Thoughts on Nope

 I really love aliens. Growing up in Las Vegas you sort of feel like you're in the shadow of UFOs all the time. 45 minutes out of town and you can get the world’s famous alien jerky, or look up and see the flight that heads to Area 51 every week. Hell, I had a family friend that worked in Area 51. 

I’m also deeply terrified of Aliens.

I love having a filmmaker like Jordan Peele working right now. He seems so dedicated to making movies for theaters which sounds dumb but I don’t always feel that way walking out of a movie. Nope was shot on Imax cameras and it absolutely feels made to be seen in an Imax theater. The camera moves with gravitas and he and DP Hoyte van Hoytema really know how the camera moves and looks on these huge massive screens. 

What impresses me the most with Peele is not his expertise behind the camera and working with actors, which is noteworthy don’t get me wrong, but instead his writing ability. I imagine in a year or two we’ll be teaching Get Out the same way we’re teaching Chinatown or Back to the Future, and while I really like his sophomore feature Us it definitely feels like a director’s movie rather than the writer's movie that is Get Out. 

I think Nope is a little more subtle than the other two in his writing. It’s very reflective of the last three years which all art probably is. 

Most of the movie is about trying to control the outside world to just make it survivable. Early in the movie OJ, played so wonderfully internally by Daniel Kaluuya, has to sell his second best horse and it isn’t because he’s trying to get out of the business or anything like that he simply just needs another week or two to think about what to do next. 

That’s a feeling that most of us can unfortunately relate to. 

I feel like Peele’s prose has gotten so much better in this movie too. I love the line “You can’t control a predator just make a deal with one.” It’s very evocative and is very Cormac adjacent. The DoP character feels like a great way for some of his more poetic writing to come out and not feel jarring in any way. All of this great writing would fall short if it wasn’t for the really amazing work from Daniel Kalyuuya and Keke Palmer.

Kalyuuya plays it really close to the chest and is always pretending to be a guy that is one step ahead, but is anything but. Keke Palmer really steals the show for me here. The way she keeps the quiet things quiet makes her absolutely magnetic on screen and the final push in of the movie is perfection. She’s realizing that the dream she had of climbing that mountain is the one she’ll never wake up from. Sometimes movies really are just the best. 

Anyway, please go watch this on the biggest screen you can find and then go see it again. Thanks for reading.