A film review by Craig J. Koban July 28, 2022

NOPE  ½ 

2022, R, 135 mins.

Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood  /  Keke Palmer as Emerald 'Em' Haywood  /  Steven Yeun as Ricky 'Jupe' Park  /  Brandon Perea as Angel Torres  /  Michael Wincott as Craig  /  Barbie Ferreira as Nessie  /  Donna Mills as Bonnie Clayton  /  Terry Notary as Gordy  /  Jennifer Lafleur as Phyllis  /  Keith David as Otis Haywood Sr.

Writer/director Jordan Peele's third film NOPE is a sprawling, ambitious minded, but frequently messy and oftentimes undisciplined homage to Spielbergian summer spectacles like CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and JAWS.  The Oscar winning filmmaker made a gigantic critical and audience splash with GET OUT (a darkly funny, yet unsettling dissection of American race relations) and followed that up with the equally good US (perhaps his most chilling TWILIGHT ZONE-esque thriller that delved into the psychology of urban legends and duality).  Now comes NOPE with a massive floodgate of expectations, and despite the fact that it contains some supremely confident and impressively suspenseful sequences and does a good job defying audience expectations, the whole film felt like dizzying collage of ideas, characters, and themes that don't always flow together smoothly.  That, and if you're going in looking for more sobering social commentary from Peele again then you'll probably be disappointed...as I certainly was.  NOPE is regretfully the weakest entry of the filmmaker's cinematic trifecta and fails to work thoroughly well as a memorable sci-fi parable. 

The trailers for this film may superficially appear like they give way, way too much away and tried to lock Peele's work tightly into the confines of obligatory UFO fiction.  To be fair to him, the advertising barely even scratches the surface of what NOPE is really about, which does dabble into the otherworldly, but not in the traditional manner of other sci-fi pictures about strange visitors from the cosmos.  Without overtly going into too much detail and to avoid spoilers, NOPE is more of a modern western with monster film troupes that, in turn, aims for the summer film escapism of Spielberg films of yesteryear.  There's also a hint of early M. Night Shyamalan films here in terms of the somewhat similar SIGNS.  When we do get money shots of the extra-terrestrials in question Peele deserves massive points for conceptual innovation (NOPE ain't your grandparent's UFO movie) and he doesn't aggressively spoon feed viewers exactly what they want from this material.  It's not that NOPE isn't without daring originality, technical merit, or a potent sense of undulating eeriness throughout.  It's just too meandering and elliptical in its storytelling for its own good, with Peele bobbing and weaving so much that it forces him to course correct on multiple occasions and largely to distracting effect. 

Peele always opens his films so strongly, and NOPE is no exception.  We're given two prologues for the price of one, the first of which is a deeply disturbing look at what appears to be a massacre at a TV taping of some program involving a renegade and bloodthirsty monkey.  The second is just as creepily evocative and introduces us to father and son business partners in Otis Haywood (Keith David) and the unfortunately named OJ (GET OUT's fantastic Daniel Kaluuya, a bit too impenetrably one note here), who both own and run Hollywood Horses, which rents out their steeds to big productions back in town.  It seems like an ordinary work day for the duo...but then random objects come hurtling down from the skies above, with one being a coin that penetrates poor Otis' skull like a bullet and unfortunately kills him.  Two things work sensationally well for this prologue: Firstly, the manner that Peele drums up questions about the unknown and what on earth actually happened to Otis.  Secondly, we get to see OJ traverse his way through processing his dad's untimely death and without having all of the answers, which gnaws away at him.  OJ is left with his dad's business, but his heart simply doesn't seem to be in it anymore. 

Peele begins to unravel more details about this family unit, which is presented well in an early scene involving OJ and one of his jittery horses at a Hollywood sound stage.  His firecracker sister in Emerald (the well cast Keke Palmer), is an up and coming actress-wannabe and assists her sibling on the job.  She pridefully boasts that her ancestors were some of the first black stunt people of the movies.  She even claims that her great grandfather was the unnamed man in Eadweard Muybridge's world famous "The Horse in Motion" (an early demonstration that one could take single pictures and use them to create motion pictures).  The Haywoods desperately need money, and after an incident on set they're let go from the production, leaving brother and sister struggling to make ends meet.  Fate steps in with the encroachment of a strange phenomenon around their ranch.  Is it a UFO or just a weird cloud formation that oddly never moves?  If it is aliens then did they have something to do with Otis' death?  Are these ETs connected to a strange nearby UFO themed amusement park run by a former sitcom child star, Jupe Park (Steven Yeun), who - yup! - survived that aforementioned monkey attack on set?  Realizing that nabbing the perfect shot (or, as Emerald labels it, the "Oprah Shot") will be hard (computers can manipulate anything these days), the siblings decide to enlist the aid of Best Buy-ian tech guru Brandon (Angel Torres) and famed cinematographer Antlers Holts (sensational name, played by Michael Wincott) to get just the right image of the UFO and make a fortune on it.  In pure Peele fashion, it doesn't go according to plan. 

Peele might be trying to appropriate the Spielberg of old, but NOPE never once follows any type of preordained path as far as the sci-fi thriller genre goes.  The scope and scale of this is mighty impressive and certainly dwarves what the filmmaker achieved on the more modestly engineered GET OUT and US.  Probably the best way to describe the look and feel of NOPE would be to say that it's a Peele film cross morphed with the sheen of a popcorn blockbuster, and everything looks quite wonderful here via Hoyte van Hoytema's lush cinematographer (which utilized some 65mm IMAX stock as well).  The driving force of interest in NOPE is the alien vessel itself that appears above the Haywood ranch, and initially it looks like just about every other flying saucer in fiction, but as Peele slowly, but surely removes the narrative layers we come to realize that his aliens and their ships are not obligatory designs at all.  I admired that Peele and company have at least thought through their alien menace here and somehow manage to transcend genre conventions with their approach.  JAWS is also clearly an inspiration here in terms of Peele wisely knowing not to show too much of the craft too often; like the shark in that 1975 movie, the vessel becomes more frightening because of what we can't make out and see, and that forces the characters into an exploratory hunt phase.  Also, in JAWS the local town sheriff employs a kooky old shark hunter to nab his prey; in NOPE the brother/sister ranchers employ a kooky old cinematographer to nab their prey. 

And like Spielberg, Peele is a good student of Hitchcock, and NOPE is littered with moments that chiefly understand the best manner to drum up suspense and play upon what viewers think is in store.  There's a clever aura of mystery of the unknown and well timed misdirection that makes NOPE frequently nerve-wracking.  But there's a difference between clever misdirection and tossing in ill defined and unfocused red herrings and plot detours, and that's where I think Peele's film starts to become unhinged.  Too much of NOPE has a cobbled together tone, with the story jerking us back and forth between seemingly incongruent elements that Peele later awkwardly tries assimilate into a total package.  Some potentially innocuous elements (like the Haywood family member being in Muybridge's The Horse in Motion) feels like a throwaway detail, but it does pay off handsomely later on, and in particular one shot late in the film.  But then there are other subplots that don't seem organically linked to the rest of the main plot, like the underwritten tale of Yuen's once traumatized child star that had his own horrific close encounter with that feral monkey on his sitcom all those decades ago.  The setup of this arc alone is pretty fascinating and could have been made into its own movie, but Peele never manages to find a manner of convincingly tying that in with the larger thread of OJ and Emerald's quest to get the "Oprah Shot."  Again, it's admirable that Peele is blending multiple divergent elements here (UFO picture, horror thrillers, westerns, and black comedy), but too many of his ideas fail to properly stick to landing. 

Perhaps the largest frustration to be had in NOPE is that the razor sharp social commentary sting of GET OUT and US is kind of AWOL here, which is - more or less - aiming for big branded genre thrills (albeit from a more twisted prerogative).  Peele is less inclined here to explore ideas and themes as he is more enamored with exploring the newfangled filmmaking tools at his disposal (and the larger budget that this entails).  On a positive, NOPE continues to explore elements of Americana that are far too frequently told from the white perspective (we simply don't get many black themed westerns or films about black ranchers), and that spirit of inclusiveness is to be celebrated.  By Peele's own aspirations, he wanted NOPE to explore humanity's addiction to spectacle and how people in the modern age try to find a way of magnetizing everything...including proof of life beyond Earth.  I think the shock and awe tactics at play in NOPE sort of sways the film away from having any level of true thematic depth that touches what Peele achieved with his rookie and sophomore films.  By the time the film does arrive at it climatic final act that pits everyone against this strange alien threat (and we're given a fairly detailed insight into what they're really all about) it plays out fairly conventionally and with some of Peele's jigsaw-like puzzle plot pieces being haphazardly put together in AH-HA! payoff moments.  I could hear many people grumble as they left my screening...and I have to admit...I was among one of them.