Nope ★★½
M, 130 minutes
A major hazard in the film-making career of any gifted auteur is the offer to direct a blockbuster.
Both Ang Lee and Nomadland’s Chloe Zhao inflamed critical opinion after Marvel came calling. While Lee’s Hulk and Zhao’s Eternals have their defenders, no one could describe their reception as rapturous. Now it’s Jordan Peele’s turn to be judged for his handling of a sizeable chunk of money. Nope’s $US68 million production cost is not in the Marvel class, but it’s a big leap from the $US4.5 million spent on Peele’s feature debut, get-outan elegant exemplar in the art of the cerebral horror movie, or the $US20 million which went into its similarly successful follow-up, Us.
Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Brandon Perea in Nope.
And Peele has further raised the stakes with a list of points that his new film is out to make. He sees it as nothing less than a satire on the human addiction to the spectacular, a critique of the ethics of commercial movie-making and a menage a trois uniting a seemingly incompatible trio of genres – the Western, the horror film and the sci- fi fantasy.
His sinister but cryptic opening scene suggests that he might just pull off these grand ambitions. The action takes place on the set of what looks to be a TV sitcom. Furniture is overturned, cushions are scattered – and stretched out on the floor is the unconscious figure of a woman, visible only from the knees down. Regarding her is a large, agitated chimpanzee dressed in blood-stained children’s clothes. And even more disturbing are the plaintive whimpers coming from somebody out of shot.
We return later to this moment. Meanwhile, Peele takes us west to the Haywood Ranch, where its owners, the Haywood family, train horses to be used in movies. Watched by his son, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya from get-out), the Haywood patriarch is exercising one of these horses when he’s thrown from the saddle and killed by something fired from above.
to sniper? to drone? No. Peele’s aspirations turn out to be much more rarefied. We’re watching the beginning of a sustained attack from a flying saucer hovering in the clouds.
The UFO’s next victims are the customers of Jupiter’s Claim, a neighboring Western theme park run by Ricky Park (Steven Yeun), whose childhood memories of his life as a young television star gradually explain the opening scene. Ricky’s psychological hangover from this is still with him, ready to be worked into a plot strand condemning Hollywood’s egregious reputation for exploiting its youngest stars. Its relevance to the rest of the plot, however, remains one of the film’s many mysteries.