So Much Nope

After thoroughly enjoying Jordan Peele's two previous movies, Get Out and Us, I did not need to be sold on seeing his latest, Nope. I was so ready that I'd be a bit disappointed when a trailer for Nope would run before some other movie I was seeing, because I was perfectly happy making plans to go without knowing anything about the movie. Fortunately, the trailers kept things mostly vague: it was something involving a ranch far out in the country, and UFOs. Plus, that familiar Peele cocktail of horror scares, clever wit, and forceful message seemed once again assured.

I did enjoy Nope and would generally recommend it. But I also felt it wasn't as strong as effort as Jordan Peele's first two movies. That might say more about just how great those were than about this one... but of course, I'm here to talk about this one now. Nope is an incredibly clever and meticulously crafted movie, but I was more impressed by that craftsmanship than I was fully entertained by it.

Nope is Peele's most thematically dense movie to date. You could ask a dozen people what it's "about" and plausibly get 12 different answers. It's about exploitation, spectacle, animal rights, cultural erasure, filmmaking, obsession, hunger, and more. Ordinarily, a movie that diluted comes across as being about "nothing," but Peele has written a very Swiss watch-like script where one thought connects to the next, and the next, and the next. There's no concept, and barely a line of dialogue, that doesn't resonate somewhere later on in the story. In many ways, it feels like Peele was writing a sequel to Us, in terms of taking his experience on that previous film and using it to inform this one. A lot of the story moves in Nope are structured in the same way.

But at times, I found the movie to be so focused on theme that narrative and characters became subordinate. The final act of Nope is a bit long, and rife with characters acting in ways that didn't feel quite in sync for me with what had come before. It was easy to see exactly the themes resonating in the story's wrap-up, but not as easy to understand the deep fixations of the characters.

It also felt to me like star Daniel Kaluuya was being underused. His character is set up specifically as a quiet opposite of his fiery sister played by Keke Palmer. I understand why it's written the way it is. And yet the end result is still that the normally very dynamic Kaluuya is sedate, bordering on dull. Only by contrasting this with his other roles can you sense there's any performance here at all -- which is commendable in its own way, but in another way winds up once again feeling to me like Get Out is the stronger movie. Other stars do get showier material, at least; besides Keke Palmer (really, the true star of the movie), Steven Yeun is a curious blend of trauma and desperation (hidden behind a smile), and Brandon Perea brings fun comic relief.

I'd give Nope a B. That's certainly strong enough to recommend to anyone who likes suspenseful thrillers. But at the same time, I could imagine Nope not making my Top 10 list of 2022, assuming I see enough strong contenders in the coming months. For Get Out and Us, they were clearly at or near the very top of the lists I made for those years. On the other hand, if this is as "bad" as Jordan Peele gets, then he's still clearly among the strongest writer-directors working today. My enthusiasm for Nope may be a little muted, but my interest in whatever he makes next certainly isn't.