Mark Reviews Movies: NOPE

Nope, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 22, 2022

At its best, writer/director Jordan Peele's third movie resides in and contemplates a world of urban legends, as well-known as UFOs and as semi-fictionalized as what happened on the set of a sitcom in which a chimpanzee was one of the stars. The UFOs don't need an explanation, even though Peele does invent a fairly unique take on what those mysterious saucers in the sky could actually be, but the story of the chimpanzee might be the most tantalizing, haunting, and promising aspect of the filmmaker's meandering, ultimately disappointing Nope.

That storyline, which revolves around a now-adult former child actor, cuts to the core of what seems to be the vague connective tissue of this tall tale. It is about myths and legends, like UFOs and the gossipy, sometimes gruesome history of Hollywood. Peele, though, is also interested in how easily we try to find meaning and even entertainment in the inexplicable and the tragic. For OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), the most recent son of a long line of horse wranglers getting work in film and television, the unexplained tragedy in need of some meaning is the seemingly random death of his father (played by Keith David, in a glorified cameo).

He's riding a horse one sunny day when something like hail starts pummeling the earth. Something strikes OJ's old man and kills him. The weird thing is that it's not hail or anything natural falling from the sky. OJ finds a key embedded into the flesh of the horse his dad was riding.

That's one mystery in Peele's screenplay, which eventually has OJ and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) seeing something like a flying saucer in the skies above the ranch, buying a bunch of camera equipment to capture evidence of whatever the thing is, and planning to turn their hunt for the truth into a television or web show. While it's not overtly spoken, OJ and Emerald clearly want answers to the random death of their father, but it's a pleasant bonus that the investigation just happens to be the perfect fodder for a piece of popular, reality-based entertainment. That's the business these two are in and have always known.

The do-it-yourself production enlists the aid of local electronic store clerk Angel (Brandon Perea), who's just curious about extraterrestrials and bored enough to volunteer himself to keep tabs on the monitors from his counter at work. They also try to hire renowned cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott, who puts some of his trademarked and often overlooked bite into a throwaway role) to get that fabled "impossible shot."

All of this is fine, if a bit too routine by the time the plot becomes exclusively about the ragtag team's efforts to get the UFO on physical film and some digital memory cards. There's at least some shape to the narrative once Peele dismisses—in antithetically spectacular and anticlimactic fashion—the extraneous stuff. The shame of it is that the seemingly extraneous material is what gives this story an air of real mystery and a genuine taste of some kind of myth-making.

The most transparently expendable but fascinating of those other story elements is in the character and past of Ricky Park (Steven Yeun), one of the main business rivals of the siblings' ranch. His former career as a child actor consisted of two TV shows: a Western and a short-lived sitcom that has since entered the realm of Hollywood infamy. Ricky puts on a happy face and shows the siblings his secret room of memorabilia from the 20-years-past sitcom, which ended in a scene of grisly violence but has since become the foundation of rumor and a sketch-comedy bit that Ricky can perfectly recall.

In reality, though, he's traumatized by the truth of what happened and what he witnessed as a kid, hiding under a table while the chimpanzee, startled by the popping of an innocuous prop, became feral. This, just as with another scene in which one of OJ's horse is briefly startled on set, does fit in to the bigger scheme Peele has concocted, but on its own, a flashback to Ricky's memory of the ape pummeling, biting, and ripping his co-stars, obscured by set pieces and followed with simple camera turns, is a horrific moment of reality shattering the urban legends, the jokes, and Ricky's own defensively blasé attitude toward the horror he experienced.

Peele does excel at other scenes of terror and suspense, as the UFO emerges, creates vacuum-like vortexes, chases some of our characters, and reveals its true nature, in a scene inside the increasingly claustrophobic interior of the thing—as a collection of ongoing screams is silenced by a sickening squish. The technique here, as Peele's camera (with the aid of cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema) tracks the object's movement behind clouds and gets in close as OJ evades it, is impressive. A lot of what surrounds it—from the wandering narrative to the self-aware quality of the performances—gets in the way of the movie's efforts as an exercise in tension and horror, though.

The routine of the third act is, perhaps, what finally undoes Nope. The movie has bigger ambitions about pain, trauma, and humans interfering with nature, but by the end, it's little more than a monster movie that dismisses its best ideas and doesn't take the remaining ones seriously enough.

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