Nope

Nope is an intricate and baroque horror movie about an aerial predator that devours human beings and, then, excretes their indigestible parts.  Beginning with a nasty epigraph from the biblical Book of Nahum, the film involves "filth" falling from the sky -- mercifully, most of this filth is in the form of metals:  that is belt-buckles and other hardware including loose change in the pockets of the victims of the flying whatzit.  Directed by Jordan Peele, the movie is visually impressive, although, perhaps, it relies upon too many peculiar locations and artifacts:  key elements in the movie involve a wretched little tourist attraction that simulates a western town, a wishing well that is, in fact, a giant camera that takes photographs through the aperture of its shaft, Muybridge's studies in animal locomotion, a hand-cranked camera, and an army of inflatable figures in various colors that flare up on the desert and flail away at the sky.  A giant balloon showing a chubby globular cowboy with a six-gun is also recruited into the movie's final confrontation with the monster and there is a sub-plot involving a chimpanzee slaughtering and mutilating actors on the set of a popular TV show.  All of this highly ingenious and cleverly done, but the movie feels a bit desperate as if the writer and director, Jordan Peele, is assembling random oddities in the hope that they somehow accumulate into a coherent motion picture.  And, for the most part, Peele succeeds and, if nothing else, Nope is entertaining, well-paced, and quite scary.

Jordan Peele was a successful comedian before he began making (and producing as well) horror films.  Nope is the third movie that he has directed and appears to be a very lavish, high-budget production.  Peele's two earlier pictures, Get Out and Us were designed to be both frightening and, also, astute socio-political documents, critiques of the White power structure in the United States.  These themes are most directly advanced in Get Out, but, also, notable in Us, a film that posits a subterranean caste of workers underlying our reality. only occasionally intersecting in disastrous ways with our reality.  Nope is largely free of tendentious political commentary and doesn't seem to be directly about racial or economic politics in the United States.  To be sure, there are some elements of the film that imply a criticism of the representation of race in American media, but these themes are more or less incidental to the narrative.  Nope is very challenging with respect to its narrative structure.  In some respects, the film seems to be like a horror movie made by Jean-Luc Godard -- at key points, the movie simply stops the action, interposing a black screen to signify a hiatus or lacuna in the narrative; indeed, some scenes simply end in mid-sentence, having set up some kind of confrontation or revelation  but, then, cutting away from the pay-off or resolution of the sequence.  On its face, the movie has a peculiar structure -- it's divided into chapters that are given the name of a major character in each section.  At first, the chapters really don't seem to cohere and part of the pleasure in watching Nope is assembling the parts into a sort of whole.  The chief riddle that the movie poses is the relationship of the main action (involving the flying whatzit) with a subordinate plot that involves flashbacks to a soundstage where a chimpanzee has run amuck, ripping off a woman's face and killing a number of other actors and crew (while an applause sign signals futilely to the studio audience that has fled the scene).  There is a relationship between the subplot involving the homicidal chimp and the aerial predator but the connection is rather abstract and the two narratives, about very different things, don't really comment on one another.  This disconnect between the main and sub-plot is intentional, but it raises questions about Poole's intentions here -- interesting questions to be sure and ones that I'm not sure the movie really answers.  Critics who have tried to assimilate Nope to the more obvious political and racial satire in the director's earlier two films go badly wrong, in my view, in imposing an allegory or symbolism on this movie -- the picture exists to deliver certain thrills (for instance a Black man on a horse challenging the aerial monster while surging orchestral music plays) that don't represent anything outside of the movie or its narrative universe.  This picture is, in effect, a "creature-feature" of a particularly classic form -- images of the monster are withheld and, for the first hour, the identity and nature of the creature is disguised, hidden so thoroughly (although sometimes in plain sight) that a viewer might be advised to watch the movie, at least, twice in order to figure out what is going on.  People sometimes gesture to the sky and shout warnings, but we can't exactly see what is frightening them.  In a couple of scenes, the monster seems to come  to earth, but these sequences are red herrings, misdirections pointing away from the creature.  When the monster is finally revealed, the picture becomes lyrical and soars -- the creature is strangely  diaphanous in one of its avatars, a system of abstract of fields of translucent force that pulses geometrically over the barren grasslands and California foothills.  In an abstract way, the plot could be characterized as a story about a group of people struggling to obtain a clear picture of an anomaly, an extra-terrestrial being or a terrestrial cryptid of a particularly strange and beautiful form.  Once, the monster is visualized this seems to be adequate to the movie's intentions and, so, the film ends.  The notion of seeing the monster and recognizing it turns out to be integral to the movie -- the monster attacks the eyes:  if you look at it, the creature swoops down, sucks you into its gullet (shown as a sort oscillating womb) and, then, spits out your eyeglasses or shoes or the nickels and quarters in your pocket.  Seeing here is equated with being the victim of predation.  If you dare to look at the creature, Medusa-like, it will destroy you.  Hence, the audience is privileged to see what the characters must turn away from -- if the flying monster knows you are looking at it, the creature will devour you.  This motif turns out to be integral to the film:  the chimpanzee attacked the sit-com actors because it was tired of being the subject of the gaze of humans, a gaze mechanically established, as well, by the cameras used to photograph the sit-com featuring the primate.  (Hence, the central role of cameras and moving pictures, including the Muybridge studies of galloping horses, to the film.)  In an early scene, a horse is spooked into violence by people looking at it on a movie set.  So the concept articulated in the picture is that seeing is dangerous, but, also, profitable -- a movie is made to be seen and produce income for its participants; similarly, the characters in the film hope to become rich and famous by selling pictures of the monster to Oprah Winfrey.  

Peele's movie is exquisitely shot and the climax is staged brilliantly.  Much of the film is quite funny in a very dark,  high concept sort of way.  The score is orchestral, sounds like Aaron Copland, and through-composed, a continuous threnody sometimes accelerating into exciting movie music that imitates the scores to classical Westerns like The Big Country or The Magnificent Seven.  (In some ways, the continuous elaborate score underlying the action reminds me of the way that Spike Lee uses music in his pictures, an undercurrent of melody that doesn't necessarily comment on or underscore the action but that moves in way that is parallel to it.)  The title Nope is a joke -- whenever someone in this movie is confronted with a horror to awful to imagine, the character simply rejects the situation and says "Nope!" signifying that something to the effect of:  I see it but I don't believe it and I'm certainly not going to engage with what I see.

Great horror films are also beautiful -- they show us an unseen and malevolent world that is organized according to principles of esthetics that we can recognize but not fully understand.  Peele's picture aspires to this horror-movie pinnacle and mostly succeeds.  Parts of the movie feel too arbitrary and there's, paradoxically,, too much content in the film, but it mostly hangs together in a (mostly) satisfying way.