Review: Nope (2022)

Nope (2022)

Rated R for language throughout and some violence/bloody images

Score: 4 out of 5

Jordan Peele is now three-for-three in my book. Get Out may still be his best film, but with this, he's proven (again) that he's no one-trick pony, delivering a film that, while it features Black protagonists just like Get Out and Us, aims its satire somewhere other than race relations or the state of America today. Nope is equal parts sci-fi horror, a modern-day Western, Peele's usual dash of gallows humor, and him taking aim at Hollywood and animal cruelty, specifically the point where the two intersect in the use of animal actors in movies and TV shows. For all that its marketing has kept a lot of things about it a mystery (some of my friends had been speculating that it would be a feature-length adaptation of the seminal Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"), the movie itself is direct and to-the-point as to what it's really about, a straightforward alien/monster story about a group of people trying to gather proof that they've spotted a UFO. It's as well-made as anything Peele has done, with a likely star turn for Keke Palmer and some extremely inventive alien creature designs that had me watching the desert skies on my drive home. I don't want to risk saying this about a filmmaker who could still turn into the next M. Night Shyamalan, but right now, Peele is arguably the best horror auteur of his generation, and this is yet another rock-solid entry in his filmography.

Our protagonists are Otis "OJ" Haywood, Jr. and Emerald Haywood, the brother-and-sister owner of Haywood Hollywood Horses, a ranch in Agua Dulce, California where they train and wrangle horses for use in movies and TV shows. They have been struggling ever since, six months ago, their father Otis died in a freak accident when a bunch of random debris started falling from the sky, leaving the ranch to his inexperienced offspring. OJ and Emerald have had to start selling their horses to Ricky Park, a former child star turned owner of a Wild West-themed amusement park, to pay the bills, and it increasingly seems like they might have to sell him the whole ranch. And then, one night, their electricity starts to flicker and they notice that one of their horses has gone missing. What's more, OJ is convinced that he saw a UFO, which he blames for the unusual occurrences going on. Together with Ricky, an electronics store employee and paranormal enthusiast named Angel, and a grouchy old Hollywood cinematographer named Antlers Holst, OJ and Emerald set out to capture proof that aliens are real and are visiting Earth. Unfortunately, the aliens are not too keen on cooperating with their plan, and they did not come to Earth in peace.

Running throughout the film, from the very opening scene, is an undercurrent of Peele's disgust at how Hollywood treats its workers, particularly animals, and nowhere is this more apparent than with Ricky. A key component of Ricky's backstory is that, as a kid in the late '90s, he was one of the stars of a "funny chimpanzee" sitcom called Gordy's Home that was hastily canceled after Gordy one day went berserk and mauled his human co-stars on set, with Ricky hiding under a table and watching in horror as the chimp beat and mangled his on-screen parents and sister. Even with this trauma, however, Ricky seemingly never learned the most important lesson from it, as he milks the tragedy to make money while his amusement park is implied to be mistreating the horses under his care. Without spoiling anything, his cavalier, mercenary attitude towards animals, seeing them as little more than props for his stage show, leads to the single greatest tragedy in the film. Steven Yeun walks a fine line as a guy who is on one hand a product of the Hollywood machine who was put directly in harm's way by it and is still clearly troubled by what happened, but on the other is a product of the Hollywood machine who recklessly pursues fame and fortune at any cost, having come to see the abuses of the studio system as just how things are done. It's clear that he's seen some shit, but he is not a likable guy, especially once he drops the aw-shucks cowboy persona he puts on for his theme park.

He stands in stark contrast to OJ and Emerald, two people who, for the most part, genuinely love the animals they care for and know that you should always treat them with respect, if only so they don't act out and injure somebody on set. Neither of them has the experience needed to do the job like their father did, not after he died before he could properly pass on all of his knowledge to them, but they still understand why professionalism matters, a lesson that goes well beyond animal actors or Hollywood in general. They get understandably frustrated when the recklessness of a crew they're working with causes one of their horses to freak out, and not just because it gets them fired from that production. If a single phrase could sum up the message of this movie, it would probably be "respect the talent", which becomes clear once OJ and Emerald realize that their skills may offer them a way to confront the alien spaceship.

Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya are like fire and ice as Emerald and OJ. Palmer's perkiness feels straight out of the Disney Channel at first, but she avoids becoming annoying by adding some additional layers beyond just sass. Emerald is frustrated with her job as a horse wrangler, having never felt attached to it and having ambitions beyond it, such that she's probably the most eager of the two siblings to get rich with a photo or video of an alien spaceship. OJ, meanwhile, is serious, soft-spoken, and has a hard time expressing himself, letting Emerald do the talking for him more often than not. It makes sense, then, that Palmer absolutely dominates the film, acting like a force of nature that makes me want to see her in a lot more movies going forward. That's not to say that Kaluuya fades into the background, though. Whereas Palmer felt like she was channeling Lil Rel Howery in Get Out, an ordinary person dropped into a crazy-ass horror movie scenario who reacts accordingly and drives a lot of the plot, Kaluuya's OJ felt like nothing less than a modern-day cowboy, a stoic hero committed to his job who serves as the straight man to a lot of Peele's humor.

That "cowboy" feel extends to a lot of the movie, and not just because it's set in the Southwestern desert and revolves around people who work with horses for a living. Once the film started outright using a Western-style score in the third act as the main characters went after the UFO, I realized that I'd love to see Peele make an old-fashioned Western, as the film took on a tone that was as much that of a rollicking adventure movie as a horror movie. It's a film that relies heavily on the desert climate of the Southwest to build tension, especially with how the UFO is framed for much of the film as hiding in the clouds, affording the protagonists and the audience only brief glimpses of it before it vanishes. The special effects when we finally get to see it and what's inside it are immaculate, suggesting that Peele and the rest of the production team actually took this movie's moral lesson to heart and didn't just do a cheap rush job. The true nature of the aliens is terrifyingly eldritch, the kind of thing where I found myself wishing I'd seen this movie in IMAX like it was filmed in, but even on a normal theater screen, the effects were stunning, the film letting viewers take them all in and make sure they know exactly what they're seeing.

If I had any real problems with Nope, it's that it's a pretty slow-moving film, one that could've afforded to be about ten minutes shorter. The talkiness of long stretches of it clash at times with what is effectively a creature feature, and while that worked to its advantage during the slow burn in the first half, once the UFO really started assailing the protagonists it could've stood to pick up the pace a bit. Between the pivotal "shit just got real" scene and the real start of the climatic confrontation, the film could've stood to have a few scenes trimmed to move it along, make it feel more like the proper creature feature it was trying to be instead of hewing to the earlier scenes' deliberate pace. That being said, a good movie being ten minutes too long is hardly a deal-breaker, and I still enjoyed myself for much of that time.

The Bottom Line

I may have drank too much water and iced tea before the movie and had my mind focused on my bladder for much of the last thirty minutes, but even so, this was the kind of movie that made it worth it for me to hold it in until the end. It's a lot more conventional in its structure and themes than Peele's prior films, and I can imagine it being divisive for that reason, but even so, it's a knockout from a filmmaker who's still at the top of his game.