Nope, 2022.
Directed by Jordan Peele.
Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, and Brandon Perea.
SYNOPSIS:
Jordan Peele’s excellent horror film Nope, which contains many nods to the blockbusters of the 70s and 80s, arrives on Blu-ray with a solid line-up of bonus features and a code for a digital copy.
During the excellent 56-minute making-of titled Shadows: The Making of Nope, director Jordan Peele mentions Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind as two films that had an influence on him, which didn’t surprise me. While watching the film, it was clear to me that Peele, a fellow Gen Xer, was drawing from the well of 70s and 80s blockbusters, in particular those two movies, in creating Nope.
The film is basically a pastiche of those two aforementioned movies, featuring Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as Otis “OJ” Haywood, Jr. and Emerald “Em” Haywood, the son and daughter of the late Otis Haywood, owner of Haywood’s Hollywood Horses Ranch.
Otis spent decades providing trained horses to movie and TV productions, and with his passing his son takes over the business since his daughter is distracted by her desire to break into show business as a performer. OJ is quiet and reserved, though, unlike his sister, and that causes problems with people who were used to dealing with his outgoing father.
Meanwhile, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) is a former child actor who owns a nearby theme park called Jupiter’s Claim. As a kid, he was on a sitcom where a chimpanzee went berserk and killed many cast and crew members, and the trauma of that incident still hangs over him.
A nickel that somehow fell from the sky went into Otis’s head, which led to his death, and OJ soon discovers that a UFO is terrorizing the area where they live, sucking up people as food and spitting out everything it can’t digest. When Em finds out what’s happening, she hatches a plan to catch the UFO on film and become rich, which leads to a partnership with a renowned cinematographer. The Fry’s Electronics sales guy who rang up their video equipment ends up coming along for the ride.
While Steven Spielberg looked to the ocean as a source of terror, Peele turned his gaze to the sky, where his malevolent flying ship darts in and out of clouds before descending to wreak havoc. Did it just arrive on Earth? Much about the UFO remains shrouded in mystery, just like we don’t know why a great white shark chooses to terrorize a beachfront community and then head out to deep sea to do battle with three men. And that’s okay with me, because sometimes I don’t need to know anything the characters aren’t aware of.
Peele does a nice job of increasing the dread and terror the characters are experiencing. The only view we ever get of the insides of the UFO consists of shots of people going through something like an intestinal tract, which didn’t quite work for me because they looked like they were moving through fabric. (According to the making-of, that seems to be exactly what was used.)
That’s a minor quibble, though, for a film that is really a commentary on Hollywood spectacle (the cinematographer, for example, seeks not just footage of the UFO but the perfect shot of it) as well as the way the industry uses people and animals without always regarding how and why they’re being used.
That subject comes up multiple times in comments from Peele during Shadows: The Making of Nope, which also features other members of the cast and crew weighing in. It includes copious amounts of behind-the-scenes footage, including some emotional moments during the final day of shooting.
In addition to the film on DVD and a code for a digital copy, this edition of Nope has the following bonus features:
• Call Him Jean Jacket (14.5 minutes): The title of this featurette references the name OJ and Em come up with for the UFO, which is from a horse their father owned when they were kids. This extra gets into the ins and outs of how the UFO was conceived and ultimately came to life.
• Mystery Man of Muybridge (5.5 minutes): This is an intriguing featurette that looks at the origins of the first moving picture, which was a two-second clip of a black jockey on a horse. It figures in the story, with Em explaining that the jockey was her great-great-grandfather, although in reality, no one is really sure who was photographed in that moment. Much is known about the horse, of course, but the jockey’s identity has been lost, and that’s the subject at hand here. The subtext here involves how Hollywood has also treated minorities.
A gag reel and a batch of deleted scenes round out the platter.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
Originally published November 14, 2022. Updated December 10, 2022.
