Nope
Directed by Jordan Peele
Running time: 2hr10 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Daniel Kaluuya in Nope
I’ve always enjoyed the (admittedly narrow) definition of science fiction that holds that in order to truly qualify as sci-fi, a story must hinge on a speculative innovation of some kind. What if we could erase bad memories? What are the moral implications of creating artificial sentient life? What if you could travel back in time and endanger your own existence by accidentally imperilling your parents’ teenage relationship?
Viewed through this lens, and despite the presence of an unidentified something in the sky, Nope, the latest film by Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us), belongs less to sci-fi than it does to another endlessly flexible, endlessly inventive, endlessly reimagined genre: the Western. The Western has always provided fertile ground for the exploration of contemporary society’s anxieties. Not all of those anxieties have proven at all flattering, with hindsight, to the societies that produced them (to put it mildly), but the films that resulted play as a fascinating and authentic document of the fears and dreams of the people who made them. Other types of Western have emphasised entertainment over sociopolitical anxiety: Star Wars (1977), is a good example of a neo-Western which is mainly prioritising entertainment and adventure.
Nope is a supremely entertaining romp, but is also concerned with contemporary societal anxieties, all of which is realised with a level of craft and attention to detail that is breathtaking to behold. Filmed on a ranch in Agua Dulce, California, the wild and windswept terrain captured by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema is almost unbearably beautiful. Night sky compositions illuminate bright, familiar old friends like the Great Bear, alongside dozens of dimmer stars only visible outside of towns and cities. This location is steeped in old school Hollywood: one of the ranches in Nope once belonged to Howard Hughes (who filmed scenes from The Outlaw in nearby Red Rock Canyon).
The cast is uniformly wonderful. Our hero is horse-wrangler OJ, whose family is descended from the very first man to be filmed on horseback. He is played by Daniel Kaluuya, on fantastic form recalling the strong, silent heroes of Randolph Scott’s late-stage career, men whose stoicism springs from a deep well of loss and pain. Keke Palmer sparks off him beautifully as his necessary opposite: the garrulous and irresponsible half of the dynamic duo, a verbal gunslinger with charisma to burn. Brandon Perea is also tremendously likeable as scrappy conspiracy theorist Angel (in a traditional Western his name would have Kid in it somewhere), while Steven Yeun plays a prosperous rancher with a troubled past: a former child star, he has served in this film’s equivalent of a war-zone, where he witnessed a fabled massacre, glimpsed via flashback.
Michael Wincott is likewise superb in a small but crucial part, as the veteran sharp-shooter brought into the posse in the final reel before the big showdown. In a witty twist, in Nope he is shooting footage rather than bullets, in his role as the only cinematographer in the West who can help the gang achieve their goal of capturing the mysterious Other which must be confronted. In an era where information is the new frontier on which conflicts are fought and won, the camera replaces the gun as weapon of choice.
And of course a film that explores our ambivalence about the impulse to “get the shot,” to capture and witness everything, finds itself making the case for and against that impulse. Nope’s narrative cautions us about the dangers of looking, but every frame of its superlative image-making screams: look, look, look.
NOPE (2021) Written by Jordan Peele | Shot by Hoyte Van Hoytema | Edited by
Nicholas Monsour
In cinemas now.
