Jordan Peele has become the Rod Serling of our moment by finding the sources of social and personal unease in the uncanny. After Get Out elevated him into the ranks of famous filmmakers, Peele even hosted the two-season revival of “The Twilight Zone.”
With Nope, Peele crosses the slippery borders separating horror from science fiction and into the subgenre speculating on the first encounters with alien visitors. In the enigmatically titled film, Peele even revisits a sci-fi theme from one of Serling’s shows … but no spoilers here.
Nope’s protagonists are a pair of siblings, sullen but determined OJ (Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya) and irritatingly irrepressible Emerald (Keke Palmer). They are heirs to Hollywood’s only Black-owned horse stable, which for several generations has supplied the fantasy factory with equine extras. As Emerald proudly points out on the set of a silly TV show, the first photographed moving image, Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion (1878), features a Black jockey.
However, race isn’t the issue in Peele’s smart alternative to this summer’s superhero blockbusters. The heroes, OJ and Emerald, are ordinary people who rise to an unusual occasion bravely and resourcefully. Nope is mostly about an alien hovering over OJ and Emerald’s stable hidden inside a cloud that never moves, visible for the longest time as only a shadow before glimpsed as a darting saucer shape. OJ tries but fails to describe it to Emerald. “It was too vast, too fast, too quiet to be a plane,” he says. She immediately gets the idea of photographing or filming the UFO—“the money shot! the Oprah shot!” she responds.
Nope begins with a subplot that gradually converges with the main theme. On the set of a treacly ‘90s family sitcom—mom and dad, boy and chimpanzee dressed as a boy—the ape goes berserk, destroying furniture, attacking the cast. The boy survives by hiding under a table and grows up to manage a tacky Old West theme park. Of course, that ‘90s show has attracted a YouTube following. He has the daft idea of introducing an alien vs. cowboy spectacle for the bleacher-seated audience, calling his make-believe space invaders the Viewers. However, the real alien intrudes before the show can begin.
Nope is a cryptic running commentary on life in a world of spectatorship where spectacle is king. Peele’s view on the subject might be surmised from the quote prefacing the film, a verse from the Prophet Nahum in the Hebrew scriptures: “I will fling foul things upon you and make you vile and make a spectacle of you.” The nearness of Nope’s alien is signaled by the failure of electricity that powers our spectacle-driven society: car engines cut, security cams darken, wi-fi drops and all devices go out. Only hand-driven mechanical implements continue to run in its presence.
Working with Christopher Nolan’s cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Dunkirk) and filming with 65mm IMAX cameras, Peele makes a spectacular looking movie in the best way possible. The special effects are subtle and unusually well done, leaving as much as possible to the imagination before finally unveiling an alien as awesomely unlike us as anything dreamed of since H.P. Lovecraft. Peele’s longtime collaborator Michael Abels provides a John William-esque orchestral score. The film’s use of sound is brilliant, especially when the alien extinguishes the racket of contemporary humanity through its presence. Nope opens slowly but gains momentum as vague anxiety builds toward terror (with a few sharp moment of humor on the way). Some critics have compared Nope to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, released at a time of widespread optimism over the future, Close Encounters imagines good things will come from meeting the aliens. Nope is the product of a different era altogether.
