'NOPE': Spielbergian Sci-Fi Falls to Earth, Proves Jordan Peele is Human

Icarus Who Flew Too High…

The name Jordan Peele carries weight. The sketch comic turned horror auteur cut his teeth mocking the familiar. Often quite brilliantly. His skill as a caricaturist made Peele the perfect tool to spin something new from the weathered clichés he so often lampooned. He – more than most – knew the difference between frail and fresh. You mock enough knock-offs and you become the expert on what hasn’t been attempted yet. In time, the satirist became a sacred commodity. From his mind, two horror greats (Get Out, Us) were born. Nope, Peele’s third feature film, is one of the most hotly anticipated films of the summer, if not the entire year. All because of Jordan Peele.

His cred is warranted, no doubt, but Nope proves that even the celebrated auteur has blindspots and perhaps some learning to do. In some senses, Nope is a step forward for Peele and showcases his established, distinctive flair for socially-conscious horror while taking this lens and applying it to a new genre. In other areas, it’s decidedly a step back. Co-opting a Spielbergian touch (mixing whimsy, wonder, and comedic lightness), Peele shifts out of the social horror gear into something more closely resembling science-fiction; complete with splashes of the macabre, to keep his established fans satisfied and all.

There’s flashes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws (were it set in the sky) as Peele playfully toys with the audience, teasing what lurks not beneath us (Us), nor amongst us (Get Out), but above us with foreboding framing and an increasingly ominous tone. Cutting through the tension, Nope also leans into Peele’s comedic sensibilities, moreso than his previous endeavors – to mixed effect. Much like the film as a whole.

Daniel Kaluuya is OJ Haywood, the great-great-grandson of Hollywood royalty. Or at least that’s how he and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer, far and away the standout here) tell it. The Haywoods are the descendants of a long line of Hollywood horse trainers, now broke and broken after the mysterious passing of their respected father. When the down-on-their-luck siblings discover an entity decidedly not equestrian lurking in the clouds above their Californian ranch, they decide to take their lives and futures into their own hands by capturing the alien anomaly on video. They recruit a slapdash team to help them accomplish the impossible and get the “Oprah shot” that’ll send their bank accounts skyward.

So follows an often-tense, sometimes funny, and ultimately frustrating saga. Nope excels at staging tension but comes up short in narrative cohesion and satisfying character development. Many of the individual sequences are brilliantly staged – a moment when a crowd is consumed whole features particularly horrifying and original imagery, as does a sequence involving a stage monkey gone bananas – but they just don’t add up to more than the sum of its parts. In some cases, glaringly so. When taken as a whole, there’s just too many dangling threads and jarring editorial gaffes to make Nope an out-of-this-world success. Instead, what goodwill Peele builds up in the first half of the movie – and he builds up quite a bit – comes careening back down to earth with a very shaky third act.

There are ostensibly important plot lines that abruptly dead end, characters who disappear before their presence feels warranted or justified, and editing choices that leave the audience scratching their heads for all the wrong reasons. Once you realize that the many threads aren’t likely to come together, that building air of anticipation escapes the balloon and Nope fizzles before ultimately ending with a thud. Any great movie should crescendo into its climax whereas Nope runs out of room to maneuver, capping things off on a decidedly wonky note.

It’s wonderful to see Keke Palmer come to life here and truly steal the show, but her unbridled energy and enthusiasm often serves to highlight the shortcomings of the rest of the cast, who seem largely on autopilot. Daniel Kaluuya is stuck in one gear for most of the film, his reluctance to explore more than one side of the soft-spoken OJ making for a character that’s ultimately flat and boring to root for. He has his moments but we’ve come to expect more from the Academy Award-winning actor.

Newcomers Brandan Perea’s Angel and Michael Wincott’s Antlers Holst don’t really work as characters; they’re even more one-dimensional than OJ and make some bafflingly asinine decisions that threatens to untangle even the jilted movie logic of Nope. In retrospective, it feels as if an entire section involving Steven Yeun’s Jupe was left on the cutting room floor, his entanglement with the central Haywood drama feels both overlong and incomplete. And this is perhaps the greatest issue that haunts Nope: it’s both frightfully ambitious in places but disappointingly rushed in others. It feels like editor Nicholas Monsour either needed to shave 30 minutes off or tack another 30 minutes on. The final product could greatly benefit from another more robust editorial pass.

Jordan Peele still deserves the fanfare he no doubt will continue to inspire as Nope is nothing close to a complete failure nor does it signal a creator contending with creative bankruptcy. Instead, it’s a case of a movie just getting away from a writer-director at a pivotal moment. Hopefully there is a learning opportunity here: sometimes when your eyes are so closely watching the sky, you lose sight of the humanity that grounds us.

CONCLUSION: ‘Nope’ showcases the brilliance of Jordan Peele while also revealing his kryptonite. The Spielberg-inspired horror-tinged sci-fi features some outstanding individual elements – and Keke Palmer is a real scene-stealer – but they don’t add up to a convincing whole. Peele’s first wobbly feature.