In Nope, the sky is the limit for Jordan Peele's ambition

As contradictory as such a description might sound, Nope is a great mess. Shifting gently from horror to science fiction, Jordan Peele’s latest evokes the work of Steven Spielberg and M. Night Shyamalan—in ways both good and bad—with must-see spectacle whose dots don’t all connect around its biggest ideas. But even if the film doesn’t work (and it feels guaranteed that it won’t) for every moviegoer who rushes to see it as much because of his name as the intrigue of its premise, Nope irrefutably advances Peele to the ranks of his crowd-pleasing, superstar predecessors, despite the fact that his ambition and his discipline as a storyteller haven’t fully fallen into lockstep.

Peele’s Get Out leading man Daniel Kaluuya plays OJ (“as in Otis Jr.”) Haywood, a rancher attempting to shepherd his family’s Hollywood legacy as horse wranglers into a new era when his father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), unexpectedly dies. Despite recruiting his self-promoting sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) as a mouthpiece to keep their business going, the Haywoods soon face the prospect of selling their ranch to their neighbor Ricky “Jupe” Park, a former child actor who already acquired several of their horses for his Western reenactment village. But when OJ confesses that he saw some kind of alien object in the sky, Emerald becomes determined to capture it on film—whatever it is—in order to earn enough money to save the ranch and burnish their fortunes.

Purchasing a truckload of surveillance equipment at a local electronics store, OJ and Emerald recruit their salesperson, Angel (Brandon Perea), to install it around the ranch. But after Angel learns of their plans, he joins their ragtag team of supposed UFO-hunting documentarians—only for the three of them to make a discovery that confirms their suspicions, but also wildly exceeds their expectations, and threatens to risk their very lives in the process.

Peele is somewhat clearly aiming for a story that echoes the adventure, and danger, of Spielberg’s Jaws, with a slightly mercenary soupçon of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind thrown in for good measure. The reason he doesn’t achieve his version of those films isn’t because he lacks the ambition or the creativity, but because he seems to be working backwards from the metaphors he wants to explore and only later defining them in a concrete narrative. At heart, this is a film about a group of people who have been in one way or another eaten up and spit out by Hollywood; even poor Angel was discarded by his girlfriend after she landed a role “on a CW show.” But for a film that on its face is about trying to photograph a UFO, Nope doesn’t satisfactorily explain how and why too many basic elements occur, much less converge in the way they ultimately do.

The film opens with a shot of a chimpanzee sitting next to a body on the set of a television sitcom, both of which are covered in blood. Peele revisits this throughout the film to reinforce that notion of people victimized by the entertainment industry, but also to showcase an element of unpredictability that becomes relevant to the Haywoods (but we won’t spoil here). Flashbacks to the incident not only amplify the overall intensity of the film, but provide some of its most shocking imagery; but they also elongate the running time, primarily as exposition or back story instead of driving events directly related to what the Haywoods are doing, and why. By comparison, it would be like Spielberg shooting the U.S.S. Indianapolis shark attack that Quint describes in Jaws, and then cutting to key moments every once in a while instead of presenting it succinctly and effectively in one chilling monologue.

Further to that end, while he could benefit from the purposeful specificity of Spielberg’s direction, Peele’s pacing feels like Shyamalan’s—which is to say, unhurried and increasingly self-indulgent. One sequence which takes place at night and in the rain, and it feels impossible not to think of, say, the T-Rex escape in Jurassic Park, given the distance between the characters and the threat that looms over them both. But Peele never especially bothers to set up concrete exterior shots of what in his scene is a car and a house, and as a consequence, there’s never a moment of true urgency. And yet his skill in constructing certain kinds of set pieces remains as vivid as in his earlier films; although its relationship to, well, anything else proves specious at best, a scene where OJ becomes convinced he’s experienced something in the family barn is just brilliant, mass-audience, edge-of-your-seat entertainment.

Of course, that has quickly become Peele’s defining quality as he has progressed as a director, although one reasonably assumes that an expanded latitude from his financiers, even fully earned, has probably played a part in the shagginess of his second and third films. In Us, for example, it’s unfortunately true that the whole conception of “the tethered” does not work logistically (how precisely would they mirror their counterparts everywhere they went?), even if it offers the filmmaker an amazing theme to explore. And quite frankly, that’s totally fine, although if you’re any kind of stickler for (even internal) logic, niggling questions like that can unravel the whole experience, as they unfortunately almost do here.

Kaluuya gives the defining performance of the film, providing a kind of inherited reticence from his cowboy father that makes OJ’s moments of intuition and sensitivity that much more powerful. Palmer’s Emerald is OJ’s outgoing counterpart, the sizzle to his steak, but the throughline of the character is so thinly defined that her convergence towards their mutual fearlessness and heroism feels less convincing. As Jupe, Yeun carries a weight that the rest of the film can’t support, but even with those flashbacks squarely unveiling his mental state, his present-day choices feel tenuously connected at best. Playing Angel, meanwhile, Perea effectively suggests a person desperate to inject himself into affairs that are none of his business, while delivering two or three too many cliched responses (“they’re he-eeere”) in moments where it’s best not to evoke the likes of earlier genre classics.

In spite of the distressingly familiar practice of audiences mercilessly tearing down filmmakers after they’ve put them on a pedestal (for a recent example see: Taika Waititi), Peele earns his criticisms for the film honestly—this is a pure and exciting work of creativity, but it isn’t a perfect one. There’s also the larger matter of genre movies trying to bear the weight—constantly—of complex, traumatic, contemporary issues that often get mistaken, or wrongly prioritized, over the efficiency of thoughtful, measured, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other storytelling. There will, undoubtedly and appropriately, be dozens of think pieces written in the weeks to come about what Peele is saying, or trying to say, in this movie and at this moment. But what Nope lacks is not ambition or ideas, but clarity, which is why the appropriate response to it is not a resounding yes, but alright, not bad—what else have you got?