Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jordan Peele
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon
Perea
I'm one of those oddballs who still listens to CDs. I could play my CDs
through my modern blu-ray player, but that device doesn't have any audio
outputs that would allow me to hook it up directly to my amp. This means
I would need to have my TV turned on to listen to music, an intrusive
distraction I don’t care for. So, to play my CDs I use a 20-year-old DVD
player, which has audio outputs and also boasts an LCD display,
something the streamlined blu-ray player doesn't. Sometimes modern tech
just can't do what you need and you have to resort to a relic from a
previous generation.
Like
Top Gun: Maverick, Jordan Peele's Nope is a movie about the need to
keep old tech alive because some day it's going to get you out of a jam
when modern tech fails. In Maverick, Tom Cruise's titular pilot flies a series of increasingly older
planes over the course of the movie. In Nope, the heroes employ a series of increasingly older cameras in an
attempt to capture an image of the UFO that seems to be hanging around
their neck of the California desert.
Taciturn horse wrangler OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and his motormouth
sister Em (Keke Palmer) boast a connection to the earliest days
of moving pictures, claiming to be descendants of the jockey
photographed in Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 experiment 'The Horse in
Motion'. Muybridge took six photos of a galloping horse and assembled
them into a "motion picture" to satisfy the curiosity of a horse breeder
who wished to know if a horse ever had all four hooves off the ground
while running. You might say cinema came about through man's curiosity
with capturing images of animals, something Nope explores
through OJ and Em's quest to photograph alien life and save their
failing ranch.
OJ becomes aware of the presence of the UFO when his father (Keith David) is killed by a coin that falls from the sky like the Coke can in
The Gods Must be Crazy and goes right through his eye
socket into his brain. A flying saucer seems to appear at night above
the ranch, seeking out any vulnerable livestock it can suck up in the
manner of the tripods from War of the Worlds (Spielberg's
version is explicitly referenced at one point). Hoping to capture the
craft on film, OJ and Em purchase state of the art CCTV equipment and
find themselves saddled with tech nerd and UFO enthusiast Angel (Brandon Perea), who knows how to use the equipment. But like I said, modern tech
just doesn't cut it sometimes and so they find themselves reaching out
to gruff cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) and his
hand-cranked vintage cameras. If Angel is the film's Matt Hooper, Holst
is most definitely its Quint.
Peppered throughout Nope's narrative is a subplot concerning OJ's neighbour, Jupe (Steven Yeun), a former child star who survived an infamous incident on a '90s
sitcom set where the chimpanzee star ran amok and chewed the faces off
its human co-stars. This is rendered in flashbacks that resemble the
massacre in Michael Haneke's Funny Games. It seems like an irrelevant detail until, in the manner of M. Night
Shyamalan, it ties into a key moment later on. However, I'm not sure
what we're supposed to make of Jupe, who feels like he's missing some
crucial character details. I guess, given what we learn about him
halfway through the film, we're supposed to view him as a shitheel, the
Mayor Larry Vaughn of the Jaws analogy. But Yeun doesn't
really play him this way. He's charismatic, but not in the oily manner
of the creep he famously essayed in Lee Chang-dong's
Burning. Similarly, the lore of the alien is never nailed down. We're told it
reacts to one thing in particular, but it contradicts this at one key
point. The movie's Spielbergian set-pieces are so thrillingly mounted
that it's easy to overlook such details and simply revel in an
old-fashioned piece of sci-fi spectacle.
It's hard not to come away from Nope surmising there's a
director's cut on the way that will make things clearer. Based on
footage from a trailer that doesn't appear in the actual film, there
appears to be a subplot about Em's struggles to make it as a YouTuber.
Late on, a character appears out of nowhere that Em seems to view as an
antagonist, a sort of rival YouTuber, but we're left scratching our
heads as to who this person is. If this footage is added at some point,
I suspect it will add greatly to the dynamic between OJ and Em. OJ is
quiet and is constantly looking and observing, and Kaluuya has two of
the most expressive eyes in modern movies, making him perfect for the
role. Conversely, Em is so hyperactive and self-centred that she misses
details. OJ is the one more naturally suited to filmmaking, but
ironically it's Em who wants to make a living capturing images. In a key
moment, OJ gestures to his eyes with his fingers, and then to those of
his sister. He's telling her that for once in her life she needs to shut
up and look at what's going on around her, to take in the details. It
feels like Peele directly addressing his audience, telling them to shut
the fuck up and watch his movie. Em is the sort of person who comes away
from the sort of movie Peele makes claiming it didn't make sense because
they weren't paying attention, too busy yapping away or scrolling
through their phone. Her brother is the type of person who has to
explain the relevance of every detail they missed. Having been on
release in the US for a couple of weeks at this point, the general
reaction to Nope suggests there are an awful lot of Ems in
the audience. If you watch Nope with an Em mentality
you'll likely come away scratching your head, but if you're an OJ you'll
be satisfied by what you see but frustrated by what appears to have been
left out.
