"Nope" - A Surprisingly Unfocused Film

It’s hard to follow up a film as brilliant and precise as Get Out. So difficult in fact, that Jordan Peele himself couldn’t even do it with Us. You might think "third time’s the charm," but nope.

I’m not sure what the main point of Nope is, which is surprising considering Get Out was quite direct in its themes, and Us was borderline ridiculous in its presentation. Nope, however, feels like Peele’s least focused work yet, in that it raises several different concepts without expanding on each of them to completion.

Let’s recap Peele’s other films and their themes:

Get Out (2017) is a Twilight Zone-esque thriller about a black boyfriend invited to his white girlfriend’s family’s house, where he finds out the family has been abducting black men and harvesting their bodies to live forever. The more obvious themes revolve around white people’s fetishization of black bodies and the way white people project a mystical or otherworldly ability on them. More subtly, the film also lambastes white liberals for their complacent racism and smug faux-equality complex (actualized by actor Bradley Whitford literally not understanding why his character saying he “would have voted for Obama for a third term” if he could have is hilarious).

Us (2019) is about a family terrorized by a set of doppelgängers revealed to be genetic clones created by the government. They live in a vast underground complex inhabited by other doppelgängers of every individual in America, each living a dark and depressed existence compared to those above ground. Putting aside the logical absurdity of that premise, it’s both interesting and somewhat Marxist, dealing blatantly with class disparity, and the notion of an “above” class living in prosperity off the suffering and toil of those “below.” The “we’re Americans” line spoken by one of the doppelgängers - and even the film’s title standing in for “U.S.” - makes the contemporary political parallels even more obvious. Eventually the underground group of clones rise up and unite to overthrow the privileged above-grounders. It’s completely in-your-face and beats you over the head, but at least there’s an interesting message to it.

With Nope (2022), Peele seems to have sidestepped another story of race, class, alienation, fetishism, and ideology in favor of one that raises too many unfinished ideas to be as poignant as his previous works.

When one of the first scenes in the film – and the first segment of the film’s trailer – opens on a discussion of Eadweard Muybridge’s 1880s Animal Locomotion and it’s black jockey, I assumed it would be the set up for a theme of black people’s unfortunately forgotten role in the foundation of motion pictures, which would be in-line with Peele’s other films. But it’s never really brought up again. The only other nods to race and Hollywood are posters of Sidney Poitier’s all-black Western Buck and the Preacher (1972), seen in the background and out of focus. Nothing more becomes of this theme.

There is also a recurring theme of man’s attempts to tame the untamable, represented through a chimp that goes berserk, horses that don’t listen, and ultimately the characters trying to wrangle a UFO. It appears as some kind of “let the animals be free!” message, but, again, doesn’t really amount to anything past its presentation.

As the film progresses, it becomes more about “the spectacle,” and people searching for fame in the face of horror. Faced with the discovery of UFOs abducting horses, the characters seek to capture it on film and sell the footage for profit. The film devolves into spectacle itself, as the final act is essentially a giant action set piece. Like Us, It’s not very subtle either – one character names the UFO aliens “The Viewers” (get it??).

And that’s basically it. Which is not to say that, as consumers and spectators ourselves, commentary on the contemporary desire to monetize horror isn’t a worthy theme to explore, but it’s not a terribly fresh one either. Michael Haeneke already did this in 1997 with Funny Games, probably the best filmic example of violence-as-spectacle. Quentin Tarantino has arguably done this for his entire career with practically all of his films and their reliance on graphic blood and gore. David Cronenberg even did it this year with Crimes of the Future.

Nope could have been more compelling if it had leaned into Peele's strengths of class and race-related storytelling. Does every Jordan Peele film have to continue in this vein? No, of course he’s free to create whatever films he chooses. But when his first two features are very deftly focused on a certain set of closely related topics, I come to expect that as his niche. With Nope, he explores a different route and I can’t help but feel that he missed the mark by not bringing home the primary theme, if there was one.