Jordan Peele’s name has been consolidated in contemporary fantastic cinema thanks to his insistence on making a career without going too far out of a series of coordinates that he drew in his groundbreaking debut, ‘Let Me Out’ (Get Out, 2017), with which won the Oscar for best screenplay, in such a way that his next work, ‘Nosotros’ (Us, 2019) consecrated a style in which each film is perceived as a great episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’, and with ‘Nope!’ (2022) the same thing happens.
There is a very remarkable consistency in the tone of his films, in which the unthinkable becomes real and the fantastic is quickly integrated as part of the plot, whatever appears to break the daily barrier of its protagonists exists, without further explanation. no excuses. That’s why it’s hard to face ‘Nope!’ as a job that is very different from others in his films, because on the one hand it is, but on the other is fully consistent with his way of understanding horror movieswith a new addition of Spielberg influence.
Jordan Peele’s Uninspired Movie
However, it is convenient to be forewarned and assimilate that this new installment of his own ‘Twilight Zone’ is not up to his first two efforts, and not precisely because he has become a worse director. In his new work, Peele shows that he was not only able to deal with low-budget films, but that now displays a colorful use of widescreen with a classic flavora photography with body that is missing in other current directors and, again, a great eye to generate tension with spaces and geography.
But as he grows as a filmmaker, his history of alien sightings and horse ranching for show seems to need a few laps to condense the amount of satellite ideas circulating around him. ‘Nope!’ works great when you want to be a horror adventure in the tradition of ‘Jaws’ or ‘Tremors’substituting the concept of the sea or the land with the sky, however, that desired film that is outlined in its two hours only takes shape in its third act, and the path to reach it has ramifications that turn a couple of of ideas.
During the first hour there is an introduction of characters, very personal humor and an unusual recurring visit to a sinister incident in a children’s series of the 90s with a chimpanzee named Gordy. That segment, which could be straight out of a George A. Romero movie, may be the best thing about the film, but the script chooses to connect it to the plot in a way that requires an abstraction of its themes of exploitation in show business and responsibility that tries to take all the reflection to a very theoretical metaphorical level And it works extremely cumbersome.
Attention Addiction and Aliens?
The protagonists are worried about recording everything strange that happens on their ranch because they believe that it is the way to solve their problems, another character played by Steven Yeun makes a living with his animal shows and another played by Michael Wincott is a documentary filmmaker who seeks to immortalize the definitive image. They all relate to the threat of ‘Nope!’ in an indirect way that we will not reveal to keep all the surprises, but when it is revealed it is something arbitrary, coming out of nowhere and that it never quite closes all the dilemmas it raises.
This does not mean that the approaches are not interesting and even after watching the film they give rise to an interesting debate, but when everything is clear, the connective tissue between monkey actors, the first frame of the cinema with a black horseman, the decline of the business of spectacle and “bad miracles”—the key to the upright slipper is less complex than it pretends when its meaning is understood—is flaccid, does not reach any conclusion or tie together brilliantlywith what ends up being more of a nuisance for the summer show that it promises.
Why not p!’ it could be a great horror movie, with moments that are not within the reach of any director, like that static cloud or the very delicate design of the sound and its movement across the screen, which leaves some moments of pure fear when we hear a certain tremor move through the sky. It also makes good use of panning the camera to take the viewer’s eyes where it wants and convey a constant sense of unease that, however, is reserved for specific moments in a two and a quarter hour footage.
Many scattered ideas and a fragile cement
After two prologue scenes, the second also very sinister, the feeling of mystery helps the viewer to cope an hour of introduction in which nothing starts and where the dilemmas of some unpleasant characters (or especially burdensome, like Keke Palmer’s) don’t catch on at all, and the action or the moments of terror end up being hard to come by, when the most interesting portion of the film arrives, the viewer he may be off-guard and it doesn’t help that his secrets are far less satisfying or interesting than they promise.
Many enigmatic images of the trailer are revealed in a series of small solved mysteries that are less stimulating than the ‘Nope!’ has made them seem, so that when we finally know the key to everything, it was to a certain extent predictable, even somewhat trite in that it seems like the umpteenth revision of films like ‘Blind’, with the irritating addition that there is even a whole sequence that tries to deceive to the already skeptical viewer, which in reviews will be doubly tedious. To make matters worse, the design and finish of the big reveal is especially ugly, which creates an at best eccentric icing on the set of disappointments that are piling up.
You can’t blame Peele for trying to be original and always finding ways to use horror and fantasy cinema to tell a lot of other things and, above all, to do it his way, but the feeling that ‘Nope!’ is from a work he wants to chew more than his mouth leaves him, without a doubt the worst of his filmography, despite the fact that he always leaves details of creativity that are sorely lacking in today’s cinema. It is a pity that all his set of scattered ideas does not come together in a whole greater than the sum of its parts, we hope that it is just a misstep and does not follow the path of authors dazzled by their reflection who were followed by greats like Shyamalan.