The “applause” signs are still flashing in the television studio in Los Angeles, but the audience is long gone. On stage are the sets of a sitcom, a comedy of the harmless kind. Actors are lying on the floor, dying or already dead. A chimpanzee with bloodstained arms snorts angrily and looks grimly into the headlights. Something terrible has happened.
The next moment is also terrible, on a desert ranch in the Agua Dulce Valley, far outside of the city. An old black man and his grown son, both horse trainers, are out in the paddocks when something is brewing above them, beyond the cloud cover. Then small everyday metallic objects, such as keys and coins, whistle down from the clouds. They hit with the force of bullets. The old man gets hit and dies.
To say that one would be breathless after these first scenes of “Nope” is almost an understatement. Because the narrator who confronts us here with the inexplicable is Jordan Peele. A black filmmaker who earned a reputation like Donnerhall with his film debut ‘Get Out.’ Half-hidden racism in the in-laws’ house, described in painful detail, which then turned into a veritable, unforgettable piece of horror. The follow-up was “Us”, also wonderful creepy. Now Hollywood is at his feet and the sky is the limit of his imagination. literally.
But the sky is also the limit of our expectations – that’s how wide the arc of horror is stretched here. A mangled television animal that has reliably amused people in front of the camera suddenly shows deadly ferocity. What made her erupt? And how could this dark power be related to the phenomenon above the clouds, which seems to spit out the contents of human trouser pockets with almost divine force?
The ancestor was a black stuntman – a forgotten hero of Hollywood
The answer is imagined as a horror of cosmic interconnectedness that encompasses the entire universe. First, however, the view narrows to the rancher family at the edge of the desert. She supplies horses for film shoots, since the beginning of cinema. The galloping horseman featured in one of the serial shots of Eadweard Muybridge’s famous “Animal Locomotions” was apparently her ancestor – one of the forgotten people of color in Hollywood history. Here the political reappears in Jordan Peele, but only briefly.
The next thing to notice is that after the old rancher’s unusual manner of death – the celestial missile that slammed into his brain was a small round dime – his children seek no outside help whatsoever. Nobody talks to them about how that was physically possible. Even the doctors in the hospital who handed the coin to the son after the autopsy didn’t ask any more far-reaching questions, and certainly not the police.
How can that be? It may be because Jordan Peele wants it that way. He clearly doesn’t care about normal questions that storytellers have to grapple with. Above all, he wants to leave civilization out. It’s about the few people in this valley who can’t get away from there either, about a kind of siege situation like in the old western – and about the disaster that has nested in the clouds above them.
The figures are rather sketches, poorly motivated for the last stand
Those people are mostly OJ and his sister Emerald, the dead rancher’s children. Played by ‘Get Out’ star Daniel Kaluuya, he is taciturn, brooding, driven by a sense of duty to the family legacy. She is portrayed by Keke Palmer as a gibberish, compensating for any childhood setbacks. But both are more sketches than complete figures, ill-motivated for some kind of western skirmish for a dusty piece of land.
And so you slowly understand that there is a certain negligence here, maybe also a wantonness, you could call it chutzpah. The murderous chimpanzee that opens the film, for example, turns out to be completely irrelevant. His bloody deed is only loosely connected to the rest of the plot. Inexplicable cosmic energies in which it would be involved and hoped to be revealed? nope
The threat, it becomes clear at some point, comes out of the clouds in “Nope”.
(Photo: Universal Pictures)
The unlimited freedom after a sensational success – why is it not good for so many filmmakers? Sadly, Jordan Peele is no exception. His budget allows him to open the really big tinker box and stage a kind of homage to the Steven Spielberg of “Close Encounters”, that’s where his talent shows. Unlike his role model, however, he apparently believes that he can do without strong characters and a gripping story, and that he will be forgiven if he repeats the same sequence over and over again, only bigger each time.
The resolution is already everywhere, but if you want to see the film innocently, you should at this point – spoiler warning! – to stop. Unfortunately, it’s quite banal: behind the ominous clouds over the rocky valley, which is at least spectacularly photographed by Christopher Nolan’s camera magician Hoyte van Hoytema, a flying saucer appears at some point.
You don’t want to call her a veritable UFO, because she looks as if she had escaped from a B-Picture of the 1950s. It sucks in people and horses to somehow digest them and only spits out metal and plastic. In earnest? Yep, seriously. And that makes the two siblings, who only want to film the cosmic thing and get rich with it, eventually get really angry. On to the showdown!
If this was designed from the ground up to be innocent, funny, a little outrageous fun, maybe it could have worked. But Jordan Peele can do more, and probably wanted to tell more: about the brutality of show business, the nature of the spectacle and our greed for sensations. Only he seems to have forgotten his plan in the middle. Maybe the UFO hypnotized him. It is to be hoped that he will soon challenge himself more. The critics, the majority of whom are still cheering for him on “Nope”, are not doing it at the moment.
nope, USA 2022 – Directed and written by Jordan Peele. Camera: Hoyte van Hoytema. Music: Michael Abels. Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun. Universal, 131 minutes. Theatrical release: August 10, 2022.