NOPE is the third feature length film from writer and director, Jordan Peele. In 2017, Jordan Peele burst through the walls of Hollywood with Get Out, and he immediately grew beyond “the sketch comedy guy”. In 2019 he returned with Us. A freakishly ambitious blank check that allowed him the opportunity to flex his vision as a film-maker. Vivid ambition. Technical craft. Some of the best performances of the year. Conceptually creative. All terms that have been attributed to one of the most impressive visionaries of our time. No matter the limitations, Peele gets the most out of what he can. He escalates his stories to the most thematically appropriate conclusions. He is the type of director Hollywood and spectacle films have been salivating for. His work revels in a passion for the past and the inspirations that forged him, but he allows that to get the best of him in NOPE.
A movie ripe with moments that exist as scraps within a structurally bizarre and narratively sluggish spectacle.
Peele invites us into his story with a slow push into Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion”. The first motion picture ever made. The camera clicks and whirs as it projects onto our screen, and Peele’s thesis is founded. With every bit of history dating back to the late 1800s, it can be tied to the history of film and its developments. What a camera was able to capture. Who it can capture. What story it can tell through images in sequence. There is a romantic interest by Peele in this single moment, and how it elects to develop that is impressive. So few directors born out of this era of film history actively understand what it means to be inspired. It isn’t a reflection, a recollection, reintroduction, or repeat of the past. It is an emotional development to be projected on screen that is tweaked so it can adhere to a specific perspective. Peele does this really well. The comparison to Signs is relatively apt, but it has more in common with Jaws than anything else. The first Summer spectacle in film history.
Peele ponders the Summer spectacle and the collective fawning over the impossible. We mosey up the money we earn and elect to spend it on trying to be wowed each Summer. What will this event give me that nothing else has? As Peele visualizes this, we are sucked into the spectacle and we scream like we’re on the ride of a lifetime. We zip and zoom around, but that quickly becomes suffocating, and we’re spit back onto the Earth. The last emotion we would feel is a thrill unlike anything we’ve ever felt, and then we are nothing. Nothing but the pawns in assisting with the commodification of spectacle. The slushie machines and costumes. The branded T-shirts. The admission fees and the wait lines. All of it is a part of the annual process in the middle of the year that we partake in because we’ve been coded to. We seek thrill until it kills us.
This is fine, and rather pointed and ambitious, but that is where it ends up being all that it is. The pace struggles to reinforce the suspense because Peele spends a lot of time caught up in “establishing” the film. So many scenes run together because it is constantly setting up the finale. There is so much set-up, that it doesn’t really give room to its lead performers to embody their characters. They have noted personalities, but there isn’t enough about them to make you wonder why this journey can’t bring them the catharsis the story should. Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya are terrific, and I hope they reappear in more Peele films, but they weren’t given enough. Steven Yeun is given the thematic workload, but it is written into the story at the most bizarre times. Often disrupting the flow of the story. NOPE really struggles with keeping true to its suspenseful pitch, and you can feel that in the length.
Jordan Peele has grown so far beyond Key and Peele, it is remarkable. On a personal level, I’d put him in the same breath as someone like Bo Burnham. In the sense that I (as many others) have watched their careers develop from the very beginning. From YouTube, to the silver screen, Peele has earned his place in being amongst some of the most exciting directors working today. He is an old fashioned storyteller, and a true image maker. There is a reverence for the imprints of film history and how one can deepen that bond to the medium. Although, three films in he can’t seem to shake the sketch structure. NOPE being the most relevant and egregious example. There is a story, but it is mostly compiled of moments that are supposed to elicit such a specific emotion in a finite space. A classroom. A broadcast booth. A president saying hello to fellow politicians. NOPE reminds me a lot of that. Especially in its conclusion.
Peele is so attached to making sure that spectacle is the antagonist to this story, that it feels like that is the only emotion that really matters. To be wowed by the film-making process and how cool it is to be able to sequence images together to elicit an emotion. Hand cranked cameras get some screen time, and now the messaging couldn’t be more clear. In an alarmingly digital age of film-making and distribution; what happened to the creative process? No silly CGI tricks, The Volume, or blue screens. Getting a couple talented people together and manipulating a subject to be captured on location is what films used to go out of its way to accomplish. Then the spectacle took over and shaped itself to swallow its crew whole. Peele is playful in how he is able to convey his frustration with the recency of the Summer spectacle as a means to tell his own story. In most other filmmakers’ hands this would be an unmitigated disaster. In Peele’s, it is just alright.
NOPE is the type of creative concept we come to expect from Jordan Peele. Unfortunately, he can’t maintain a suspenseful pace to service the build towards the money shot. Its awareness of the current platitudes of spectacle (and maybe film-making in general) is ambitious as hell and worth noting. It means a lot to see that there is someone out there with a name as big and fresh as his dismantling recency bias. If NOPE didn’t show you any of that, then you should check out one of his recent tweets. He is talented and so close to making a film that nails everything he intends to. He gets great performances out of his actors. He has a genuine, old fashioned sense of craftsmanship. He loves his inspirations but not to a harmful degree that so many others are falling prey to. The pieces are here, but whenever he makes a film, it feels like one of the most important pieces is missing or mismanaged in the script. The characters, story, and structure being the biggest disappointment in a decent time at the movies.