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‘Nope’ is another genre-disrupting Peele masterpiece
By Katie Walsh
Tribune News Service
In “Nope,” writer/director Jordan Peele
presents us with a big, shiny summer
blockbuster — a cowboys and aliens riff
built from the DNA of sci-fi spectacles
of yore — and then proceeds to vivisect
the very notion of a summer blockbuster
before our eyes.
He wants us to question the nature of
image-making, and he starts at the be-
ginning of fi lm history, with photographer
Eadweard Muybridge. In 1878, Muybridge
crafted the fi rst known example of the
“moving pictures”: a two-second clip
called “The Horse in Motion,” made up of
sequential photographs of a jockey riding
a race horse.
That the jockey on the horse — the
fi rst person featured in the movies — is
Black, and unknown, is the starting point
for Peele’s exploration of seeing and
the seen in “Nope,” which interrogates
the power of images, who gets to create
them, and who gets the credit.
These are complex questions, but
Peele has wrapped them up in an incred-
ibly original, and entertaining, piece of
sci-fi fi lmmaking that is both unlike, and
like, anything you’ve ever seen before.
Daniel Kaluuya stars as OJ Haywood,
Universal Pictures/TNS
From left: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Brandon Perea in “Nope.”
a taciturn horse wrangler grieving the
loss of his father (Keith David) in a freak
accident, while continuing to run the
family business, Haywood Hollywood
Horses, with his sister Emerald (Keke
Palmer), providing animals to movie sets.
As recounted in a lively on-set safety
speech by Emerald, the siblings happen
to be descended from the rider who fi rst
appeared on horseback in the Muybridge
clip, and through OJ and Emerald, Peele
reckons with erased Black fi lm history
and seeks to reinscribe it.
However, at their Agua Dulce desert
ranch, strange things are afoot. Clouds
are ominous, winds threatening, roaring
screeches emanate from the sky and
spook the horses.
They enlist Angel (Brandon Perea),
a surly young employee from the local
Fry’s Electronics, to install security cam-
eras, and he takes a vested interest in
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the potential extraterrestrial phenomena
there, examining the footage and return-
ing to witness it himself.
“Nope” is Jordan Peele’s “Jaws,” a
monster movie made from the rib of
Steven Spielberg’s pioneering ’70s
blockbuster. It also bears the imprint of
Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the
Third Kind,” and is deep with references
to ’80s and ’90s cult sci-fi . Film fan Peele
can’t help but reference his favorites,
and this is a movie about making movies,
specifi cally the unnamed technicians and
laborers who keep the movie machine
running, but don’t get the glory. Peele
assembles and disassembles the pieces
of the blockbuster in front of us, showing
us how it works, asking us to think about
the many varied ways in which we engage
with moving pictures, photographs, tech-
nology and spectacle, from the carnival,
to security camera footage, to a virtual
reality headset.
“Nope” is another genre-disrupting
masterpiece from Jordan Peele, whose
intellectual, curious and playful perspec-
tive has become vital, and necessary,
for the horror and sci-fi genre to evolve.
There’s so much more to explore in the
depths of “Nope,” but for now, let us just
say, “yup.”
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