Directed by Jordan Peele
Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Brandon Perea, Steven Yeun
An invasion from the wide open sky is affecting a ranch-town, causing a key number of its locals to act either for their community or for themselves. Nope is a highly conceptual film, much like writer-producer-director Jordan Peele’s previous two films Get Out and Us, and it hits a comfortable mark where it’s both thoughtful and entertaining without having to sacrifice either one.
Two of the locals, siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer), are noticing strange things going on around their ranch-house, particularly with electrical disturbances, their horses acting up, and a cloud in the sky that doesn’t seem to be moving. They recruit electronics store clerk Angel (Brandon Perea) to set up cameras at their estate to try and film any of this unusual activity – and they certainly come up close with plenty of it.
Tackling the UFO (or UAP) invasion sub-genre, Nope thankfully doesn’t feel much need to reinvent the wheel. The way it teases out these encounters is exciting, without having to be wildly different from what we’ve seen in the sub-genre before. Peele flexes his blockbuster Spielbergian methods, inserting the right amount of thrills in the right places, along with some more heroic moments that feel like they’re almost parodying the old style of westerns. There’s mostly serviceable cinematography from Hoyte van Hotyema, though there are more than a handful of shots that stunningly show the extent of this invasion, grounded from a human perspective. Some of these shots really do rival the best from Spielberg’s work.
The film succeeds in being both entertaining and thoughtful at the same time, with the thematic content here much less explicit than Get Out or Us. It may feel a tad tenuous, but the commentary it has on both trying to communicate/control our fellow beasts and on trying to use the power of film to cheaply gain fame and fortune further demonstrates how Peele can tap into such original concepts in an original way, again working a little differently than his peers.
There are certainly thrills and spectacles and plenty of underlying content to chew on. But one aspect the films fails on are the characters. They do fine to service the story, but how much has been spent on the filmmaking itself and how little on the characters is largely felt. Kaluuya’s skills are underdeveloped as an almost nothing protagonist, someone with scant back-story and a withdrawn persona, yet none of it adds up to much of an arc for him. He comes across as so cold and unlikable, as does Angel even moreso, and a bit more spark and warmth, like in Emerald, would’ve made this plight for humanity something we’re more likely to root for.
This is an admirable and impressive feat, with plenty of excitement that feels it’s been missing from Hollywood films for a time, though it ultimately can’t escape some of the flaws that are a little too prominent to ignore. Despite all the film’s good intentions, it still could’ve benefited from both a richer and tighter screenplay. But it doesn’t detract too much from this thrilling film’s cinematic power and its musings on the power of cinema.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN
