Nope (2022) review

Spectacle is at the center of Jordan Peele’s Nope. This is a revelation to absolutely no one who has seen the movie. Where Get Out and Us were reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan stories before he fell off in the biggest way imaginable, Nope is reminiscent of Steven Spielberg in his 70s and 80s prime. It’s as big and epic in scope as Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the energy and ferocity of Jaws and Jurassic Park. Nope came closer to recreating that feeling of wonder and adventure mixed with horror I get watching Jurassic Park than the Jurassic Park movie that came out last month, a feeling that I had been severely, severely missing in big budget movies.

Nope is the best summer blockbuster to come out in years. It’s thrilling, it’s gorgeous to look at, it's funny, it's terrifying, and most importantly for a blockbuster, it's ambitious. It's everything that blockbuster filmmaking has not been ever since the blockbuster theater system has been dominated by Disney. Everything about Nope oozes charisma and creativity, from the cast and the cinematography to the unique but not over-the-top twist on the “UFO on a farm” story. The way the ranch is shot is gorgeous, the wide open spaces surrounded by desert hills, feeling fully immersive into a world where a UFO could be lurking in the clouds at any given moment.

While Nope is debatably not be a full-on horror movie, it is easily the scariest film he has made so far, the attack scene at Jupiter’s Claim and the Haywood ranch kicking off the second act of the film being one of the most thrilling horror sequences I’ve seen in a theater in years. I enjoyed the slow pacing in the first half for the most part, but my only narrative complaint with Nope is that it felt like it was missing a UFO scene in its first act. After OJ sees the UFO for the first time, he tells his sister Emerald about it and immediately she is 100% on board with the idea that their ranch is a UFO hotspot. She knew something weird was going on, but I feel like it needed a scene where she also sees the UFO doing something weird to convince her without a shadow of a doubt that there’s a UFO.

A running theme throughout the film is fight-or-flight animalistic instincts. After being agitated and pushed to its limit, chimp actor Gordy kills a bunch of actors and crew members on set in Ricky’s flashback, the horses respond to the UFO above them by trying to run away from it and OJ compares the UFO to a predator keeping hold over its territory. The cinematographer Antlers Holst even watches animals hunting and fighting each other. The first scene is the spectacle of a chimp actor snapping and violently killing the actors on a TV set. VIOLENCE… SURROUNDED… BY A SET AND CAMERAS. Later, we see the surviving child actor Ricky “Jupiter” Park has a secret shrine to the incident in his office, which he says he had a rich couple pay him 50k to spend the night in. Obsession with and monetization of big spectacles seems to be the angle Jordan Peele looking at the classic UFO story.

The social commentary in Nope is much more subdued than in his previous movies, almost to the point where it is completely unrecognizable in comparison to Get Out and Us. It’s a movie about something that will only have an effect on you if you look at it, similar to how you see the American spectacle of violence on the news. At the center of the commentary of Nope, like with the filmmaking itself, is the spectacle. Jordan Peele examines how the public desires bigger and more impressive spectacle better than Colin Trevorrow could with the Jurassic World trilogy if you gave him 10 attempts to do so.

The obsession with the spectacle of violence that has permeated America for its entire existence, as well as the incentive to perpetuate that spectacle for all to see on the internet is explored through the lens of UFO sightings. OJ and Emerald try to get the “Oprah shot” of the UFO, setting up an elaborate camera system and hiring the best cinematographer in the world to capture it on film, and Ricky creates a whole carnival attraction in an attempt to create the greatest spectacle attraction on Earth. There’s even a TMZ guy who shows up trying to get the scoop on the disappearances at Jupiter’s Claim and ends up getting sucked into the UFO. As well as behaving like a predator, the way that the UFO operates mirrors the way that spectacles are consumed in America: it sucks things up and spits it back out in a gory fashion, and moves onto the next thing to consume.