Nope?

Yep

definitely!

Hooray for Jordan Peele; an ingenious film maker who takes cinematic conventions and plays with them in referential and yet innovative ways, but also always has that extra dimension to his films demanding a deeper analysis into the meaning of what you are seeing on screen.

I say always but this is actually only Peele’s third movie, and this also probably trails behind the other two a little. Before you think I have anything bad to say about this film though consider that in only five years this guy has set himself apart as one of contemporary American cinema’s most exciting directors and Peele’s third best movie is still leagues ahead of most of what everyone else it putting out.

This one feels like is Peele’s take on the Summer Blockbuster; compared to Get Out and Us it certainly has more budget and greater visual ambition, but like Christopher Nolan before him he has taken this approach and created a beautiful mix of content that feeds both the eyes and the mind.

The metaphor is worn more lightly on this one than in his previous films but there is still a lot to get into. It is possible to take what happens in the story at face value this time, but only in the same way it is possible to drink coffee then spit it out again – you’ll have tasted it but you’ll still be asleep.

On the surface Nope is about a two siblings, whose Californian horse ranch becomes the place of a UFO sighting, but it is also concerned with humanity’s relationship with the natural world and how our obsession with spectacle and our belief that the planet is there for our entertainment, along with a desire to capitalise on this, is self destructive. There is something about notions of looking and being looked at, and comment on Black people’s anonymity in history as well as observations on mainstream comedy’s habit of trivialising real world events. (Saturday Night Live is the target with this last one but this is particularly interesting when you consider where Jordan Peele has come from and if you’ve seen Key and Peele’s sketch on gun control and the second amendment.)

When it was clear in the second trailer that Peele was doing something around aliens I thought this was a bit too generic for him. As it is though he has managed to do something new with this well established idea while still echoing what has come before. Case in point, it is Jaws more than Close Encounters of the Third Kind that comes more to mind while you are watching it, which is not what you’d anticipate – referential but not in the way you’d expect.

To say too much more at this stage would risk spoilers but Nope is another fascinating film from this still relatively new director. Daniel Kaluuya, returning from Get Out, is typically strong and he is well supported by Keke Palmer who has a totally different energy yet works against him superbly. There are nice performances from Michael Wincott and Keith David too, who have both already faced movie extra terrestrials in the past.

There is more to it but if you want to know whether you should see it for yourself then you had my answer at the start. I will just say that I bought a Hands Across America t-shirt like the one young Adelaide wore in Us after seeing that film but I’m not sure I want a Gordy’s Home sitcom shirt which might be the equivalent here. Maybe I’ll get a Scorpion King hoodie instead.

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The Ripley Factor:

There are not many women in the film and one of them is in the wife role with two others being stereotypical horror victims, albeit in a very untypical way. There aren’t actually that many characters in the film at all though and Keke Palmer’s Emerald is driven, confident and cool. She may be brave or that could just be ill-considered impetuousness but she certainly drives the plot and she compensates well for her brother’s inadequacies. In fact the two of them make a good unit and neither could function without the other. As such they present an effective picture of equality. Peele’s other two movies had a male and a female protagonist respectively and even though Kaluuya is probably the lead here the director still doesn’t need to have a woman as his main character next time to address any imbalance. This one swings back and forth.

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