SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains massive spoilers for NOPE. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
Jordan Peele is fucking amazing. There I said it. With a dozen of times he has released films, it never got out our minds that his thing with unsettling and eerie themes were indeed his freaking forte.
What is NOPE about anyway?
Peele has described ‘NOPE’ as a film that tells the great American UFO story. He deconstructs any ideas the media have presented us about aliens in the past. Nope is an original, atypical alien film that uses the mode of otherworldly forces to explore the idea of the spectacle and the good and the bad that come from this idea of attention.
ABOUT THE FILM
The action takes place in Agua Dulce, about a 40-mile drive north of Hollywood. There, siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) run Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, named for their great-great-great grandfather Alistair E. Haywood, who rode the horse in the first moving picture ever made. They train horses for movies.
But following the untimely death of their father Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David), killed in a freak accident in which debris rained down from the sky, they’re running into hard times. In any case, the Haywood ranch is just up the road from Jupiter’s Claim, and OJ’s been selling horses to owner Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) to keep the ranch afloat. Jupiter’s Claim is a goofy cartoonish amusement park lightly modeled on a fun-loving town from some old Western place.
But that’s in keeping with Agua Dulce, because there’s been a lot of weird stuff going on in the six months since Otis died. Electricity randomly browns out and audio slows down at nighttime, and the laws of physics occasionally behave strangely. And there’s something in the sky.
A FLYING SAUCER IN THE SCREEN?
Yes, this is a UFO movie!
But, since as the local electronics wiz and alien aficionado Angel (Brandon Perea) tells Emerald, the government switched to calling them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena after they “declassified all that alien shitload years ago. Flying saucers in the sky are often metaphors for invasion by unknown forces, or for paranoia that the government is keeping secrets from its people.
Nope might adopt the flying saucer cliché, but this beautifully shot spectacle from director Jordan Peele breathes new life into the sci-fi horror genre.
IS NOPE THE NEXT ALIEN AND UFO FILM OF 2022?
As the marketing for Jordan Peele’s ‘NOPE’ ramped up in the last few months, speculations ran fast regarding the mystery in this new film. It sold the idea of aliens, featuring clips of a round, and silver object flying around in the clouds, but there was still a doubt that audiences could actually trust what they were seeing, and there was suspicion that the idea of it being a spaceship just flopped.
The sci-fi/horror feature does include a new kind of extraterrestrial species. But don’t get it wrong. It turned out, it’s an object that’s really, really, hungry.
While we don’t get a full-on scientific explanation about the nature of the alien in Nope, we do find out quite a lot about it. We know that it’s a shapeshifter and it seems to take on its most compact form when it is between the hunts. It also seems to have some kind of ability to generate a cloud that it uses for camouflage in the sky. It’s a carnivore that doesn’t seem too picky about the kind of meat that it eats, be it a horse or human.
