Sometimes a good flying saucer movie is just a good flying saucer movie: a dab of wonder, some wide-open skies, the occasional scare. Maybe a few homages to other representatives of the genre.
Nope, the breathlessly awaited third feature film from Jordan Peele, has all of that. It also exudes the sense that it wants to be more, and the filmmaker’s track record, combined with the film’s Hitchcockian, reveal-nothing marketing, buttresses the high expectations. Buried within are ideas about spectacle and race and filmmaking itself. If you relish the idea of doing the work, as many think pieces have, you might extract ore from the movie’s inland California mountain setting.
And if you don’t feel like doing that work? Nope has a premise, but it doesn’t have much of a story. It has a lot of handsomely captured movement, but it’s hard to figure where it’s going. It has stunning detail, but only occasionally does it add up to anything. After admiring its veneer for more than two hours, the first word to leave my mouth was “Why?”
O.J. Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) run a ranch outside Los Angeles, where they try to make ends meet training horses. As the film begins, they’re struggling through a commercial shoot in which director and crew are clueless in all matters equine. Before the disaster ends, Emerald has time to explain that the family is descended from the jockey featured in a famous 19th-century experiment conducted by the photographer Eadward Muybridge, a bit of proto cinema that revealed all four of a horse’s legs leave the ground during a gallop. This is intriguing subtext, and that’s what it remains, a brainy footnote to read in between the movie’s lines.
Like previous Peele films, including his perfect debut Get Out, Nope takes place in an enclosed world, which, in this case, is also an expansive stretch of desert land that Peele and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Dunkirk) turn into their own lonesome playground. Squint a little and you could be looking at a John Ford movie. Peele is a master at placing people within an environment, which he has plenty of opportunity to do here. O.J. and Emerald race around their ranch and its environs, trying to capture a UFO on film, much as Muybridge captured that galloping horse. They have help in this endeavor, from an industrious installation tech (Brandon Perea) and a grumpy cinematographer (Michael Wincott), both of whom know an adventure when they see one.
There’s a more disturbing subplot as well, concerning a Western-themed amusement park huckster (Steven Yeun) to whom the Haywoods sell horses. As we see in an ingenious flashback, Ricky “Jupe” Park was a child TV actor, known for a sitcom starring a lovable chimp (a motion-captured Terry Notary). As we witness in a flashback, one day, the chimp decides he’s had enough and proceeds to maul the cast — everyone but little Ricky, who shares a bond with the beast. The incident is the most affecting sequence in the film, a macabre, obtuse nightmare that seems to have been shipped in from another movie. There’s certainly a movie to be made about a child who witnessed the consequences of animal exploitation but didn’t learn his lesson; Ricky now sacrifices his horses to the aliens above. But the storyline is a tight squeeze in Nope, padding a film that already feels a little stretched.
The performances are excellent from top to bottom. Kaluuya, already an Oscar-winner for playing Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah, plays O.J. with a heavy burden in his neck and shoulders. The family patriarch (Keith David in an all-too-brief performance) has died under strange circumstances at the beginning of the film, and the son absorbs the responsibility of taking over. Palmer’s Emerald isn’t nearly as invested. She’s more of a free spirit, more interested in her side hustles than the ranch. One of the film’s pleasures is watching the siblings meet in the middle over their shared excitement, their desire to make their own movie of a visitor from the skies.
The sound design is also exquisite. Peele has a wonderful instinct for things that go bump in the night, or even the day. The craft level in Nope is as high as that spaceship, which looks a little like a flattened-out cowboy hat. I just couldn’t help wishing for some kind of bigger picture, something like the kind of thematic arc and destination Peele crafted so well in Get Out and, to a lesser extent, his sophomore effort, Us. Maybe this isn’t fair. Maybe inspired spectacle and eyebrow-raising subtext are all Nope is shooting for. But Peele has shown he’s capable of much more. Expectations can be a burden, but they’re nonetheless real. There’s another shoe still waiting to drop in Nope. Watch the skies, and maybe you can imagine it.
Chris Vognar is a culture writer living in Houston.
