NOPE: Nope Man's Sky

Director: Jordan Peele

Writer: Jordan Peele

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott, Steven Yeun, Wrenn Schmidt, Keith David

Runtime: 130 mins.

2022

Jordan Peele: Idea Man. This reputation crystallized after his premier feature Get Out, an allegory for racial trauma, microaggressions, and fetishistic performativity, complete with sci-fi thriller trappings. Peele distills the miasma of racecraft into something sharp and familiar. Peele's preternatural skill as a director is what elevates the film to iconic status. We may trot out the well-observed "I would have voted Obama for a third term" line regularly, but it's the off-kilter delivery of "no no no no no no no" and the clinking, sinking sensory nightmare of the hypnotism that we remember most deeply. Indeed, it is 'Idea Man' Peele who undermines his second film Us, a queasy, slanting audiovisual achievement that falls apart when the script butts in to explain everything with dotted Ts and crossed Is.

So, Nope. OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) inherits his father's (Keith David) horse training business after a freak accident in which loose change shrapnel falls from the sky. The family ranch has been a mainstay in Hollywood since the original motion picture: the infamous jockey, OJ's great great great grandfather, riding on a horse. OJ's sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) drops by from time to time to leverage her charisma for the good of the ranch, but they both have the sense that their legacy is slipping away from them. A series of terrifying encounters with an alien object in the clouds inspires them to grasp for legacy once more, in the form of documented extraterrestrial evidence.

The screenplay is filled with characters making leaps in logic and generally accepting rash speculation without blinking. It's a shallow movie through and through. So has Peele learned his lesson from Us? Absolutely! The script is built no deeper than a wading pool by design, allowing its constellation of themes to swirl around us rather than hammering on anything in particular. The characters' willingness to leap from assumption to assumption keeps the movie light on its feet. This is not a writer's movie, so it is a great choice to avoid getting bogged down in the lore. Peele elides all the stuff we don't need to be thinking about.

Unlike Get Out and Us, Nope is not an actor's movie either. Kaluuya and Palmer deliver strong performances to be sure. They complement each other well, with Palmer exploding outward and Kaluuya habitually collapsing into himself. There just isn't any room for them to be great. Their characters are vessels for simple desires, and the actors are savvy enough not to push beyond that.

The counterexemplar of this broad performance style is Steven Yeun as Jupe, a former child star turned Western theme park coordinator. He's been buying up OJ's horses for his own purposes: a ritualistic sideshow that has something to do with the UFO.

Yeun delivers a nuanced, psychological performance that breaks the movie around him. His scenes might look good in a reel, but he pulls too much focus with too little clarity for his character's role in the script. Frankly, for the script to function he needs to be more of an asshole, and his uncertain thoughtfulness begs us to ask more questions than his flimsy subplot can sustain.

So if it's not a writer's movie, and not an actor's movie, then what? I'd argue that Nope is self-consciously and wholeheartedly a cinematographer's movie. There's even a cinematographer in the ensemble! Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) is a crinkly crankly old master who gets beguiled into OJ and Emerald's service by the prospect of capturing an impossible shot. There's a lot of love, and a whole lot of hate, for the colonizing gaze of the camera in Wincott's performance. He alternates between taciturn and manic based on the scene's needs in a straightforward way that Yeun's performance could have benefited from.

This is Peele's first collaboration with DP Hoyte van Hoytema, who has put together an incredible filmography since he broke through with Let the Right One In in 2008. Their masterstroke is the design and execution of the ship. The way it darts between clouds, swift without acceleration-- rarely has the alien seemed so alien onscreen. Then there's the existentially harrowing sensory overload that we are treated to when an abduction occurs...

Even beyond the SFX spectacle, each visual moment is so carefully carved. Peele and Hoytema find something pensive and wistful beneath the fervor of spectacle, resulting in a rewarding exploration of themes that the screenplay only glances at. Take the way Hoytema frames Kaluuya in the night, lit such that the whites of his eyes hover stark in the darkness. This visually informs a running commentary about gaze and eyelines, as OJ attempts to cobble together the predatory behavioral language of an alien species. Take the discrepancy between the trite 'little green men' outfits that Jupe peddles at his sideshow, and the sublime otherworldliness of the actual extraterrestrial presence. Take the juxtaposition of the painfully awkward soundstage shoot at the beginning of the film and the incredible location filming in the hilly gulch, inspiring reflection on artifice and awe.

This reverence produces Nope's richest aspect: the sky. The characters scrutinize cloud coverage the way you would scan the treeline for a predatory jungle cat. The camera roves over the blue purple hues, letting the beauty of nature speak while your fear of the unnatural listens. The clouds feel claustrophobic sometimes, like a roof that sits too low; at other times the vista grandly extends to the vanishing point. It all feels rather meditative, which threatens to push Nope firmly away from horror and into the territory of a classical western.

That is, until that trick of the atmosphere during golden hour begins rushing towards you...

3.5 / 5  BLOBS