![]() Working with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Peele alternates between gorgeous Western landscapes and images (and sounds - dear lord, the sounds) of abject terror that viewers will not easily forget.Īt the same time, Nope is never too gory or gruesome, or bloody for the sake of shocking the audience. But these days, when so much of what makes its way to theaters are sequels, remakes, and big and ugly action movies, he does seem to be operating on a different level than almost all of his peers. Certainly he’s not the first person to make horror movies that are as lovely as they are chilling - or to use horror and science-fiction stories as allegories for real-world issues. In another era, Peele’s work might not feel quite so special. Yeun brings a haunted, tragic quality to his character, even as he delivers one of the movie’s funniest speeches about a mythic Saturday Night Live sketch from the 1990s that poked fun at an incident from Jupe’s past. He spends significant time with OJ and Emerald, and introduces several other key supporting characters like Jupe, who has a sad backstory as a child actor that doesn’t necessarily weigh heavily on the plot in the present, but does inform the message that Nope is trying to get at involving the movie business’ exploitation of everyone from actors to animals. Peele also has the confidence to let his tale unfold gradually. I will say that while I have to assume Peele’s eventual explanation for what’s going on with that unidentified flying object has been used previously by someone in the long history of science-fiction stories, I’d never seen it before - and it’s really clever. That’s about all the plot that’s covered in Nope’s trailers, so I’ll leave the rest of Peele’s surprises, including the precise nature of that UFO, for you to discover yourself. ![]() At that point, OJ and Emerald do what any couple of young, broke people would do: They go to a big electronics store, load up on security cameras, and try to get concrete proof of aliens that they can then sell for a fortune. Then things get really bad when a UFO appears in the skies above Agua Dulce. Nope is also packed with outstanding suspense sequences and brimming with subtext about moviemaking, animal rights, and our culture’s collective hunger for fame.īut the Haywood ranch is now in rough shape, and OJ has taken to selling some of the horses to their neighbor Jupe ( Steven Yeun) and his little Western theme park just to make ends meet. That won’t be a problem here once the science-fiction story gets cooking, practically every new scene reveals an image of beauty or nightmarish terror - or both. Only someone with supreme confidence in his work would name his movie Nope. If he stumbled, he’d hand every critic the headline of their negative reviews. ![]() There are long stretches of his new movie Nope where you feel like you are in the hands of a virtuoso one who knows exactly what to show and what not to show, when to cut and when not to cut, and when to shock the audience with a deft plot twist. ![]() Here is a director with stuff to say and images he wants to put out into the world - along with the talent and eye to bring them to life. The thing that comes through loudest and clearest in Jordan Peele’s work is confidence.
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