NOPE

Just got out of Jordan Peele's NOPE and am jotting down this quick review. Before I get to any spoilers, let me say: yes it's good and you should watch it. You should especially watch it in the theaters because it is full of beautiful, eerie shots that deserve your total immersion. My one regret (in all of life) is that I did not watch it on IMAX. See an IMAX version of this if you possibly can.

Since the plot of the movie is so swaddled in mystery, basically any further discussion of it is spoilers (beyond, there's obviously UFO imagery.) So, caveat emptor for reading beyond this line:

Honestly, this movie does not seem as racially driven as Peele's other movies. Yes the two main characters are driven by the desire to get recognition for black contributions to film, and the title is vaguely AAVE. But compared to the plot of Get Out?

If anything, *autism* seems more focused in this film, in OJ's social difficulties (compared to his sister who gives a great speech but is inattentive to the actual job of protecting animals), inability to look people in the eye, and how that relates to him understanding and dealing with the monster. The twist of the movie, after all, is to stop humanizing aliens and instead animalize them. But even then I wouldn't say the movie is "about" autism.

It's about a lot of things - part of the reason this review is so scattershot is that it's hard to put together a single throughline for the movie so far. Race, autism, the treatment of animals, practicality vs dreams (the title "Nope" can be read as the cliche Black reaction to horror to be "get the hell out of there unlike those head in the clouds white people") and film itself.

Any sufficiently prolific director eventually films their "love letter to cinema" and this is Peele's. It takes a swipe at comic book movies (with the CGI set and horse that is the result of a predicted sequel), the required old camera techniques, the auteur cinematographer, and of course Emerald's speech about the first recorded actor/stuntman/animal wrangler. The entire goal of the movie is to film one perfect shot. And ways we see the alien are reminiscent of camera, movie theaters, and green screens.

There's a very soft class element to the movie. We are supposed to see the Haywood's as underdogs, trying to get their "moment" before it's swallowed by a mass corporate culture that doesn't even leave them royalties. Though the Haywoods are more like downwardly mobile aristocracy (inheriting the farm, someone even calls them royalty) rubbing up against tacky upwardly mobile new money (the child star who used his fame to start an amusement park of middling success.) This doesn't make them morally wrong in any sense, it just makes a complicated narrative.

And I have to say, everything involving Ricky 'Jupe' Park was the most entertaining part of the movie. His inability to describe a harrowing trauma of seeing a monkey kill his colleagues as a child and so instead describing an SNL sketch is solid gold. His incredibly pathetic rodeo that is his idea to introduce alien life to the public is also hilarious to watch. He has such warm, out-of-his-depth harmless charm. I also loved all the small touches - For All Mankind's Wrenn Schmidt as his PA, or a an actress that got mauled by the monkey attending the rodeo under a pink veil. All these things are unconnected to the "plot" of the movie, but deeply connected with the theme of how we relate to animals.

In fact, the horrific climax of the night after the rodeo is so strong, that the pacing of the movie falls very flat after that. It's hard to focus on the daytime sequence of conning the alien into getting a picture now that they know what they are doing, after how intense the storm the night before was. (This picks up by the time the alien unfurls into its more billowly form.)

... though if every horror movie needs it's ad-hoc system for detecting the presence of the unimaginable (like Jurassic Park's water ripples), then you really can't beat the field of the car-salesman windtubes. That was a comedic yet effective choice for hinting at its presence.

The sound design is top class, possibly the best of any movie in memory. I loved the tiny after-echoes of dialogue we got in certain eerie scenes. But also the eerie, sweeping vistas of the West, and how much horror relies on sound to build tension. It's no surprise that the sound designer did another one of my favorite movies, Under the Skin. https://www.slashfilm.com/588264/movies-about-aliens-that-you-definitely-need-to-watch/

I could talk about the futuristic TMZ cameraman or the auteur who chooses to get consumed by an alien for one perfect shot, or the completely up to the minute social references without being laborious. The movie is just a melange of really good stuff that sift and settle into what it means slowly after the fact.