Nope

dir: Jordan Peele

2022

Now, I’m just a simple, country movie commenter. I ain’t no fancy, big city film critic, with credentials or qualifications or justification for inflicting my film-related opinions on a largely unsuspecting, and, let’s be honest, entirely uninterested public.

But I knows what I likes, and I liked this here film by Jordan Peele called Nope.

Having said, or at least typed, all those words as a preface already, I’m not going to pretend that I get everything that was going on here, or all the references Peele tries to make, or how they all hang together, and whether it all makes sense as a movie. But what I will say is that whatever flick I thought I was going to watch, it turned out to be something completely different.

Nope contains multitudes of tropes within it, so many references not necessarily just to other films but to the history of the entertainment industry, that when I tell you it’s pretty much a monster movie, you’re not going to believe me. Even the title, Nope, refers to the dumb things people do across a multitude of genres that sees their characters bite the big one. In this flick, at those moments where a character is about to do something stupid, but then changes their mind because they realise how vulnerable to the monster it would make them, they just casually say “Nope”, and do something more sensible.

That’s refreshing, that is. Like a cool, refreshing drink after mowing the lawn in the hot spring sun. Why, yes, that is literally what I did – watched a movie, mowed the lawn before the rains set in, then wrote a review about that movie and about cutting the lawn with an electric lawn mower. I’m going to try to keep both parts relevant and interesting for you, the poor reader.

Of course it would work. What if you were a bunch of characters in a flick, and your main goal wasn’t just to survive, but to capture on film the existence of some kind of creature. But, and here is a tremendously big but that I cannot lie about, what if the mere presence of the creature caused all electrical equipment to stop working?

Hmm., now that’s a conundrum.

And again, what if, now stay with me, what if your family business was raising and training horses, and Hollywood no longer really wanted your horses, so your business wasn’t flourishing anymore?

You could blame a bit of racism: One of our main characters, being OJ (the great Daniel Kaluuya), despite being very good at his job, is ignored by most of the production staff while on the set of a commercial, especially when it comes to the safety measures they’re meant to adhere to. Do they ignore him because he’s African-American? Let me be clear, I know the actor isn’t African-American; but the character he’s playing is.

Do they ignore him, leading to the inevitable kick from the hind legs of one of his horses, because his flighty sister Emerald (the great Keke Palmer) gives a historically significant, but not immediately helpful speech about how the first ever movie had one of their ancestors in it, and that people should follow her on Instagram, instead of emphasising what not to do around a horse? It perhaps doesn’t help that OJ, taking his cues from the cowboys of TV and countless movies, speaks very few words and only ever begrudgingly. He is taciturn to the point of making Clint Eastwood look like a Chatty Cathy.

What’s a man trying to keep his business alive meant to do? Well, I guess the short term solution is to sell some of his horses to his neighbour Ricky (the great Steven Yuen), who runs some weird fun park next door.

Ricky is that quintessentially American construct of a mega-successful child actor who has something go very wrong, and who tries to wrangle some kind of existence from coasting on those former glories. The tragic event in Ricky’s past is not the usual kind of drug abuse or criminal offences or worse – it was something that happened on the set of the mega-successful sitcom that he was on, that happened to have a chimpanzee as one of its cast members.

You might be thinking, and quite rightly so, “what the fuck does this have to do with the main story?”, and the thing is, I don’t know, to be honest. I can theorise that it’s something about how the entertainment industry thrives on exploiting animals, people, everyone and everything it can, and that sometimes the exploited rise up and remind people that they’re not bound by human expectations.

We see scenes from the awful incident at the beginning, surreal as they are, and even when scenes from it aren’t playing on the screen, people talk about it plenty, and Ricky’s entire existence seems to be centred around that incident.

In the beginning we see that child Ricky is hiding under a table, as people in the studio flee from a chimpanzee dripping with blood. A woman tries to get up or escape, and the chimp, Gordy, attacks her even worse. A single shoe, in the fracas, has ended up standing improbably on its tip, straight up. It’s like flipping a coin and having it end up on its edge instead of heads or tails. It’s improbably, but not impossible. Ricky is scared and is terrified that he will be Gordy’s next victim.

He won’t be, but he will spend the rest of his life wondering what happened. He is clearly traumatised by what happened, but still needs to make a living, hence his fun park called, from memory, Jupiter’s Claim(?) There is a combined gold rush ghost town / alien UFO abduction theme, but he also has an “exclusive” shrine to himself and his sitcom past in his office, where people spend a fortune just to bask in the glory of some weird sitcom that had a chimp as one of its main characters.

OJ, despite how inanimate he might seem, is also traumatised, though he would most likely deny it. After the chimp-related intro, we have a scene where father and son (the dad played by the legendary Keith David) are out and about on the ranch, before something strange happens that flat out kills the father. Something falls from the sky, and the father is dead.

Six months later is when most of the flick takes place, where OJ still hasn’t come to terms with what happened to his dad; Emerald, or Em as she’s usually called, just thinks they should sell the place and be free, and Ricky wants to buy their ranch, but for the strangest reason you could imagine.

The relationship betwixt brother and sister is a strained one. She’s always vaping, which is annoying enough, but it’s never really articulated as to what their resentments are against each other. So, I’m entirely guessing. It seemed to me that OJ resents Em because she hasn’t helped out around the ranch at all, and Em finds OJ’s determination to keep the ranch viable as an impediment to getting what she really wants (I have no idea what she really wants: Fame, freedom, I dunno?).

When they figure out that the strange things that are happening around the ranch could be because of something…not of this world, their first impulse is not to run. See, that’s their first mistake. They figure out that whatever it is around here that seems to be abducting horses and people could be their ticket to ride: a photo of whatever it is they are after, they refer to as the “Oprah Shot”.

Not the money shot – the Oprah shot. How is it that she became the benchmark for fame?

Horses go missing. People go missing. Turns out Ricky has only been buying the horses in order to use them as bait for the – thing – that lurks out there.

And what is that thing? I don’t know. I don’t think we ever entirely find out. It is something that can look one way, and then later on looks like something completely different. Is it organic, is it synthetic, is it a machine or some kind of alien life form?

I don’t know. It certainly has a look. Don’t know if it’s particularly scary, so I don’t know if this qualifies as a horror film.

Is Jaws a horror movie? It kinda ticks some of the boxes. I think this flick hews closer to something like Jaws than an outright sci-fi flick. We do see people get sucked up by the thing, but it’s not for the purposes of probing or experimentation.

It feeds. It lurks. It eats those who look at it directly. And it has some quality that causes anything electrical to stop working.

So if you’re going to film the unfilmable, you’ll need the greatest and craziest cinematographer of all time. In this film’s universe, it’s a chap called Antlers Holst, played by Michael Wincott who, to me, possesses one of the greatest and deepest voices of all time. I have not seen him in a film for ages, and feared that maybe he was dead. Oh no, he is very much not dead, and his voice, if anything, is even deeper.

He makes Tom Waits sound like a castrato choirboy singer. He also, improbably, possesses an IMAX hand cranked camera that operates without electricity, which seems…unlikely.

Antlers also possesses that kind of Captain Ahab-like derangement, the obsession with capturing the “impossible shot”, a shot no other cinematographer has even achieved. I wonder if that will spell his doom?

All in all I found this to be a very enjoyable experience. I think it kinda hangs together better than Us did, his previous feature, even though sometimes the connective tissue between many of the elements doesn’t really seem to be there.

Peele is also a renowned smartarse, so there are various inexplicable bits and pieces in the film that are there just for their own sake. One of the most surprising, for me, has Emerald doing a motorcycle slide straight out of the anime movie Akira, solely for its own sake, which makes almost no sense whatsoever other than to remind people that Peele wanted to make a live action Aklira movie, and the computer, and presumably a bunch of studio executives, said no.

I also felt curiously satisfied at the end with the way everything panned out. It is definitely a film I want to watch again a couple of times, because I feel like it has more to say beyond what most monster / action sci-fi movies have to say, but I’m also wary because Peele could just be taking the piss, as we say in this great land down under.

I think Nope is one of the better crowd-pleasing movies that came out this year, though it’s nowhere near as profound as it pretends to be. And it sure as shit doesn’t need to be.

I very much liked the dynamic between Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as siblings with their tensions and their in-joke references, and I thought they worked well together.

Everything else, well, it’s a wild and crazy universe. There’s all sorts of crazy shit out there.

Pray that it doesn’t feast upon YOU!

8 times they could have just said “Nope” and driven away as soon as they figured what was happening out of 10

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“This dream you're chasing, where you end up at the top of the mountain, all eyes on you... it's the dream you never wake up from.” - Nope