive alien abduction movie

This is going to be an interesting one.

I say that for two very specific reasons: 1.) Thoughts and opinions on Jordan Peele’s third feature film are going to all over the place, and probably quite divisive. So many expectations have built up from that ever-present trailer that’s been screening over the past few months, and they’ve deliberately masked what Nope is really about; 2.) Maybe more than any other movie this year, this is going to be a movie where you’ll want to go in fairly fresh without preconceived notions based on stuff revealed in reviews… like this one.

Many people may already think they know what to expect after the pervasive first teaser trailer that made Nope look like a “UFO movie,” but there’s a lot more going on here. If you want to know more than that but not so much that you can’t enjoy the movie’s surprises, then read on. I’m going to do my best to make this review worth your time.

As you may already know from those trailers, Nope reteams Peele with Daniel Kaluuya, who plays O.J. Haywood, the son of a horse rancher who dies in a bizarre event as the film opens. His younger sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) shows up to help with the family business as horse handlers for film and television, but one day, O.J. spots a strange disc-like object floating in the sky above the ranch. Em suggests they need to capture it on film in order to achieve fame and fortune. This sounds good to the sullen O.J., who has been forced to sell his father’s horses off to a nearby rodeo show, run by Steven Yeun’s Ricky “Jupe” Park, a former child actor with a lot of local acclaim. Brandon Perea plays Angel Torres, a low-level tech at an electronics store who gets roped into the duo’s plan, while another important piece of the story is Michael Wincott as cinematographer Antlers Holst, who the siblings also call upon to help capture the flying object on film.

That might sound like a lot, but it’s also probably all you really need to know to figure out if Nope might interest you. While there have been quite a number of alien invasion and alien abduction movies over the decades, Peele finds a new way into the material that might bode better comparisons to Arrival or A Quiet Place than to the far more populist alien flicks by Spielberg and Shyamalan.

This is the important thing. Very few of us have ever seen aliens or spaceships or UFOs in real life, so many of our impressions of what contact might be like comes from movies and television shows and books that often use the exact same model. Peele’s take on alien abduction is something far more horrifying and original.

There is no question that Nope is intended as a B-horror movie, and in that sense, it’s a bit like Ed Wood, if he was a better writer and had a bigger budget to work with. Peele is indeed a great writer – that Oscar is no fluke – and he does that by mixing a good deal of light humor into the suspense and mystery inherent in this kind of movie. But he does it more subtly and not in a way that will take away from the stakes in the film. 

Nope is very much a slow burn of a movie — so more like Spielberg’s Close Encounters than War of the Worlds — and it does require some patience, but that’s because Peele knows that, more than anything else, he really needs to make the audience care about O.J. and Em. In that sense, we do learn a lot about them through their conversations and flashbacks, but not so much that it detracts from their primary goal in the movie, which is to get a video that can prove the existence of extraterrestrial life. What they find is something far more nefarious that’s not like any other aliens we’ve seen in film or other mediums.

On the other hand, that opening shot of a chimpanzee covered in blood on a television set might seem like a red herring, and maybe it is. That scene does return a few times over the course of the movie with direct connections to Yuen’s character, but quite a few things you saw in that first trailer, while they make sense in context of the overall story, don’t really matter so much.

More important than anything else, Nope is about family and specifically the relationship between O.J. and Emerald, and how this shared goal brings them together. Keke Palmer is quite electric, and frankly, I’m surprised this is the same actor who wowed me so many years ago as the title character in Akeelah and the Bee. Kaluuya gives a far more deadpan performance, but I have to say that I sometimes had trouble understanding what Palmer was saying, either cause of the vernacular used or just because the sound seemed a bit wonky at my screening.

An interesting note: Last week, a film critic I greatly respect was convinced people were hoping for Jordan Peele to fail with his third feature film as a director, and I’m not sure I fully agree with him. If anything, people are putting a lot of hope and faith in Peele to deliver a third movie as entertaining as Get Out and Us. I was never as bullish on either of his earlier movies. They both were very good, although neither made my year-end top 25 list. I’m not sure that Nope will either, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy and appreciate what Peele was trying to do.

As I said earlier, Nope is a difficult movie to review, because the honest truth is that no one truly knows what Jordan Peele intended, except for Jordan Peele. I greatly admire that tenacity of vision in a filmmaker, because Nope is not the type of movie we might normally see from a studio. I’m still digesting and ruminating over some of the elements Peele has assemled, but my desire to experience the movie a second and maybe even a third is quite telling that Peele certainly has achieved something quite magnificent with this very different take on the alien invasion thriller.

Rating: 8/10