Nope

Writer/director Jordan Peele's third horror-type film (released earlier this year) is called NOPE.  After the initial trailers, which suggested some sort of alien invasion tale, folks surmised that the title was an acronym that stood for Not Of Planet Earth.   This is not correct.  Why this film has such an unassuming title is one of the least impressive things about it.  It's puzzling for a film that invites viewers to fire up their frontal lobes and peel back the layers.  One that has certainly resulted in post viewing analysis leading to heated debate.  More than any recent film I've seen, in fact.  Kudos to Peele for created something so intriguing and enigmatic.  While I would not call NOPE an unequivocal success, I'm always more down for an ambitious failure than a vanilla crowd pleaser.  

And I can see many viewers exiting in frustration, baffled by a film that seems to contradict itself thematically.  Peele's screenplay feels unfinished, maybe a second or third draft.  I read that the project was born out of the dark days of the COVID pandemic, where the future loomed dark and uncertain.  Great art is rarely created in comfortable places, but flawed would-be epics may be a dime a dozen when the creator is desperate to exorcise his or her demons.

Otis/"OJ" (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Em (Keke Palmer) train horses for hire for film and TV, a legacy of their father who one strange day was killed by a quarter that dropped out of the sky.  Their selling point is a claim that one of their ancestors was the famous, (and anonymous) jockey seen in the 19th century electrophotographs by Eadweard Muybridge known as Animal Locomotion.  The siblings struggle to keep the business and the family ranch solvent, reduced to selling off the horses to a local theme park with a Western theme run by Jupe Park (Steven Yeun), a former child actor who survived a rather bizarre incident on a sitcom where a chimpanzee went on a murderous rampage (which we see in gradually expanding flashbacks). Despite the mental scars, Jupe is not above exploiting the incident for profit at his park.

One day OJ and Em discover a mysterious flying object in the sky that causes electrical disturbances and rains all sorts of objects down on earth.  We will learn that this UFO devours living things as well. Any more details are left for you to discover. 

NOPE probably thus far sounds in part like a latter day retread of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and JAWS, and it's impossible not to be reminded of Spielberg's films and a bit of his style, too.  But Peele, despite some vivid effects, as usual is going more for the cerebral than the visceral.  And in this film of multiple paradoxes we get both subtle and obvious imagery.  A film that simultaneously plays hesitantly and with sinister confidence.  One that even in its most intense moments still feels low key, refreshingly so.  There's more Hitchcock than Stephen King here, and I was reminded of both of them, too.  Peele achieves a unique rhythm.  Kaluuya's laconic performance (nonetheless very effective) fits perfectly within this framework.  

What is the film about? My first viewing revealed a treatise on the troubling dance we tend to have with entertainment itself.  Exploitation to serve a public that is never satiated, always seeking bigger spectacle.  Also, a passionate examination of animal rights.  You might reach further and detect an environmental polemic of sorts.  

I left the theater conflicted, filled with practical questions about the plot, but also about what was ultimately being said.  The protracted climax seemed to dilute some of Peele's themes, but any big Hollywood film that can provoke such feelings is worth the trip to theater, for more than just the sensory overload.  And it must be said that Michael Abels score and the overall sound design is considerably eerie and appropriate.