‘Nope’ Review #2
Stars: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott | Written and Directed by Jordan Peele
Nope produces everything I love about the summer movie season. A tense, funny, entertaining spectacle that cries out to be seen on the biggest screen possible. When the film’s August release date was announced I was curious why a Jordan Peele film didn’t get an October release date, to capitalise on the Halloween season. After seeing Nope it became crystal clear that unlike his last two films, Get Out and Us, Nope portrays Peele’s ability to not only entertain us but can make us have fun right alongside the scares.
Nope feels like a throwback in so many ways, and in so many more Peele has found a way to bring a Spielberg summer blockbuster from the 70s into the modern world. Not only does the film entertain, but has some clear and some subtle messages it wants to tell us. The film starts with what seems to be a tragic accident that leaves brother and sister, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) running the family ranch, where they train horses for movies. Their family has been in the movie business since day one, as Emerald explains early on, “we like to say since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game”. Now that the ranch is left to them they soon discover that their home might have an uninvited guest living above them.
Everyone involved is due their credit. Daniel Kaluuya has been one of the most fascinating and entraining actors of the last few years and yet again he is given the opportunity to show his range. His previous performance in Jordan Peele’s debut film Get Out put him on the map and now this proves he’s not going anywhere. Keke Palmer is also great, it’s my first time seeing her on the big screen and she didn’t disappoint, she was constantly engaging and entertaining, she nails down the comic timing of Peele’s tight script, so too does Brandon Perea. Perea plays Angel Torres, a tech worker who provides some great comedic relief, but soon becomes a stand-out supporting player throughout the film, and by the end the trio made for lots of great interactions. Steven Yeun plays Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park, a child actor who now runs a western-themed park. After he experiences a tragic event on the set of a TV show when he was a child, he saw firsthand how man exploits both violence and how man tries to tame the untameable. He provides the line that sums the film up the most, telling his audience “Right here, you are going to witness an absolute spectacle.” Not only does this line give the film its main theme, but feels like Jordan Peele is turning to the audience and telling us what we are in store for.
In typical Peele fashion he slowly builds the tension. By creating fear through the fear of the unknown, Peele makes use of one of the greatest tools a filmmaker can possess. Throughout Nope he slowly builds the tension to great effect, doing for the sky what Jaws did for the ocean. There are no cheap jump scares thrown in our faces or surprises out of nowhere. The film builds suspense like an old Hitchcock thriller, yet what the film manages to do so wonderfully is be a grand, cinematic spectacle. The film feels closer to King Kong, Jurassic Park, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, than to anything Peele has previously done. It’s that word ‘spectacle’ (the one I’ve mentioned so many times already) that is the controlling idea of the film. We’re all obsessed with spectacle, with seeing the grand and amazing, with the unbelievable and shocking. No matter how shocking, gruesome, or violent the spectacle is, as long as there is a spectacle we’ll all flock to see it, to capture it, to show it to the world. Like the films before it, in particular King Kong and Jurassic Park, they’re films that show the obsession of man with spectacle, with being the person to give the world the unbelievable, no matter how dangerous it may be. Now Nope plays like the final instalment in a trilogy to those films. It’s everything those films before it were grand, tense and exciting, it’s what film was made for and why we keep coming back.
***** 5/5
Nope is in cinemas now.
