Nope

Jordan Peele really doesn't flinch from a stoush. His first film, Get Out, took an excoriating swipe at racism and white privilege in the US. His second film, Us, delved into class divides and human rights. His latest film, Nope, takes aim at man's subjugation of nature, primarily for profit. The marketing of this film suggests a creepy, sci-fi alien invasion film, and while this is all accurate, there's more going on here too. Daniel Kaluuya, returning for a second Peele film (after Get Out), plays OJ Haywood, a trainer of horses that appear in films or TV. His father, Otis senior (Keith David), is killed early doors in a freak accident....or is it? Well, no obviously, it isn't, but life moves on for 6 months before more manure flies.

OJ is joined by his sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer), as the Haywood Hollywood Horses business, bereft of the old man's guidance and experience perhaps, begins to flounder. OJ has been selling some of the horses to Steven Yuen's Ricky 'Jupe' Park, who runs a cheesy theme park on neighbouring land. It's around this time that the first 'encounter' takes place. Building tension is Peele's forte and he's pretty cheeky here. Each turn of the screw brings a dip of relief at its mini-resolution - a bit of fakery here, a magnified insect there until, at one point, you might wonder if the film will continue this way to the end, with no meat on the tricksy bones at all. More fool you. There's plenty of meat, literally and metaphorically.

Aside from the cautionary memo of messing with wild things, the film has a lovely little sideline in voyeurism. There are a fair few moments where looking is NOT advised, be it to the sky (beware of falling items), in the eyes of performing horses, on surveillance video screens, and especially at....well, you'll see. A cinematographer character, Antlers Holst (gravelly-voiced, Michael Wincott) is even portrayed in his office rolling through rushes of wild animals attacking each other, like a morbid anti-Attenborough. 

Somewhat related to this is Ricky's incredibly macabre sub-plot backstory, where, as a child actor, he witnessed a performing chimp rampage and was perhaps seconds away from a severe mauling. This sequence, which is drip-fed to us (and begins the film) is reminiscent of something Tarantino would cook up to stir the audience, to shock but also to add value in a thematic sense. Top deviating. Incidentally, there's a piece of prosaic iconography here that I can't fathom - we see a victim's shoe, blood-spattered BUT standing on its end, toes up, defying gravity. This shot reappears a number of times, so there's some significance there, I'm just not getting it. Answers on the back of a postcard, please.

After a second act finale of pulse-raising energy and blood-soaked windows, the final furlong of Nope plays out like a dusty, landed Jaws, with driven characters planning the trap (including a great, sappy Richard Dreyfus role from Brandon Perea as Angel Torres); loopy Quint-a-like, Holst, going rogue to get the shot with the dusk light; even a huge rubber mascot standing in for a scuba tank. But the analogy isn't water-tight, as the ultimate motive of the gang switches throughout from monetary gain, to fame-seeking, to revenge, even to planetary altruism (briefly), whereas in Jaws, they just had to kill that mutha of a shark. I suppose both can be seen as territorialism, though I can't see this film maligning aliens for decades as Jaws did for sharks. I might be wrong.

Any minor reservations I carry about story motivations don't dent this enough for me, though. It's superbly structured, tightly edited, beautifully shot (by Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax cameras for more scope) and, of course, expertly pulled together by writer/producer/director Peele. A word on the cast too - Palmer kicked arse, Yuen balanced his role well (is he a product of his upbringing or a cynical opportunist?) and Kaluuya brings a special kind of naturalistic despondency to his pivotal role. He's excellent, as always.

Nope is social commentary masquerading as blackly comic, horror/sci-fi and, look, you can't say that about too many films. A fine hat-trick from Peele.

See also:

Obvious parallels with Spielberg's CV but Jaws (1975) is mimicked most closely here. I'd chuck in Francis Ford Coppola's, Apocalypse Now (1979) for one character in particular.

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