Yup!(thatsmeyoure probablywonderinghowiendedupinthissituation)
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*SPOILERS OF POYNTON FOLLOW*
In the hyperbolic chamber of social media, Nope is getting compared to Jaws and The Exorcist. But at best it’s Signs, and that mainly during an on-the-ground extraterrestrial encounter that proves to be an elaborate fakeout. (There was one horrible moment when I thought the film was going to reveal itself as a stealth Cloverfield installment. Thank heaven for small favors.) Writer-producer-director Jordan Peele enjoys toeing the line between sincerity and parody, which perhaps explains why the strongest scenes here feature Steven Yeun as a former sitcom child star-turned-Western amusement park impresario who has shamelessly commercialized a horrific encounter from his past involving a rampaging chimp named Gordy (mo-capped by go-to digi-simian performer Terry Notary).
Gordy is an earthbound parallel to Nope’s primary villain, an airborne apex predator that hides behind an immovable cloud and has an insatiable hunger for human flesh. It has ensconced itself just outside the Cali-valley home/workplace of the Haywood family, who for generations have trained equines for use in motion pictures, their history stretching back to Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion series. Nowadays, their meager work is mostly in advertising, with on-set colleagues (one played by Knots Landing vixen Donna Mills) treating them with varying shades of condescension. Brother and sister OJ (ay yi yi!) and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) are opposite sides of the emotional coin — he surly and introverted, her bubbly and self-promotional — and both are still mourning the loss of their father, Otis (Keith David), who is killed, pre-credits, by a mysterious hailstorm of flying debris.
Taking out Keith David before your opening titles is a flex, and not one that does Nope any favors. The film could use the grounding influence of a genre-movie stalwart, someone who might temper Peele and most of his cast’s need to be above the material, or to disappear inside its IMAX-sized margins. Kaluuya underplays to the point of insubstantiality, while Palmer and Brandon Perea, as a cynical Best Buy-like techie who insinuates himself into the eventual alien hunting (get a clear picture of the beast, the central trio think, and the cash and Oprah appearances shall flow), lay it on comically, and unfunnily, thick.
None of the three leads seem directed so much as encouraged to go big, go small, or go home, which is why it’s a relief when another old hand, tectonically gravel-voiced Michael Wincott, playing a grandiose cinematographer named Antlers Holst, shows up to wrangle this overstuffed beast of a movie back toward unabashed merriment. (Wincott speak-singing his way through Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater” is one of those things I didn’t know I needed.)
Speaking of d.p.’s, this is yet another case in which the supremely talented Hoyte Van Hoytema clashes against a rather bland visionary. Peele has some compositional chops, particularly when framing his cast from behind against the Rorschach-esque firmament above. But he tends toward more prosaic setups in conversation scenes, and his efforts at Spielbergian awe/terror ring consistently false, particularly when coupled with strained and deflating attempts at self-aware humor. This is a shame for a film whose overarching concern is the power, and the danger, of looking deep within a series of existential voids.
The Gordy scenes play as well as they do because Peele allows the horror to dominate and frames any countervailing comedy as a pitiable sort of self-deception (this includes the Yeun character’s recollection of a fictional SNL skit, a bravura monologue so subtly disturbing, and so uncannily, hilariously on point, that it spotlights the weaknesses of the rest of the writing). Most everything involving the Haywoods is empty bombast by comparison — loud and obnoxious, visually and thematically murky (a should-be-standout image of the Haywood home drenched by a torrential downpour of human blood is key among the missed opportunities). And it certainly doesn’t help that the antagonist in its final form suggests a Kardashian-like kaiju preening through the Met Gala.