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It’s surprising how little information about writer/director Jordan Peele ’s “Nope” has leaked since it was first announced. There have been a few trailers that show what may or may not be the film’s primary threat, and the marketing team has done a very good job with posters of its main cast members looking up at the sky and uttering the film’s title. All that thirst for capitalistic box office gain comes with a price, namely that it builds hype and an audience expectation that may not be met once the finished product is unveiled. This invariably leads to whiny complaints on Twitter and a plethora of think pieces I have no desire to read, even if I didn’t like the movie.  

I’ve always had begrudging respect for a filmmaker who refuses to cater to a viewer’s pre-ordained expectations, even if said viewer is yours truly. It’s why I attend David Lynch movies despite never being a fan of the director’s work. So, I’ve been replaying a throwaway line of dialogue in my head as a potential explanation for how “Nope” is constructed and executed. In response to a pitch for his services, cinematographer Antlers Holst ( Michael Wincott ) tells Emerald Haywood ( Keke Palmer ) that he “makes one movie for them, and one for me.” This is a callback to John Cassavetes ’ philosophy/excuse for appearing in trash—the pay allowed him to finance the movies he wanted to create. 

After the massively entertaining, Oscar-winning calling card of “ Get Out ,” Jordan Peele moved toward a hybrid of audience pleaser and filmmaker’s jones with “ Us .” That film was less blatant and required more work on the audience’s part, which made it fascinating for some and frustrating for others. It was also powered by a career-best performance by Lupita Nyong’o, whose dual role was unshakably strange and multilayered. There is no equivalent performance in “Nope” to anchor viewers, and it’s about three times as messy, but I got the feeling that Holst is Peele’s stand-in, that is, the director is revealing to us through a character that he made this film to amuse and please himself. If that is true, then Holst’s final scene says a lot about his creator; it’s a moment of self-sacrifice in lieu of the perfect camera shot. 

Prior to the pitch for work scene, Holst and Emerald met on the set of a commercial he was shooting. She arrived late to assist her horse-wrangler brother Otis Jr. ( Daniel Kaluuya ) with the animal hired for the ad. That shoot goes awry, but not before Peele drops some breadcrumbs that will lead viewers through the forest he’s built for us to get lost inside. He also includes a nice cameo from nighttime soap opera legend Donna Mills . Speaking of cameos, the opening scene of “Nope” features Keith David as Otis Sr., head of Haywood Hollywood Horses, the family business. The Haywood’s ancestors were the first Black stuntpeople and animal wranglers in Hollywood, going back to the earliest days of movie making. That seems like an extraneous detail, but nothing is truly extra in a Jordan Peele movie.

The rest of the cast features Steven Yuen as Jupe, a barker who runs an alien-based carnival of sorts out in the same middle of nowhere the Haywoods have their ranch, and Angel ( Brandon Perea ), a techie specializing in surveillance equipment he sells out of a Best Buy clone called Fry’s. Jupe is the survivor of a horrific freak accident on a television show that had the first use of a certain type of animal. Angel is hired to install fancy cameras on the Haywood ranch so that Otis and Emerald can be the first to capture “the Oprah shot” of a specific event I won’t reveal. All this focus on being the first to do something! Again, no detail is completely extra in a Jordan Peele movie.

With “Nope,” Peele continues to explore and repeat certain elements of his prior works. Like “Us,” there’s a Bible quote that may be another breadcrumb to follow. This time it’s Nahum 3:6, which says “I will pelt you with filth, I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle.” There’s also a focus on animals, with horses playing a major role here. Unlike the deer in “Get Out” and the rabbits in “Us,” symbols of creatures being preyed upon, Peele reverses the power dynamic by turning into prey the most dangerous predator of all. There’s also the unusual use of an inanimate object; in “Us” it was scissors, in “Nope” it’s a fake horse and those weird, swaying air-filled things every used car dealer seems to have.

“Nope” is not as good as “Get Out” or “Us,” but it’s definitely Peele’s creepiest movie. He’s always been more Rod Serling than Rob Zombie , and that’s most evident here. There’s humor to be had in the minority characters’ reactions to horror (yes, they say “nope” the way most people would say “oh HELL NAW!”), but the director really leans into Hitchcock’s tenet about suspense vs. surprise. The wait for something awful to happen is always worse than when it does. Additionally, Peele remains a master of misdirection, offering fleeting glimpses of something that’s amiss or keeping the most brutal violence just beyond our view. The sound mix on this is aces, and I’ll never tire of horror movies that center on Black protagonists who are more than just fodder for whatever’s killing everybody.

Peele also gets good performances out of Kaluuya and Palmer, who believably work the sibling angle with all its longstanding grudges, in-jokes and patterns based on who’s older. Wincott wields his wonderful voice as a force of nature. Yuen seems to be off-kilter and the movie’s weak link, but the more I thought about his plotline, the more his performance made sense. I think he’s the film’s biggest breadcrumb in terms of figuring it all out. As for the special effects, they’re interesting, to say the least.

Truth be told, “Nope” reaches a conventional end point that would probably be more satisfying to most audiences had the journey been more tuned to the usual ways these stories are told. After my IMAX screening, there was a smattering of audience applause but I heard lots of grumbling. Call me a sadist if you must, but this is my favorite type of audience reaction. One particularly angry guy behind me on the escalator said “I can’t wait for the critics reviews calling this ‘splendid’!” “Nope” isn’t splendid, but it is pretty damn good. I had a lot of fun trying to figure it out. It’s a puzzle with a few pieces missing; standing back from it, you can still see the picture. But does it give the viewer exactly what they want? See the title.

Available in theaters on July 22nd.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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Nope (2022)

Rated R for language throughout and some violence/bloody images.

135 minutes

Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood

Keke Palmer as Emerald 'Em' Haywood

Steven Yeun as Ricky 'Jupe' Park

Brandon Perea as Angel Torres

Michael Wincott as Craig

Barbie Ferreira as Nessie

Donna Mills as Bonnie Clayton

Terry Notary as Gordy

Jennifer Lafleur as Phyllis

Keith David as Otis Haywood Sr.

• Jordan Peele

Cinematographer

• Hoyte van Hoytema
• Nicholas Monsour
• Michael Abels

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Jordan Peele’s Nope brings chills and thrills, but it’s all empty air

His alien-invasion movie Nope moves away from racial metaphor, but lacks a solid center to replace it

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Share All sharing options for: Jordan Peele’s Nope brings chills and thrills, but it’s all empty air

About halfway through Nope — Jordan Peele’s sci-fi Western horror follow-up to Us and Get Out , centered around two Black siblings training horses for Hollywood projects — Emerald (Keke Palmer) explains to her curt brother OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) why she lives such a disappointed life. Their father Otis (Keith David) promised her a horse of her own, but instead brought OJ in on training him for work on The Scorpion King , as a father-son project. Ever since then, she’s only been nominally interested in the family business.

As she tells her story, the lens tightens around Emerald’s face while tears stream down her cheeks. OJ sits, tight-jawed, aware of his sister’s anguish but unable to emotionally engage with her. The scene captures the siblings’ broad beats, but its deployment so late in the film keeps it from landing with the force Peele probably hoped for. It’s a recurring issue throughout Nope .

Maybe that running lack of impact has to do with Peele’s unwillingness to let Nope tell a story beyond winking references. Maybe it’s because he’s uninterested in exploring the inner lives of his characters, who largely coast on repetitive punchlines and cloying sentimentality. But the biggest surprise of the tight-lipped Nope is that it’s Jordan Peele’s weakest film.

[ Ed. note: Setup spoilers ahead for Nope .]

Emerald and OJ are, as one character backhandedly calls them, “Hollywood royalty.” They’re descendants of the largely forgotten Black man riding a horse in Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion , purportedly the first film in history. Like the horses they train, the siblings live in the background of the movie business. That territory doesn’t really bother the quiet, closed-off OJ. But it’s partly why Emerald is so captivated with breaking into Hollywood. She doesn’t want to be erased like her forefather, or like the other Black creatives who’ve inhabited Hollywood for decades.

Peele’s script should let the audience in on feeling her desire. There’s a justness to her frustration and hope that should prompt a swelling of the heart, or at least a rooting interest. But her rapid-fire pitch to a film crew about her artistic passions flies by so quickly that the audience can barely hold on. Who is Emerald, apart from being a classic showbiz grifter? Peele is only moderately interested in the answer to that question.

He has greater control in building out the monster component of Nope , though it’s also messy. The simplistic plot first maneuvers through tragedy: Small objects mysteriously tear through the sky, striking and killing OJ and Emerald’s father in the opening scene. From their dad, the pair inherit a ranch sunk deep in debt. They begin selling horses to local Western-themed amusement park owner Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star who survived a murderous chimp rampage on his television show in the 1990s. On the Haywood ranch, a series of strange occurrences follows the rain of coins and keys: The power zaps out, horses turn wild and sprint into the night, a cacophony of screams amid a visceral soundscape fills the brushland.

When a shocked OJ spots a UFO zipping across the sky, he and Emerald concoct a plan to film the object and use the footage to get themselves rich and possibly famous. Initially, the UFO’s intentions appear unclear: Is it a friend, a foe, or something unknowable? OJ only knows not to look directly at the ship, which it takes as aggression or interest — a major hang-up, considering that the siblings want to film the craft.

It’s important to consider the interest Nope takes in the vapidity of stardom and the machine-grinding ways in which Hollywood reduces creative spirits to shadows of themselves. Jupe surrounds himself with souvenirs from his traumatic television career. The characters, in spite of the danger, can’t help but look at the UFO, because they feel the need to take pictures of it like fans seeking selfies with celebrities. Even a TMZ photographer arrives at the ranch willing to risk his life for a photo. The whole movie is waiting for Peele to propose an incisive vantage on that heavy-handed totemic component, beyond wielding it to one-note ends.

Nope does have its flights of entertainment. The first half is genuinely a fun ride with plenty of gags, as Peele slowly pulls comedy and horror from the same well. The frustration with this alien-invasion story doesn’t reside in the script not providing easy answers. Instead, the obfuscations and unanswered questions are assets. The light details allow Peele to play in a big sandbox of references, from Fire in the Sky to Buck and the Preacher , Saturday Night Live , and a wide gamut of Steven Spielberg’s filmography.

The freedom Peele affords himself allows him to switch the tone and mood on a dime. In one particularly eerie close-encounter scene set in a stable, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema uses framing and dark lighting to foster an edge-of-your-seat dread. The tension is punctured when OJ says the film’s title, sharply dropping the horror elements in search of laughs.

Nope ’s larger issue lies in the ways in which Peele’s script perpetually stops short of adding up all the moving parts into a whole. It feels as though Peele is stuck between trying to craft an entertaining blockbuster monster movie and wanting to carve out greater thematic depth from his fascinating premise. That first impulse makes Nope one of his more approachable films, in terms of its humor and the things it leaves open for interpretation. The latter leaves the burden to Palmer and Kaluuya to create richer interior lives for their characters than Peele can provide. Both actors can sell a sight gag with the best of them, especially Kaluuya, with his deadpan face. And both actors have a real attachment to the people they’re playing, even when they’re left retooling the dialogue’s repetitive beats. Brandon Perea provides further heaps of enjoyment as a geeky IT guy who’s also left underdeveloped as a mere comedic foil.

The film’s unwieldiness could be excused if it weren’t so bloated. The narrative is split into individual chapters that destroy the pacing, particularly in the final half hour. A set-piece where OJ and Emerald bait the UFO closer to their cameras appropriately involves inflatable tube men — no pun intended, but it’s as elongated and overstretched as they are. Peele leans on wish-fulfilling moments that make little logical sense, even within the framework of this movie. The climactic sequence is muted by uneven dialogue through radio chatter, and through the late insertion of an eccentric yet brooding cinematographer character (Michael Wincott) with barely any emotional attachment for the audience. It’s another instance of an attempted swing at a bigger thematic punch that never quite lands because it’s so narrow and surface level.

It would be too much to call Nope a bad movie. Even in Peele’s lack of precision, plenty of good qualities lurk underneath the knottier shortcomings. But this horror flick doesn’t rise to the levels of Get Out or Us , either. It isn’t because in this case, Peele isn’t trying to teach white people to understand the full scope and feeling of racism. It’s because Nope is an idea more than a story. It’s a collection of individually captivating scenes, as opposed to an intriguing whole. It’s a handsome picture, but Peele is far too impressed with its handsomeness to work on populating it with fully felt characters. It might enthrall audiences, and it might frighten them, but it’ll struggle to stay with them after the credits start to roll.

Nope opens in theaters on July 22.

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• Breaking Down the Meaning of Jordan Peele’s <i>Nope</i>

Breaking Down the Meaning of Jordan Peele’s Nope

L eading up to its release on July 22, Jordan Peele kept his highly-anticipated third film, Nope , tightly under wraps. The trailer is little more than a spooky montage of dark forces and craning necks, and Peele was very cagey about what happens in the movie in the few interviews he’s given. His elusiveness sparked a whole host of wild fan theories and predictions: that the movie is about government drones, or time travelers, or the MMA fighter Angela Hill .

Well, two TIME reporters saw the film—and walked out of it with even more theories and questions than when we walked in. Nope, which is available to stream on Peacock as of Nov. 18 as well as to rent on other digital platforms, is a transfixing and hugely ambitious movie with a perplexing array of disparate characters and symbols: a murderous chimp, inflatable dancing men, a flying saucer. By the time the film has ended, the A-plot has resolved itself neatly. But in the two packed theaters where we screened the film, theatergoers remained silent and still as the credits rolled, suggesting some sort of confusion, or at least unease, with the whole thing.

As TIME’s film critic Stephanie Zacharek put it , “Peele, it seems, is one of those ‘It means what you think it means’ filmmakers, which delights some audiences but comes off as a copout for viewers who want to know what a filmmaker is thinking, because ostensibly those thoughts are more interesting than anything we could come up with on our own.”

So, just like the movie’s characters, we’ll try to interpret what we’ve seen before us while mixing in grandiose conspiracy theories to answer one big question: What, exactly, is Nope about? Spoilers, of course, abound.

Nope is simply a summer monster movie

Jordan Peele’s movies beg to be closely scrutinized: they’re full of historical and cultural Easter eggs, double meanings and sociopolitical commentary. His first two films, Get Out and Us , have provoked endless analysis from professors, psychologists, and historians, with Get Out even inspiring a whole class at UCLA. Peele isn’t shy about his conceptual ambition and his penchant for writing Big Themes into genre storytelling: “Humanity is the monster in my films,” he told Vanity Fair in 2017.

But in the last few months, Peele has signaled that Nope is different in that regard, that his intentions may be more visceral and surface-level. “I wrote it in a time when we were a little bit worried about the future of cinema,” Peele said. “So the first thing I knew is I wanted to create a spectacle… the great American UFO story .”

And after watching Nope , it’s easy to read it purely as a summer popcorn movie; a break from what critics might perceive as heavy-handed didacticism. The main plot of the film is simple, slotting neatly into a thriller/horror lineage of a group of good guys trying to kill a scary monster. (See: Jaws , Alien , The Thing .)

Late in the movie, Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ lays out the monster’s motivations very clearly: “It’s alive, it’s territorial, and it wants to eat us.” This mute, faceless monster doesn’t seem to be a stand-in for, say, Manifest Destiny or global warming: it’s simply a vehicle for making audiences shriek, riffing on a rich cinematic history of UFOs, and capturing gorgeous shots of the expansive SoCal desert sky.

Peele spares no expense in that last regard: he hired cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who shot Christopher Nolan epics like Dunkirk and Interstellar , to film this one using IMAX cameras. The director has made it very easy for audiences to get wrapped up in the film’s visual beauty and heart-racing motorcycle-driven set pieces; to mostly turn off their Hot Take brains and enjoy a furious battle for survival.

Nope—it’s actually a parable about the power of cinema

But for characters battling a giant sky monster that eats people, they spend an awful lot of time primarily worried about… filming it?

It seems like a quarter of all movies that make it into theaters these days are so-called “love letters to Hollywood” (see: La La Land , Mank , Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, Licorice Pizza ). Nope repeatedly gestures toward that subgenre. The movie is very clearly attempting to place itself within several cinematic lineages: Western, horror, sci-fi, buddy-comedy. The very first shot takes place on a Hollywood television set (albeit during the rampage of a murderous chimp). Easter egg references to film history abound, whether in the form of OJ’s Scorpion King hoodie or his Buck and the Preacher poster.

But the characters aren’t just fans of movies: they’re obsessed with the act of filming and documenting life. For OJ, Emerald (Keke Palmer), and Angel (Brandon Perea), the UFO only truly exists if they’ve captured it on film. They spend the first half of the movie interacting with it mostly through screens, as if poring over their own Zapruder tape. They set up a wildly ambitious obstacle course—complete with those wacky inflatable men—not to physically capture the beast but to use the footage as their golden ticket to becoming Hollywood royalty.

The movie’s climax goes even further in centering the act of filmmaking. As the monster floats off into the sky, Emerald unleashes a giant inflatable balloon cowboy—a definitive symbol of Classic Hollywood if there ever was one—as an airbound weapon, then furiously snaps her camera as she repeatedly attempts to get one perfect shot.

It’s a curious and self-serving twist on the “final shoot-out” trope, with a film roll replacing bullets. In the battle between good and evil, the film seems to be saying, it’s the actual art of filmmaking, combined with the ingenuity of filmmakers harnessing the power of Hollywood heroes, that might be humanity’s last hope.

However, there’s another way of interpreting the movie not as a love letter, but as an outright condemnation of Hollywood instead. More on that later.

Nope —i t’s a critique of surveillance culture

We’re still not entirely sure what the gaping organ on the underbelly of our UFO-turned-predator is (a mouth? An eye? Both?), but it certainly does seem to be watching us. OJ pieces this together, too, when he interrupts a burger run to posit that maybe the creature—like a horse—spooks at direct eye contact. It wants to watch, never to be watched. And Jupe (Steven Yeun) gets close to the point when he announces to the crowd at his amusement park that “We are being surveilled by an alien species I call the Viewers.” (Maybe the one thing Jupe was right about, poor guy.)

“Surveillance” is a weighty term here, given its history and significance in relation to policing the Black community . If the alien is, in fact, always watching them from inside that cloud, then the Haywoods’ ranch starts to feel a bit like a panopticon—a central observation tower within a ring of prison cells. To the prisoners, it feels like someone is constantly watching them, and all sense of privacy is lost. In her book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness , Simone Browne draws a comparison between the panopticon and slave ships: Both institutions police and dehumanize people, creating a system of power and control.

But when OJ whips out his cell phone—a tool often used to document police brutality —to record the kids pranking him in the barn, he’s turning the tables on the threat at hand. And when Angel helps the Haywoods install security cameras on their property, the watched become the watchers, reasserting their power. By capturing evidence of the creature, they’re ensuring that they will be believed—and that they can control the narrative. So when Emerald snaps that last, sweat-stained photo on the Winkin’ Well , maybe that’s a win, pushing back against surveillance culture.

Nope — it’s about Black historical documentation

Or maybe that Winkin’ Well photo has a different meaning entirely.

Toward the beginning of the movie, Emerald explains to a sound stage full of people that her great-great (great) grandfather was the jockey who was the subject of the first known assembly of photographs creating a motion picture. Those photos were assembled by Eadweard Muybridge, known by many as the “ forefather of cinema .” The name of the jockey, however, remains unknown. “We’ve got the first movie star of all time,” Peele told GQ . “And it’s a Black man we don’t know. We haven’t looked. In a lot of ways, the movie became a response to that first film.”

When OJ and Emerald embark on a quest to record the alien, then, maybe they’re seeking to document history, leaving their own indelible mark in the textbooks.

“Ain’t nobody gonna get what we gonna get,” Emerald tells her brother inside Fry’s Electronics. “What we gonna get?” OJ asks. “The money shot,” Emerald replies. “Undeniable proof of aliens on camera. The Oprah shot.” Securing the Oprah shot would cement the Haywoods’ place in history—which should have already been established, given the family lineage. The act of “archiving while Black,” as the academic Ashley Farmer has put it, can be inherently radical, as Black scholars, historians and activists historically have been shut out of the preservation of their own history.

The Haywood siblings make a false step in Nope , when they entrust the documentation of the creature to the eccentric filmmaker Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), who Emerald claims is the only person in the world who can get it on film, and who happens to be white.

As OJ ducks for cover inside a structure with walls made out of wooden slats, a horse gallops by in the background, evoking the praxinoscope feel of the Muybridge clip. Then we’re treated to the remake itself, the pièce de résistance: a gorgeous sequence of OJ galloping through the arid, stark landscape of Southern California, recreating and reclaiming his great-great-great-grandfather’s legacy.

“It’s about taking up that space,” Peele told GQ . “It’s about existing. It’s about acknowledging the people who were erased in the journey to get here.”

Then Antlers is gone, leaving Emerald as the last woman standing to capture this slice of history for both her family and the world at large. And with every last ounce of energy—and frankly impressive upper body strength—she succeeds, snapping the Oprah shot on the trusty ol’ Winkin’ Well.

Nope — Nope is about capitalism

You knew we’d end up here, didn’t you?

By now, it’s a cliche to yell “late stage capitalism!” about pieces of media that even reference economic structures or wage labor. But bear with us here: When you zoom out, it becomes evident that the throughline of each of Nope ’s subplots is the grave danger of wrangling the untameable into a for-profit spectacle.

First, it’s the Haywood family, whose entire legacy rests upon converting majestic stallions into show ponies to be ridden by washed-up actresses in commercials. Next, it’s the creators of Gordy’s Home , who chased viewership ratings so blindly, they ignored the Chekhov’s Ape about to detonate on his poor castmates.

The Gordy massacre clearly had a traumatic effect on poor Jupe, who witnessed his castmates getting mauled firsthand. But society taught him that the tragedy was something to be mined for commerce and comedy: We’re sure Chris Kattan killed in the SNL sketch that Jupe describes. And as a child actor, Jupe never knew anything else. It’s his Stockholm Syndrome, chained as he is to Hollywood ideals, that makes him attempt to turn the UFO into his new Gordy—because even in the worst case bloody scenario, maybe a good SNL skit and a few thousand bucks will come out of it.

Jupe’s attitude of embracing risk for the sake of success isn’t the exception, but the status quo. For the Haywood siblings, filming the UFO is the key to their family’s very survival. (It’s not like OJ could take bereavement leave after his father’s death.) In their near-suicidal quest to monetize the monster, they’re not all that different from the TMZ cameraman who begs for OJ to save his footage as he lays dying in the dirt.

This theme directly taps into that of two of Hollywood’s classic monster movies, King Kong and Jurassic Park : that the masses’ desire for believably terrifying and titillating spectacles can only end in disaster. And as long as tickets are sold, there are those like Jupe or the cinematographer Antlers who will happily create deathly shows. The line between obsessive craftsmanship and obsessive commerce-creation becomes nearly indistinguishable, as they each lead to the same violent ends.

Watching Antlers die, it’s hard not to think of Halyna Hutchins, the real-life cinematographer who was shot to death by accident last year on a New Mexico film shoot of an Alec Baldwin Western. On that shoot, crew workers had complained of safety lapses and unsafe working conditions due to a tight budget and strict productivity mandates. The incident brought to light a long history of fatal accidents on film sets, often stemming from producers cutting corners to save money. With this history in mind, the characters’ attitudes of film-above-life leaves a very sour taste, and calls into question every one of their actions.

Peele himself leaves a very strong hint toward this interpretation’s veracity in the film’s first frame, which shows a grim Bible quote from the prophet Nahum: “I will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, make you a spectacle.” Nahum says this to justify the destruction of the city of Nineveh, which he argues is overrun by sin and vice, and must be cleansed. Peele’s UFO monster, then, can be read as making a moral judgment from on high of humanity’s obsession with money and spectacle—and raining down upon them filth and blood as punishment.

Nope. We’re overthinking it

But the question remains: Do we have to have our cake and eat it too? Do we need both a big, fun summer monster movie and a treatise on the follies of capitalism in Hollywood? Or can we just let Jordan Peele enjoy his cake: a well-deserved dessert after the daring, draining concepts of Get Out and Us ?

Both of Nope’s forerunners delved deep into dark places. The Sunken Place and the Tethered—though central to two timeless cinematic masterpieces—demanded a lot of both Peele and his viewers. The Haywood ranch, on the other hand, infuses this film with sheer thrills, edge-of-your-seat terror and the joy that can accompany it. “There’s also a way to watch this movie where you say, ‘Look, I’ve been working all day, all week,’” Peele told Uproxx . “’I want to shut off and see some wild stuff.’”

Peele, as he’s proven time and time again, is a master of cinematography and filmmaking. Maybe we should step back from all of the overanalysis (as fun as it may be) and just let him do what he does best: make one hell of a movie.

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‘Nope’ Review: Jordan Peele’s Wildly Entertaining Blockbuster Is the Best Kind of Hollywood Spectacle

David ehrlich.

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How do we live with some of the shit that we’ve been forced to watch on a daily basis? Why are we so eager to immortalize the worst images that our world is capable of producing, and what kind of awful power do we lend such tragedies by sanctifying them into spectacles that can play out over and over again?

While Jordan Peele has fast become one of the most relevant and profitable of modern American filmmakers, “ Nope ” is the first time that he’s been afforded a budget fit for a true blockbuster spectacle, and that’s exactly what he’s created with it. But if this smart, muscular, and massively entertaining flying saucer freak-out is such an old school delight that it starts with a shout-out to early cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge (before paying homage to more direct influences like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), it’s also a thoroughly modern popcorn movie for and about viewers who’ve been inundated with — and addicted to — 21st century visions of real-life terror.

The only sci-fi movie that might scare and delight Guy Debord and Ed Wood to the same degree, “Nope” offers a giddy throwback to the days of little green men and hubcap U.F.O.s that hopes to revitalize those classic tropes for audiences who’ve seen too much bloodshed on their own screens to believe in Hollywood’s “bad miracles.” It’s a tractor beam of a movie pointed at people who’ve watched 9/11 happen so many times on network TV that it’s lost any literal meaning; who’ve scrolled past body cam snuff films in between Dril tweets; who’ve become accustomed to rubbernecking at American life from inside the wreckage.

Less acutely metaphorical than “Us” or “Get Out” and yet just as compelled by the sinister forces that hide in plain sight — along with the double-edged thrill of actually seeing them — “Nope” satisfies our morbid appetite for new horrors better than any multiplex offering in years, but only so that it can feed on our fatal inability to look away from them.

Having said that, “Nope” is also the least confrontational movie that Peele has made so far, its social criticism diffused to the brink of abstraction and joyfully couched in the kind of nervous laughter suggested by its title (which somehow gets funnier every time one of the characters says it aloud). Despite a few moments of deliberately conspiratorial handholding — including a winky scene in which someone announces that “we’re being surveilled by an alien species I call ‘The Viewer’” — it takes a minute to connect the dots between the various things that Peele is doing here.

There’s a good reason why “Nope” opens on the set of a 1998 sitcom minutes after the show’s lead actor, a chimpanzee named Gordy, has gone bananas and beaten several of his co-stars to death, but the rationale is never as explicit as the one undergirding the “Hands Across America” subplot from “Us.”

By the same token, it’s easy to figure out why grief-stricken animal wrangler OJ Haywood ( Daniel Kaluuya ) might want to sell the Agua Dulce ranch where his family has raised Hollywood picture horses since the movies were invented — in the present-day portion of the film’s prologue, a nickel rains down from the sky with such velocity that it kills OJ’s dad ( Keith David ), cutting a hole clean through his eyeball — but Peele doesn’t spell out why OJ might want to keep it. At this rate, it’s unclear if he even could keep it; OJ is too sad to do the job right, leaving his super-extroverted little sister Emerald ( Keke Palmer ) to keep Haywood Hollywood Horses from being put out to pasture.

The only thing that’s writ large from the get-go is the relationship between one era of spectacle and another, which Emerald articulates like a family motto in a rapid-fire monologue about the Black jockey who Muybridge photographed to create the very first assembly of motion pictures. Most people forgot his name in the shadow of that immortal shoot (and it would take Hollywood another 100 years to come back to the idea of putting a Black man on a horse), but Emerald and OJ remember it well: He was a Haywood too. Alas, even the most remarkable history isn’t enough to guarantee a future in show business, and that’s doubly true for animal wranglers in an age where studios would sooner animate whatever they might not be able to tame (it’s worth noting that Gordy, like many of the animals you see in the movies these days, is 100 percent CGI).

It’s only when OJ spots a silver disc shimmering through the sky above his ranch — an eerily magical stretch of air that Crayola might call “Day-for-Night Periwinkle” — that he finds his feet again. If no one wants to shoot real horses anymore, he’ll show the world something that it’s never seen before. Something wild. Something that no one else could ever hope to break. And so begins a UFO story that’s less interested in killing the alien than it is in capturing it on camera, even when the desire to see it might be strong enough to devour a city whole.

The process by which OJ and his more reluctant sister become amateur UFO hunters can be a clumsy one — the Haywoods team up with the tetchy, half-dumb Fry’s Electronics clerk (Brandon Perea) who sells them their surveillance camera, his character dragging weight until Peele finds the right use for him in the third act — but “Nope” does a quietly brilliant job of herding its disparate subplots in the right direction.

Instrumental to that success is the Haywood’s neighbor and business rival Ricky “Jupe” Park (the great Steven Yeun, all smarmy kindness and smothered trauma), a former actor who survived Gordy’s rage as a child only to profit from people’s morbid curiosity about it as an adult. Under his calm smile and cowboy veneer, we get the sense that Jupe is trying to assert some kind of control over the worst thing he was ever forced to watch; that he eagerly recounts the “SNL” sketch about the attack (for example) in the hopes that staring his demons in the face might blur his vision of it, soften its edges, and turn it into something he can live with.

Does that have anything to do with all of the horses Jupe’s been trying to buy lately? Time will tell, but wrangling nightmares into spectacles is dangerous business, especially when people can’t bring themselves to look away.

With great patience and tremendous craft, Peele steers these characters (and a handful of others) from one masterful set piece to the next, all of them flecked with popcorn-spilling jolts but more fundamentally driven by a profound sense of big-screen, body-rattling awe. On some level, “Nope” is Peele’s smallest film so far; almost the entire story takes place on the Haywood ranch and its surrounding areas. At the same time, however, it also feels like his largest. Sometimes literally: Hoyte van Hoytema’s 65mm compositions lend the carnage an intergalactic scale that makes even the film’s most familiar tropes feel bracingly new, and inspire a degree of holy terror that allows the grand finale to alternate between heart-in-your-throat horror and fistpump-worthy “Akira” references as cinematography assumes a hands-on roll in the action (Peele keeps the film’s self-reflexive streak to a low boil, but cranks it up to a delirious high in the dying minutes).

It doesn’t hurt that Peele’s latest boasts some of the most inspired alien design since H.R. Giger left his mark on the genre, or that Kaluuya’s eyes remain some of Hollywood’s most special effects, as “Nope” gets almost as much mileage from their weariness as “Get Out” squeezed from their clarity. It’s through them that “Nope” searches for a new way of seeing, returns the Haywoods to their rightful place in film history, and creates the rare Hollywood spectacle that doesn’t leave us looking for more.

Universal Pictures will release “Nope” in theaters on Friday, July 22.

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Nope review: Space is the place in Jordan Peele's subversive sci-fi update

Don't look up: The fertile mind behind Get Out and Us explores unfriendly skies — and more earthbound threats — in his far-out latest.

In the arid, IP-fatigued movie landscape of 2022, Jordan Peele feels like some kind of unicorn: an auteur filmmaker whose mere presence above the title elicits a kind of collective thrill in both audiences and critics that no mad multiverse or reanimated dinosaurs can really match. And he's essentially done it with just two films over five years, cementing his signature style — spooky, high-concept, socially astute — with a speed and clarity of purpose that most directors take half a lifetime to nail down.

Nope (in theaters July 22) arrives accordingly with no small set of expectations, and not a little bit of mystery: The 35 million-plus people who have viewed at least one of two versions of the trailer online will come in with the idea that it is perhaps a play on an old-school UFO movie, or at least something vaguely extraterrestrial. And they know that it marks a reunion with his Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya , who is now, like Peele , an Oscar winner . (They've both still been under-served by the Academy, but that's a story for another time.)

It's also the first lead role of this caliber for Keke Palmer , a onetime Nickelodeon kid whose prickly, dynamic presence on the sidelines of films like 2019's Hustlers seemed to beg for a bigger closeup. Here, she gets to hold the restless center of nearly every scene she's in as Emerald Haywood, the showboating sister of Kaluuya's more cautious, introspective Otis Junior. Otis Senior (Keith David) is not long for this world, or at least this screen: He dies in the opening scene, felled by some mysterious space-junk detritus that drops from the sky one day on the family's ranch outside Los Angeles. ("What's a bad miracle, they got a word for that?" OJ asks ruefully at one point, looking like he already knows the answer.) The Haywoods hail from generations who, as Emerald brightly explains to a roomful of blank-eyed industry types, helped bring horse-training to Hollywood, earning an inaugural place for Black wranglers in movie lore.

That and five dollars won't buy them a bag of carrots, though, if they can't get their stallions to behave on a green screen. And even back at the ranch, the livestock still seem spooked. But aren't animals always the first to know when something's off? There's a man named Ricky "Jupe" Park ( Minari' s Steven Yeun) , busy running his own hustle at a retro Western-themed amusement park down the road, who may have ideas about the strange weather hanging over the valley. Jupe was once a child star himself, until something went terribly wrong with a chimpanzee on a sitcom set more than 20 years ago; now he works a sort of rhinestone-cowboy shtick with his wife and kids, though he's always eager to revisit the old glory days if somebody asks, or even if they don't.

Revealing much more about what follows seems like an unnecessary spoiler, though it also feels fair to say that Peele has never leaned this close to early Spielberg (or if you're feeling less charitable, mid-period M. Night Shyamalan). His screenplay — threaded through with flashbacks and unhurried character moments — is for a long time a tease, both elliptical and explicit when it comes to the central mystery, though it's clear he's absorbed a lifetime of Close Encounters lore, and much darker visitations too. The casting, as always, is on point: Palmer's Emerald is loose and funny and kinetically alive, the kind of final-girl hero most scary movies only feint at creating, and Kaluuya remains one of the most fascinatingly interior actors to watch on screen. His OJ doesn't speak much and often moves even less, but there's so much going on within him that the eye never wanders; his stillness is a centrifugal force.

The wide-lens cinematography, by Hoyte Van Hoytema ( Interstellar , Dunkirk ), is gorgeously expansive, and Michael Abel's score clatters and shivers. The prevailing mood is a looming, sun-drenched tension (as in Ari Aster's Midsommar , daylight doesn't signal safety here). For all of the film's escalating supernatural events, though, what's less clearly drawn, and will likely prove less satisfying to a plot-hungry public, are the whys and hows of its conclusion. Peele's scripts have always felt like meta-text; this one toggles between classic genre stuff and a deliberately fragmented play on certain all-American tropes — flying saucers, sitcoms, jump-scare terror — filtered through a fresh, keenly self-aware lens. As a sci-fi fable, Nope feels both more slippery and less viscerally satisfying than the relatively straightforward horror of Get Out or even 2019's Us , but it still sticks. The truth is out there, or up there, in that curiously immovable cloud that looms like a cotton-ball anvil above the Haywood ranch; it's Peele's prerogative to build his world below it, and leave the rest. Grade: B+

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Nope First Reviews: Ambitious and Well Crafted, but Possibly Jordan Peele's Most Divisive Film Yet

Critics say the writer-directors sci-fi thriller is thought-provoking and confidently made, but its big ideas and cerebral plot may leave general audiences wanting more..

TAGGED AS: aliens , First Reviews , Horror , movies

Nope marks the third feature from writer and director Jordan Peele , and the first reviews of the movie prove that Get Out and Us were no flukes. This time, the filmmaker is focused on a frightening science fiction story involving a horse ranch, a former child actor, and something mysterious lurking above the clouds. Nope stars Daniel Kaluuya , Keke Palmer ,and Steven Yeun within a praised ensemble amidst some spectacular visuals. But whether its script is brilliant or confusing is debated from one review to the next.

Here’s what critics are saying about Nope :

Does Nope confirm Jordan Peele as one of the great directors of our time?

With Nope , Peele once again proves that he’s not just one of the most interesting filmmakers working in horror today, he’s one of the most interesting filmmakers working, period. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

He continues to be one of the best in the business. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

This film really might be what it takes to etch him as, no, not the next Spielberg, but an event-level filmmaker that we’ve all been worried we were losing. – Cory Woodroof, 615 Film

How does it compare to Get Out and Us ?

While still full of profound and layered ideas, Nope is closer in execution to the horror-comedy mix of Get Out than Us . – Ben Kendrick, Screen Rant

Nope is arguably the most conventional horror film of his three directorial efforts. – Matt Rodriguez, Shakefire

Peele’s most assured, confident film yet… Nope may not be Jordan Peele’s best movie to date, but it is his most enjoyable. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

Compared to Get Out and Us , Nope is likely to prove more divisive… I fully expect it to be labeled his strongest and weakest flick in equal measure. – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

Peele is capable of doing much better movies (as evidenced by Get Out and Us ), but Nope just looks like a cynical cash grab. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Is it as good as Us and Get Out ? Nope. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

It’s Jordan Peele’s weakest film. – Robert Daniels, Polygon

(Photo by ©Universal Pictures)

What other movies does it recall?

You can just about taste the DNA of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and… other films that have been made in the shadow of Close Encounters , like M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival . – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

What binds this movie so closely to Close Encounters of the Third Kind  has less to do with alien visitors, in the end, than with the fervent curiosity that they can inspire. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

It captures the same thrills, tension, and strong characters of movies like Jaws , while also setting itself up to be as iconic as sci-fi movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien . – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

It’s closer to Peele’s Super 8 than Peele’s Signs . – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

This movie reminds me of Tremors … That’s a movie with swagger. And Nope has a similar swagger that Peele was smart to use. – Mike Ryan, Uproxx

The film it most resembled in spirit is a small one, Theo Anthony’s 2021 documentary All Light, Everywhere . – Cory Woodroof, 615 Film

But is it also totally original?

Nope is unlike anything you’ve seen before. – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

With stunning cinematic moments of pure dread, terror, and wonder, Peele has indeed delivered on his promise to bring audiences something unique. – Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

This frequently monotonous and unimaginative movie is an unfortunate case of hype over substance. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Is it scary?

The best horror movie of the year… building the tension to the point that it feels as if nowhere is safe. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

Peele is able to create one thrilling, scary scene after another. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

As a horror movie, Nope fails miserably to be frightening. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

How does the movie look?

Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema captures something so original visually that it is destined to become iconic. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

Nope mostly delivers in terms of big-screen spectacle, visual oomph… and overdue iconography. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

Peele’s latest boasts some of the most inspired alien design since H.R. Giger left his mark on the genre. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

The movie’s visual effects are adequate but definitely not spectacular for a movie concept of this scope. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Does Nope have a compelling plot?

Nope doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary way. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

For all of the film’s escalating supernatural events, though, what’s less clearly drawn, and will likely prove less satisfying to a plot-hungry public, are the whys and hows of its conclusion. – Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

It’s obvious that writer/director/producer Jordan Peele got this movie made without anyone stepping in to question the very weak and lazy plot of Nope . – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Nope is an idea more than a story. It’s a collection of individually captivating scenes, as opposed to an intriguing whole. – Robert Daniels, Polygon

Is it more cerebral than entertaining?

Nope feels like something of a B-movie ouroboros, an unusually well-made and imaginative thriller that’s sometimes tripped up by its own high-mindedness. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Depending on your appetite for the heady and sonorous, it will either feel frustratingly perplexing or strike you as a work of unquestionable genius. – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

It will leave certain viewers more confused than exhilarated. – Ben Kendrick, Screen Rant

Peele’s strength is that he makes you lean in and talk about his film whether you like it or not. – Kathia Woods, Cup of Soul

But does it actually make any sense?

Nope establishes itself as something of an ethically minded Hollywood history lesson, with a particular focus on the industry’s long, brutal record of animal accidents and abuses on set. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Nope gives audiences an unforgettable experience, but forces them to reckon with exactly what types of experiences they really want, and at what cost. – Cory Woodroof, 615 Film

While this might be his most bombastic film in terms of what he’s attempting to it, it’s also maybe his most understated in its messaging. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Even when parts of it don’t gel, Nope is a rapturous watch. – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

Logic often takes a back seat, and that has the unfortunate effect of lessening our involvement. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

It’s a puzzle with a few pieces missing; standing back from it, you can still see the picture. But does it give the viewer exactly what they want? See the title. – Odie Henderson, RogerEbert.com

Does the movie have any other major issues?

Events may happen to OJ and Emerald, but outside of the plot’s story beats, we don’t really know anything about them on an individual level. – Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

The characters would have benefited from greater depth and dimension. – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

Peele is far too impressed with its handsomeness to work on populating it with fully felt characters. – Robert Daniels, Polygon

The film’s drawn-out pacing issues… leads to redundant and repetitive events and a comparatively (even compared to Us ) claustrophobic narrative. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

Nope opens everywhere on July 22, 2022.

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Jordan Peele’s Nope, explained

Unpacking the spectacle at the heart of the movie’s mysteries.

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It’s gutsy to start a movie with a verse from Nahum, which is surely one of the Bible’s least-quoted books. But Jordan Peele likes a challenge.

So the text that opens Nope , the director’s follow-up to Us and Get Out , is Nahum 3:6: I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle. Buckle up!

Nope is a bloody, creepy UFO movie, unexpectedly gross in spots, with several different ideas knocking around in its head. Since the relatively straightforward Get Out , Peele’s work has moved away from simple explanation and toward discomfiting vibes, and that’s to its credit.

But that means audiences have to lean in and work harder, and have to be okay with mystery. That helps explain why some viewers may come away dissatisfied. TV and movies over the past several decades have coaxed us to expect explanations and puzzle boxes in our entertainment, and to be annoyed when creators refuse to reveal the trick at the end of the show. But Peele is happy to leave some things to our imaginations.

Which includes his gutsy epigraph. Nahum is one of the “minor” prophets of the Bible (which basically means the book he wrote is short), nestled in between Jonah — the guy who was swallowed up by a giant fish — and Zephaniah, who like Nahum mainly foretold destruction . The target of all three was Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, which did indeed fall not long after the prophecies, taking the empire down with it. Just before this verse, Nahum describes Nineveh as a lion’s den, the “city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims,” a place with “galloping horses and jolting chariots,” full of bodies of the dead. Basically, Nineveh arrogantly chews people up and spits them out. So, Nahum says, God will do the same to Nineveh.

Nope is not set in Nineveh, exactly; it’s set in Hollywood. The action takes place in Agua Dulce, about a 40-mile drive north of Hollywood. There, siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) run Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, named for their great-great-great grandfather Alistair E. Haywood, who rode the horse in the first moving picture ever made . They train horses for movies. But following the untimely death of their father Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David), killed in a freak accident in which debris rained down from the sky, they’re running into hard times. Plus, the advent of CGI means the movies just don’t require real horses on set the way they used to.

Alistair Haywood’s character is Peele’s invention, though the film in which he rode a horse, made by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878, is real. Actually, there were multiple films; the one that Peele intertwines Nope with involves a horse named Annie G. ridden by an unidentified but definitely Black jockey. History remembers the horse but has lost track of the jockey’s identity , which is sort of Nope ’s point. In one scene, Emerald proudly announces on a movie set that “since the moment pictures could move, we got skin in the game.” But nobody remembers Haywood unless she reminds them.

In any case, the Haywood ranch is just up the road from Jupiter’s Claim, and OJ’s been selling horses to owner Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) to keep the ranch afloat. Jupiter’s Claim is a goofy cartoonish amusement park lightly modeled on a fun-loving town from some old Western — and those in turn, let’s remember, were very lightly modeled on the actual West. Jupe, a former child star, picked up his nickname from his role as “Jupiter” on Kid Sheriff , a movie he starred in following a rather sudden end to a short-lived sitcom, Gordy’s Home . He now sustains a living chasing that fame any way he can: selling access to memorabilia, attracting tourists to Jupiter’s Claim, starring in reality shows with his family, and some … weirder pursuits.

But that’s in keeping with Agua Dulce, because there’s been a lot of weird stuff going on in the six months since Otis died. Electricity randomly browns out and audio slows down at nighttime, and the laws of physics occasionally behave strangely. And there’s something in the sky.

Yes, this is a UFO movie, or a “UAP” movie, since — as local electronics wiz and alien aficionado Angel (Brandon Perea) tells Emerald — the government switched to calling them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena after they “declassified all that alien shit years ago.” Call them what you want: Flying saucers in movies are often metaphors for invasion by unknown forces, or for paranoia that the government is keeping secrets from its people.

Peele knows all this, but with Nope , he isn’t doing pure homage. Instead, he scatters breadcrumbs along the way to his main point. This is partly a film about how frequently Black film history has been pushed out of memory. In the ranch house, you can glimpse posters for the films Duel at Diablo and Buck and the Preacher , the first Westerns that Sidney Poitier starred in and directed, respectively, in 1966 and 1972. Buck and the Preacher , in particular, was groundbreaking for casting Black actors as main characters. Coupled with the Haywood connection — and the fact that it’s still hard, 50 years later, to get a movie made starring Black actors that isn’t about trauma in some way — Nope points to Hollywood’s history of shoving inconvenient histories aside.

But that’s not all that’s going on here. Nope is centrally about how our experiences of reality have been almost entirely colonized by screens and cameras and entertainment’s portrayals of what it calls reality, to the point that we can barely conceive of experiencing reality directly, with honesty and without any kind of manipulation. It’s as if it sprung from the mind of any number of theorists, like Guy Debord, the philosopher who in 1967 wrote a book called Society of the Spectacle . “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail,” Debord wrote, “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

In his treatise, Debord goes on to posit that “the spectacle” — which he describes as sort of an all-consuming blanket of unreality that attracts our gaze and replaces our reality — more or less has colonized modern life. Our social life is not about living, but having.

And that’s all over Nope, from start to finish. Jupe’s offices are lined with posters commemorating TV and film history, from his earliest work all the way to an upcoming family reality show, all designed to keep eyes on him. He’s been courting the flying saucer, whatever it is, since its appearance six months ago, using Haywood’s horses to do so. And while he harbors a painfully traumatic memory of a chimp attack on the set of the short-lived Gordy’s Home , he can’t access it directly when explaining to Emerald and OJ; he recounts a Saturday Night Live sketch about it instead.

Jupe’s development of a “family show” at Jupiter’s Claim is just another harnessing of spectacle — in this case, the flying saucer — to get paying customers to his amusement park. He calls the unknowable creatures he believes are on board the saucer “The Viewers.” They are watching us , he thinks, unable to think of himself outside that paradigm. To be alive is to be watched, he believes. It’s when people stop watching you that you cease to exist.

Watching and being watched is everywhere in Nope . When OJ and Emerald first come to believe there’s a saucer in the sky, they head straight for the electronics store to get surveillance cameras, which Angel installs on their property. Angel, besotted with aliens because of TV (“Ancient Aliens, History Channel — watch that shit,” he tells them), rigs up a remote connection so he can watch at night from the electronics store. It’s like TV, till it’s real. The first night, as OJ dodges the saucer, a nearby coworker in the store, munching chips and hanging out, even breathlessly asks, “What happened to OJ?” As if he’s a character on a show, and not a real guy whose life is in danger.

OJ isn’t much for technology; unlike smartphone-toting Emerald, he still uses a flip phone, a clear sign that he doesn’t want to participate in this spectacle culture. When it comes for him, he knows not to look. He opts out. (Nope.)

But you can’t really opt out of a spectacle culture — it’s around you, and whether or not you want to participate, it tends to suck you in anyhow. When OJ and Emerald realize there’s some kind of a flying saucer in the sky, their first impulse is to film it, to own a representation of it. That’s not without reason, since they’ve grown up knowing that their family’s place in Hollywood history was essentially stolen from them by those more interested in the horse’s name than in Haywood’s. But their urge to get “the impossible shot” is greater than their urge to run away from the danger itself.

Yet it might help to explain why OJ is the first to realize that the saucer isn’t a saucer at all, at least not like the kind they’re used to seeing in the movies. It wasn’t crazy to assume the object in the sky was a ship carrying aliens. Many of the things we believe about the world around us and about our history come from representations of them on screens, not reality. (Debord again.) Our ideas of what war is like, what cities are like, what love is like, how the West was “won” — they all come through movies. They have since the pictures started moving, as Emerald puts it.

And as time has gone on, we’ve grown more hungry for bigger, better representations. The mirror ball that spooks the horse on set is a VFX ball , a key tool for digital video artists in making today’s spectacle-driven CGI blockbusters.

Which is why it matters what we see. But OJ gets it: the saucer is alive, and it isn’t trying to help them or study them or warn them. It just wants to eat them. It’s less saucer than spectacle to gawk at. And it has a screen-shaped rectangle at its heart which, as we see at the start of the movie, contains Muybridge’s film of Haywood riding the horse. But it’s insatiable. It wants blood. The spectacle consumes all.

There are other deliciously unexplained breadcrumbs scattered throughout Nope , which could be clues or references or just delightful red herrings. There’s a tiny reference to Poltergeist when the alien arrives. There’s also a tennis shoe that balances on its heel, for no apparent reason, during Gordy’s on-set rampage; it later shows up in Jupe’s back room of memorabilia. The name of the TMZ reporter who shows up on a motorcycle — with a mirrored helmet, no less — is listed in the film’s credits as “Ryder Muybridge,” which is obviously a reference to the man who shot the film starring Alistair Haywood and who has gone down in history with all the credit. (Emerald is desperate that he not steal their impossible shot.)

In the end, of course, there’s a great irony to Nope , and one of which Peele is undoubtedly aware; he ends the film, after all, with the “impossible shot” being captured as a still by an old-fashioned film camera. (Which is not a guarantee that they’ll be believed — you can fake a photo, right?) Nope is a big, very loud, very effects-driven spectacle. It’s a movie with a thousand references to the past. It’s also a riotously entertaining thrill ride that owes portions of its plot to some of Hollywood’s most successful summer blockbusters, Jaws and Independence Day . It’s part of the culture; it can’t stand outside of it.

But it functions at least a little bit as a warning, or maybe a prophecy, or a call for a reboot, or a reminder to care about what, or who, gets our attention. When midway through the film, the saucer rains guts and blood down on the ranch house, you have to think of Nahum’s words: “I will cast abominable filth upon you.”

A culture built on spectacle can only get more spectacular, coaxing us to always look at it, to never tear ourselves away, to gorge ourselves on it. The impossible trick is to just say nope.

Nope is playing in theaters beginning July 21.

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Critic’s Pick

‘Nope’ Review: Hell Yes

Jordan Peele’s genre-melting third feature stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as brother-and-sister horse wranglers defending the family ranch from an extraterrestrial threat.

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By A.O. Scott

The trailers for Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” one of the most feverishly anticipated movies of the summer, have raised some intriguing questions. Is it a western? A horror film? Science fiction? Satire? Will it fulfill the expectations raised by Peele’s first two mind-bending, zeitgeist-surfing features, “Get Out” and “Us,” or confound them?

I can now report that the answer to all of those questions is: Yup. Which is to say that there are some fascinating internal tensions within the movie, along with impeccably managed suspense, sharp jokes and a beguiling, unnerving atmosphere of all-around weirdness.

“Nope” feels less polemically pointed than “Us” or “Get Out,” more at home in its idiosyncrasies and flights of imagination even as it follows, in the end, a more conventional narrative path. This might be cause for some disappointment, since Peele’s keen dialectical perspective on our collective American pathologies has been a bright spot in an era of franchised corporate wish fulfillment. At the same time, he’s an artist with the freedom and confidence to do whatever he wants to, and one who knows how to challenge audiences without alienating them.

In any case, it would be inaccurate to claim that the social allegory has been scrubbed away: Every genre Peele invokes is a flytrap for social meanings, and you can’t watch this cowboys-and-aliens monster movie without entertaining some deep thoughts about race, ecology, labor and the toxic, enchanting power of modern popular culture.

“Nope” addresses such matters in a mood that feels more ruminant than argumentative. The main target of its critique is also the principal object of its affection, which we might call — using a name that has lately become something of a fighting word — cinema.

Peele’s movie love runs wide and deep. There are sequences here that nod to past masters, from Hitchcock to Spielberg to Shyamalan, and shots that revel in the sheer ecstasy of moviemaking. A sketch-comedy genius before he turned to directing, Peele never takes his performers for granted, giving everyone space to explore quirks and nuances of character. He also shows an appetite, and an impressive knack, for big effects. The climactic scenes aim for — and very nearly achieve — the kind of old-fashioned sublimity that packs wonder, terror and slack-jawed admiration into a single sensation.

Movies can be scary, enchanting, funny and strange. Sometimes they can be all those things at once. What they never are is innocent. While this movie can fairly be described as Spielbergian, it turns on an emphatic and explicit debunking of Spielberg’s most characteristic visual trope: the awe-struck upward gaze .

“Nope” starts with a cautionary text, drawn from the Old Testament Book of Nahum, which describes God’s threatened punishment on the wicked city of Nineveh: “I will make a spectacle of you.” Our beloved spectacles — like most of the other artifacts of our fallen world — are built on cruelty, exploitation and erasure, and “Nope” is partly about how we incorporate knowledge of that fact into our enjoyment of them. In the first scene, a chimpanzee goes berserk on the set of a sitcom, a moment of absurd, bloody terror that becomes a motif and a thematic key. The ape is a wild animal behaving according to its nature even though it has been tamed and trained for human uses.

The same can be said for the horses who serve as Peele’s totems of movie tradition. He invokes what is thought to be the very first moving image, captured by the 19th-century inventor and adventurer Eadweard Muybridge , of a man on horseback. Emerald ( Keke Palmer ) and O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) claim the rider as their ancestor. They honor his legacy by holding onto the business started by their father, Otis Haywood (Keith David), a ranch that supplies horses for television and movies.

O.J. — it’s short for Otis Jr. — is the main wrangler, a laconic, sad-eyed cowboy more comfortable around horses than people. His sister is more outgoing, and one of the offhand delights of “Nope” is how credibly Kaluuya and Palmer convey the prickly understanding that holds siblings together and sometimes threatens to drive them apart.

Strange things are happening on the ranch. The power cuts out, a mysterious cloud lurks on the horizon, and freakish storms drop detritus from the sky. A horse’s flank is pierced by a falling house key, and Otis Sr. takes an improbable projectile in the eye. Is there a flying saucer haunting the valley? Emerald and O.J. suspect as much, and so does their neighbor, an entrepreneur known as Jupe (Steven Yeun) who has turned his corner of the valley into a Wild West-themed tourist trap.

The possible U.F.O. hovers around the edges of the action for a good while, kind of like the shark in “Jaws” — or the spaceship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” — adding an element of danger that throws human interactions into comical and dramatic relief. As in “Jaws,” a fractious posse forms to deal with the threat, including Angel (Brandon Perea), an anxious techie, and Antlers (Michael Wincott), a visionary cinematographer who shows up at the ranch with a hand-cranked IMAX camera. Jupe, whose back story as a child actor connects him to that wayward chimp, is a bit like the mayor of Amity — less a villain than the representative of a clueless, self-serving status quo.

He’s also a showman, and as such an avatar of the film’s ambivalence about the business of spectacle. Emerald, O.J., Antlers and Angel, by contrast, are craftspeople, absorbed in matters of technique and concerned with the workaday ethics of image-making. This is the place to note Guillaume Rocheron’s haunting, eye-popping special effects, Hoyte van Hoytema’s lucid-dream cinematography and Nicholas Monsour’s sharp editing, and to encourage you to think about the hard work and deep skill represented by all the names in the final credits.

Peele, of course, is both craftsman and showman. He’s too rigorous a thinker to fall back on facile antagonisms between art and commerce, and too generous an entertainer to saddle a zigzagging shaggy-dog story with didacticism. Instead, he revels in paradoxes. The moral of “Nope” is “look away,” but you can’t take your eyes off it. The title accentuates the negative, but how can you refuse?

Nope Rated R. Scares and swears. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Nope Reviews

The supporting players work together in ways that show Peele’s prowess, not only as a visual filmmaker, but as one who casts well and trusts his actors. Nope is a wild ride, and one I can’t wait to take again.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2024

Jordan Peele’s third film captures the terrible beauty of our endless fascination with events no matter how horrific.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

Nope, Peele’s third directorial outing, may debut in the horror genre, but there’s more to the brilliant film than audiences’ expectations.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 7, 2023

More stylish than substantial.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Sep 7, 2023

I love all of Jordan's movies so far, but this one might be my favorite just because there's so much to unpack. Every time I think about it I find more things that I need to talk about and it's the gift that keeps giving.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 14, 2023

It's a very layered movie, lot of themes on Hollywood and how it uses people and kinda chews them up and spits them out - figuratively. He [Jordan Peele] is probably one of our best directors today.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 10, 2023

The failure of Nope is partly because of Peele's lack of restraint in terms of mangling together mismatched ideas.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Aug 9, 2023

Although the vision is stronger than the pen this time around, the Spielberg-esque scope is all-embracing, and his craftiness in the individual horror/sci-fi set pieces is utterly remarkable.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 29, 2023

As with his previous films, Peele wears his inspirations on his sleeve. This time around he mines heavily from two Spielberg classics, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Jordan Peele takes full advantage of Hoyte van Hoytema's phenomenal cinematography and Michael Abels' memorable score to create a spectacle worthy of the big screen, but it's the sound production that really elevates the movie to that level.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 25, 2023

An almost perfect spectacle that dives into our obsessions with spectacles in our real life. A unique blockbuster that will make you afraid of looking up.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Jordan Peele has made a science fiction thriller that is one of the most visually striking films in recent memory.

Known for his powerful social commentary in US and Get Out, Jordan Peele reinvents the summer blockbuster through a neo-sci-fi western that looks at society’s obsession with spectacle.

Damn the white-washed history, and the capitalist traps of Hollywood’s fortune and fame. The beast has no more power here.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

It's a good movie, but perhaps it's time to take some of our bloated expectations off Peele as a filmmaker.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 16, 2023

The film ultimately spends what feels like an eternity in a climactic and rather confusing confrontation that feels elaborate but fails to ratchet up the tension.

Full Review | May 30, 2023

A sci-fi horror flick that raises some interesting questions about why aliens might come to Earth and what for.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 28, 2023

Director-writer Peele clearly knows the business of suspending disbelief. I say “yup” to ‘Nope.’

Full Review | Original Score: A | Apr 16, 2023

Beneath the interesting and strange tale of aliens and UAPs is Peele shining a bright light from the sky onto Hollywood and American pop culture’s exploitation of Black people and animals.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 7, 2023

There's so much considered detail and nuance that is weaved into these fantastical themes which is bolstered by a lot of the characters taking control of their own narrative.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 23, 2023

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‘nope’: the meaning behind jordan peele’s most terrifying scene yet.

The filmmaker tackles tokenism and the Hollywood system in a sequence that will likely be talked about for some time.

By Richard Newby

Richard Newby

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[This story contains spoilers for Jordan Peele ‘s Nope .]

What’s the deal with the chimp? Well that chimp, Gordy, is the key to the whole bloody affair.

Let’s back up for a moment. Jordan Peele’s latest film, Nope , further cements the filmmaker as one the most important contemporary voices in cinema. Across three films, Get Out (2017), Us (2019) and Nope , Peele has displayed a unique and incisive ability to discuss who we are as a species shaped by history we remain largely ignorant of. His latest, an ambitious sci-fi/horror film that subverts expectations, has such sights to show us. And while we cast our eyes upon these sights, we’re left to question whether we should be looking at all.

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In this age of “content” geared toward “consumers,” in which almost every experience, the beautiful, the tragic, and the horrific, is made public and packaged for our entertainment, we’ve allowed ourselves to depersonalize and otherize for the sake of entertainment. We’ve allowed screens to create a barrier between us and them .

Hollywood feasts on the minority experience. It always has. Nope provides a history lesson in that sense with Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion,” the first motion picture. While Muybridge is known by the film scholars and enthusiasts, the name of the Black jockey, the “first movie star” as the film puts it, has been lost to history. That jockey’s descendants, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer), who stand at the center of Nope , have sought to reclaim that legacy after their father, Otis (Keith David), is killed by falling metal debris — a token, a coin to be exact. As Hollywood horse trainers, the Haywoods have barely managed to get by, forced to sell half of their horses to feed others. In an industry largely driven by nepotism, it speaks volumes that the Haywoods have been forced to remain in their place, tied down and unable to move on up in the entertainment industry.

During a shoot for a commercial, OJ attempts to impart safety guidelines to the crew about the horse, Lucky, such as not standing behind him or looking him in the eye. But the director (notably portrayed by Oz Perkins, filmmaker and son of Psycho’ s Anthony Perkins) and crew mock the rules — and OJ, giving him and his sister the same amount of respect as the horse. These individuals are simply things to look at, tools in the creation of content. Crew members treat them as subservient in ways that others can witness, allowing them to elevate their own positions. When living creatures, be they human or animals, are made a spectacle of, they are diminished, reduced to entertainment — currency exchanged for status.

Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child actor who runs a Western-themed amusement park, Jupiter’s Claim, is in a predicament not entirely different from the Haywoods’, even if he seems more successful on the surface. Jupe gained fame as a child on a movie called Kid Sheriff . The idea seems innocent enough, but the history of moviemaking tells the story of child actors of color being used as tokens. The idea of an Asian American kid portraying the quintessential white American archetype, the cowboy, in a movie that would have debuted in the late ’80s or early ’90s, would have very clearly been a spectacle, a concept funny to audiences even if they weren’t exactly sure why.

Some can’t help but compare Peele to Spielberg, and Nope certainly shares similarities with Jaws (1975). While it’s easy to see that line of thought, it’s another Spielberg movie that hangs over Jupe, and is even referenced by the font on the Kid Sheriff poster. It’s difficult not to think of Ke Huy Quan, who portrayed Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), or Gedde Watanabe, Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles (1984), whose accents were mocked by audiences and whose characters became apocryphal examples of the diminutive Asian sidekick and the foreign exchange student. Both actors struggled to find a place in Hollywood afterward because the spectacle rarely translates into currency, or opportunities for nepotism. And as we’ve seen most recently with Quan’s performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once , we’ve been missing out on a brilliant talent because of that. So, when we find Jupe running a cheap theme park in the middle of nowhere with his three kids, who put on shows for audiences in the hopes of being discovered, we are witnessing a familiar Hollywood story play out, just not the one people talk about.

But that’s only half of Jupe’s story. The other half comes back to the chimp. As Jupe explains to Emerald, who seems to have some unconscious memory or preternatural sense about the chimp, he was a castmember on a sitcom called Gordy’s Home following the success of Kid Sheriff . Nope opens with a gruesome attack from a chimp on the set of the sitcom, an attack that later becomes the subject of a cover of MAD Magazine and an SNL sketch in which Chris Kattan portrays the chimp. Only later in the film do we see the full extent of the attack, which was so intense and horrifying in camera angles and sound effects that it stands as one of the most frightening sequences in Peele’s filmography.

So, what’s the deal with the chimp? It was the balloons, or rather what they symbolize. The episode, titled “Gordy’s Birthday,” features a white father, mother and sister, their presumably adopted son played by Jupe, and the chimp, Gordy. As the family celebrates Gordy’s birthday, with the chimp, whose real name is never given and is simply referred to as “one of the chimps that played Gordy,” dressed in human clothes and wearing a birthday party hat, Jupe takes out his present, a small box, before his sister, portrayed by the actress Mary Jo Elliott (Sophia Coto) comes out with a much larger box and steals the attention away from her brother. Like Kid Sheriff , we’ve seen this kind of content before, in which the token character is used as a setup for a joke. When Elliott opens the box, a half-dozen balloons rise up into the stage lights and pop, sending the ape into a frenzy that only stops when he sees Jupe cowering under a table and extends his fist to him, to perform the fist bump move they perform on the show.

Balloons are an invitation to spectacle. They suggest, “Come see, come see” and promise entertainment. But they are also empty, filled with air, and when they deflate or pop and we realize the spectacle is over we too are left with a feeling of emptiness, the craving sensation for more. The popping balloons startle Gordy, yes, but more importantly, they signify the end of spectacle. Gordy, tired of being the sideshow attraction, the joke, reminds those around him that he is not an attraction, or a means for humans to elevate themselves in comparison to their ape cousins. Gordy’s bloodshed is a reminder of what he is. It’s as if he is saying, “You want to watch me? Really watch me? Then let me show you — I’m a wild animal.” Yet, Gordy doesn’t attack Jupe because he sees kinship in him, another living being treated like a spectacle, a token, in front of a live studio audience. It’s a commentary on the ways in which people of color have often been compared to animals, apes in particular, as a means to discard their humanity, and how even on a Hollywood soundstage, they’re still seen the same way — things to be sold to audiences who never let them grow beyond the chains of expectation placed on them.

Nope expands that concept through the presence of an alien lifeform, not a UFO, but a giant disc-shaped eye, drawn to the area by tube men, people shaped balloons that promise spectacle, something to consume. And consume the alien does, sucking up life forms into itself and taking all people ever were or could be as sustenance. The alien does what we’ve been doing for generations, watching people in positions stripped of power and then consuming their experiences for our sustenance. It’s no coincidence that the people chasing this alien in the hopes to get footage, secure their legacies, and become somebody are OJ, a Black man, Jupe, an Asian man, Angel (Brandon Perea), a Latino man, and Emerald, a queer Black woman, all groups that we’ve seen dehumanized in our movies, television shows and news footage.

Stop for a moment and consider the groups of people we most often see murdered in movies and on television, and then consider the groups of people we often see brutalized in shaky cam footage shared on the news and social media. It’s minority groups. The suggestion here isn’t that movies and television lead people to commit crimes against these people. Rather, it’s the idea that we become desensitized to seeing violence committed against these groups until it becomes tolerable.

Footage of cops killing Black people, Asian Americans being assaulted on the streets, Latinos being put in cages, and queer people being harassed and murdered may start as news, but there reaches a point in sharing that footage that we stop seeing the victims as people, but as currency for our political awareness and badges to show how woke we are, a boon of gratitude and relief that it wasn’t us, and in some cases, though few would admit it, something to see simply because it’s trending. Months ago, an active shooter livestreamed a mass murder of Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. He did it for his racist ideology, but he also did it for the views. We may not be doing the murdering, but we do share some culpability in what we watch, and how it allows blood to be spilt, just like the blood the alien rains down on the Haywoods’ home after feasting on the spectators at Jupiter’s Claim.

We haven’t grown beyond gladiatorial arenas, we’ve just changed the way we view them, eagerly consuming experiences that shouldn’t be seen instead of scrolling by and saying, “nope.” OJ’s name, revealed to be Otis Jr., is meant to conjure images of OJ Simpson and the 1994 televised high-speed car chase following the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. The public couldn’t turn away, and once the trial began more people tuned in. We’ve only seen this issue of turning crimes and tragedies into spectacle grow over the years. Most recently, the highly publicized Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamation trial became a spectator sport online, with fans scouring every moment of footage in hopes of turning public opinion in favor of one or the other. The term “media circus” no longer seems to cut it, because the public have involved themselves and no longer just watch, but ride the reactions, testimonies and verdicts as one would a roller coaster.

Even the most painful experiences aren’t beyond the subject of jokes and parody. While it may seem like a stretch to imagine SNL doing a skit on the Gordy incident, we’ve accepted worse for the means of our entertainment. Public figures in the midst of mental health crises, politicians getting away with murder, child abuse, police brutality. And then there’s TMZ , which comes into play in Nope ’s third act. The “news” site represents a dissolution of privacy, and the notion that everyone wants their five minutes of fame, regardless of the pain. Nothing is off-limits as long as we can maintain that barrier that separates us and them . But OJ, Emerald and Angel aren’t just after fleeting celebrity, but creating a lasting legacy that the world has denied them, by capturing the alien on film.

There is power in watching, and sometimes beauty. Peele doesn’t forget that. When the alien reveals its full self, a giant, billowing, balloon-shaped organism with a square-shaped mouth that resembles a camera lens, we’re reminded that watching has the potential to humanize rather than dehumanize, to tell the stories of those history has tried to erase. And the alien, in its final form, invites us to come see, to look it in the eye and see ourselves reflected in it. Are we merely consumers? Or are we historians and storytellers?

The photos Emerald captures of the alien before it bursts after consuming a giant-inflatable balloon may allow OJ, Angel and herself to gain recognition, cement their legacy and thus freedom. But in reminding people that they aren’t nameless individuals who exist for the consumption of other people, they run the risk of upsetting the perceived status quo. The chimp known as Gordy died with a bullet in the brain when he rocked the boat, and even dead he was forced to remain a joke, a spectacle. And so, much like Get Out and Us, Nope leaves audiences with an ending that feels triumphant but begs the question of what happens after the screen cuts to credits.

Does the barrier shatter and permit tokenism to be exchanged for a lasting Hollywood currency and legacy? Or does the fact that Emerald has been drawn to Gordy’s story throughout the film suggest that mankind will do what it has always done: dress up those they see as less-than in the garments of humanity, take all they can from them for entertainment, and then spill their blood? Do we want to see how it all plays out? Most assuredly, the answer is, “nope.”

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Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’ Is a Deeply Layered Sci-Fi Masterpiece

An ominous cloud, a black horse and random pieces of debris floating in mid-air.

That imagery was more than enough to get fans buzzing about Jordan Peele ’s highly-anticipated sci-fi horror film, Nope —and for good reason. With his past box office hits, Get Out and Us, the writer and director garnered a reputation for expertly weaving timely themes and powerful symbols into his work. So, it comes as no surprise that his latest title is just as complex as it is bizarre.

The new film, which premieres today, stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood, who own a horse ranch that often works with Hollywood production teams for films. After their father suddenly dies from a random object that falls from the sky, they learn that a deadly UFO has been lingering in the clouds above their ranch. Desperate to capture it on camera, they devise a plan, but things quickly go south.

The plot seems straightforward enough, but it's also laden with metaphors and timely commentary about the link between power and attention. For instance, one scene involves former child star Ricky Park (Steven Yeun) as he tries to unveil the UFO to his audience of spectators. This points to our culture's growing obsession with entertainment and the unknown—thanks in part to the recent pandemic—and how letting these things distract us can lead to dire consequences. It's also no accident that this mysterious alien has a penchant for horses, which are known to signify power, independence and freedom.

Another key theme is racism in America. All throughout the film, as OJ and Emerald desperately fight to get this alien creature on camera, it serves as a reminder of how most people of color feel when they experience racism—or rather, a subtle enemy that they constantly feel the need to prove is real. Then of course, there's the memorable opening scene, where Emerald schools a white production staff member about the legendary Black jockey who appeared in one of the first motion pictures ever made. At this point, one can't help but think about the erasure of influential Black men and women throughout history.

While Peele doesn't shy away from timely topics, it's worth noting that the tone of this film is lighter and, dare I say, fun, compared to his first two films, thanks in part to Palmer's impeccable comedic timing and, of course, an occasional reference to the film's very relatable title . Though Palmer shines as OJ's outspoken little sister and she delivers some funny one-liners, the most amusing (and satisfying) moments are when the characters utter that simple word, "Nope," and run in the opposite direction when confronted with the terrifying UFO. In fact, in one standout scene, OJ drives back home and tries to get out of his car, but when he realizes that the creature is hovering right above him, he instantly closes the door without thinking twice and says, "Nope."

So, does this movie hold up as a sci-fi alien film? Absolutely . And the best part? You can still enjoy it if you don't feel like over-analyzing every metaphor and potential easter egg. The writing is smart, the special effects are phenomenal and the performances are solid all around. But if you can't resist trying to peel back all the layers, then Nope will definitely keep you busy long after the credits roll.

Purewow Rating: 4.5 Out Of 5 Stars

It's not quite as dark or unnerving as Get Out or Us , but there's a lot of symbolism to unpack in Peele's layered Nope —so much so that it might warrant a second watch. With stellar performances, great storytelling and thought-provoking themes, this film won't disappoint.

For a full breakdown of PureWow's entertainment rating system, click here .

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Keke Palmer Opens Up About Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’, Says She Was 'In Shock' About Her Character

Associate Editor, News and Entertainment

'Nope' Explained: Every Question About Jordan Peele's Movie Answered

Who's the main villain of the movie? Who dies? Are the horses ok!?

The Big Picture

• Nope is a sci-fi horror film that deconstructs ideas about aliens and explores the concept of spectacle and attention.
• The film follows the Haywood siblings, OJ and Emerald, as they encounter a UFO named Jean Jacket and try to capture it on camera.
• Nope delves into themes of exploitation and the American dream, with Jean Jacket and Ricky "Jupe" Park embodying different interpretations and consequences of the dream.

Beloved writer-director Jordan Peele added his long-awaited third film, Nope , to his collection on July 22. It is a sci-fi horror film that takes both of those genres to completely new and unprecedented places. Peele said about the film , “It’s a bigger adventure than I’ve ever tried to tell. From a film perspective, by far my most ambitious.” Teaming up with renowned cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema , the two created the first horror film to be shown on IMAX cameras . In typical Peele fashion, Nope has induced awe into fans old and new, diverted and exceeded viewers’ expectations, and taken over the current cultural discourse, creating a slew of new conversations to be had about film and our relationship with it.

A man and his sister discover something sinister in the skies above their California horse ranch, while the owner of a nearby theme park tries to profit from the mysterious, otherworldly phenomenon.

What Is 'Nope' About?

Peele has described Nope as a film that tells "the great American UFO story" . In countless yet seamless ways, Peele completely deconstructs any ideas the media have presented us about aliens in the past. Nope is an original, atypical alien film that uses the mode of otherworldly forces to explore the idea of the spectacle and “the good and the bad that come from this idea of attention.” The first notion of the spectacle that Peele introduces in Nope is the discussion surrounding the first moving picture ever created by Eadweard Muybridge in the 19th century.

This is mentioned because the black jockey that was riding the horse in those photographs has been seen by all but goes unnamed throughout history, while the white photographer lives in infamy. The even more personal connection to this is that the jockey was the great-great-great grandfather of Nope ’s two protagonists, siblings OJ Haywood ( Daniel Kaluuya ) and Emerald Haywood ( Keke Palmer ). This concept of the spectacle quickly grows larger than life as it takes a variety of forms throughout Nope that all revolve around exploitation. The theme of spectacle is also personified by the central threat or "monster" of the film, which appears to be a UFO that is inhabiting the skies above the valleys in Agua Dulce, California, and more closely, the Haywood ranch.

Who Are the Characters in 'Nope'?

Jean jacket.

Let’s start off with the elephant in the room: the giant flying alien that the whole movie is about, Jean Jacket. Named by the Haywoods after one of their old horses, Jean Jacket is the UFO that is haunting the valley of Agua Dulce, eating anything and everything in its wake . For nearly the entirety of Nope , viewers see Jean Jacket storming the skies in saucer form. It looks exactly like the most classic flying saucer: Large, silver, and disc-shaped. As Nope progresses, viewers learn alongside the film's characters that it is not a spacecraft with other creatures on it at all. Jean Jacket is a single entity and is the creature/alien itself in its entirety. At the very end of the film, we get to see Jean Jacket morph into its true form. It expands and re-creates itself, opening up from the inside out into an extremely large creature whose final form looks as far as possible from the saucer we once saw. This creature subverts alien imagery in an extremely innovative way. Some have compared its look to that of a biblical angel for it resembles having a vast silky wing span as it moves through the sky.

OJ Haywood and Emerald Haywood

The dynamic duo at the forefront of the film are the Haywood siblings, OJ and Emerald. At the beginning of Nope , their father, Otis Haywood ( Keith David ) experienced a very mysterious death one day. After his passing, OJ and Emerald were left to continue their father’s legacy, running the family business as the only black-owned horse trainers in Hollywood. Growing up, OJ worked very closely with his father when it came to horse training and handling. This led him to have a deep understanding and compassion for the animals. He is the more serious and reserved sibling whose body language and facial expressions do most of the talking for him. In contrast, his younger sister Emerald is charismatic and exuberant, confident of being her true self in any situation.

Emerald didn’t get the horse training that OJ received from their father . So, while she is dedicated to the family business, she found that she also needed a means of expression and income outside of horse handling for films. Between the two of them, there is a real “team” energy and sibling spark. Despite their differences, their bond with each other can be felt in any scene. Once they begin to experience Jean Jacket’s presence in the skies over their ranch, the two band together, deciding that they will do whatever it takes to get photographic evidence of this beast. Together, they begin crafting plans to get the perfect money shot of Jean Jacket, what they call “the Oprah shot.” With this shot they plan to kill two birds with one stone: they can show the world the creature that has been tormenting them, and they can sell the extraordinary footage for millions of dollars. Before this, OJ was trying to accrue some money by selling horses to his neighbor, Ricky “Jupe” Park ( Steven Yeun ), who lives in the same Agua Dulce valley, just down the road from the Haywoods.

Ricky “Jupe” Park

Although the Haywood siblings are the film's main characters, in many ways, Ricky “Jupe” Park is the core character of Nope , for his backstory, and the current life that he leads personify the main themes that Nope discusses. “Jupe” Park is a washed-up child star who is desperately clinging to fame and relevance by running a self-exploitative theme park called "Jupiter's Claim" based on a film he was in in the '90s. Having resided in the Agua Dulce valley for a while, Jupe has encountered Jean Jacket the UFO, and learned that Jean Jacket likes to eat horses.

At his theme park, Jupe runs a live show called “The Starlight Lasso Experience.” During the show, Jupe summons Jean Jacket. To do this, he buys horses from the Haywood ranch, and unbeknownst to the Haywoods, Jupe uses them as sacrificial bait for Jean Jacket to come down and eat the horses in front of a live audience. Through this endeavor, he exploits both the horses and the UFO in an attempt to maintain the admiration of an audience that he received throughout his childhood. The theme park is not just about "Kid Sheriff," the film Jupe was in as a child. In Jupe’s office, there is a secret back room dedicated to a sitcom called "Gordy’s Home!", which was the show in which Jupe got his television beginnings. This room is a mini-museum full of rare memorabilia from the show that Jupe charges expensive entry fees to fans to look inside.

Gordy the Chimp

The audience, without knowing it, gets their first look at "Gordy’s Home!" at the very beginning of Nope when there is an unexplained horrifying scene showing a chimp covered in blood, eating someone’s guts on a TV set. There is also a focus on a mysterious shoe that is floating perfectly upright on the ground behind the bloody chimp. There is no knowing that Jupe is connected to this incident until a bit later in the film. Fast-forward, Jupe has a meeting with OJ about horses that Jupe has purchased from the Haywoods. During this meeting, OJ is trying to buy some horses back from Jupe. Jupe, knowing that he has fed the horses to the UFO and cannot give them back, quickly diverts the conversation to his secret back room of "Gordy’s Home!" memorabilia. Here is when audiences are connected back to the first scene in Nope , as Jupe tells the Haywoods a pivotal story from when he starred in the show .

It turns out that when the chimpanzee actor went on the killing spree on the TV set, Jupe was on the set as well, and watched all the terror unravel right before his pre-pubescent eyes. What happened was, in the episode of "Gordy’s Home!" that was being filmed, it was Gordy the chimp’s birthday. Gordy was gifted some balloons, one of them popped, and that sound irreversibly triggered Gordy to act upon his animal instincts. This resulted in Gordy going on a rampage and killing and maiming many cast members of the show; most notably a young girl who was Jupe’s co-star, Mary Jo ( Sophia Coto ) who ended up surviving, but with many deformities . While this was happening, young Jupe was hiding underneath a table, barely breathing, or moving a muscle to try and not trigger the chimp to kill him too. The table Jupe was under had a slightly see-through tablecloth hanging over the table’s edge that Jupe was watching everything through.

Eventually, Gordy made his way over to the table that Jupe was hiding under. He was hovering around it very slowly and looking at Jupe through the other side of the tablecloth. This tablecloth ended up being Jupe’s saving grace for it prevented him from making direct eye contact with Gordy and setting him off. Right as Gordy was reaching to give Jupe a fist-pound, he got shot down by his handler. Jupe retells this whole story to OJ and Emerald Haywood when they are in his office. He tells it with an eerie combination of a stone-cold and comedic tone that perpetuates the idea that this highly tragic event was actually a spectacle to tell of for years to come. Meanwhile, the flashbacks the audience sees as Jupe recounts the tale are clearly monstrous and grim. Especially for a child to have witnessed and to then be boasting about later in adult life.

Jupe now believes that his survival of this near-death encounter with a wild animal is a miracle. Though, he wrongly attributed his survival to him being a “chosen one” of higher powers. The suspicious vertical shoe of Jupe’s co-star floating up-right in the background gave Jupe more fuel to believe that whatever greater energy caused Gordy to snap was the same one that allowed him to live that day. He internalized from that day forward that he must have an innate, impenetrable connection to greater forces in the universe like aliens and wild animals that would keep him out of harm's way. This directly ties into Jupe’s decisions to interfere with Jean Jacket and try to tame it by sacrificing others to it for his own profits. Unfortunately, a real life situation fairly similar to this one involving a chimp actor acting out did happen some years ago .

Angel Torres

Angel Torres ( Brandon Perea ) is a young tech-wiz who works at a local electronics chain. He hates his job and has a pretty “over-it” attitude. We learn this quickly due to his prompt admission that his girlfriend recently broke up with him, leaving him feeling confused and heartbroken. The Haywoods meet Angel at the electronics store when they go in to buy cameras to begin recording Jean Jacket. Angel notices they are getting some pretty high-tech equipment and insists on coming over to install it. When at the ranch to help the Haywoods with the cameras, Angel makes himself at home there, trying to get as comfortable as possible with the Haywoods to uncover what exactly it is they’re doing with the cameras . He makes a joke that doubles as prodding to them, asking if they’re filming any aliens. They don’t give him the time of day, but after he pushes his knowledge about both tech equipment and aliens onto the Haywoods, they accept him and let him in more on the happenings with Jean Jacket. Soon after he becomes an established member of the Jean-Jacket-Footage-Initiative, helping the Haywoods in their mission of getting their “Oprah shot.”

Antlers Holst

"Wizened grouchy cinematographer" Antlers Holst ( Michael Wincott ) is a cinematographer whom the Haywoods meet on a Hollywood set that they are providing horses for at the start of Nope . Once the Haywoods start getting into the thick of their encounters with Jean Jacket, they reach out to Holst for film expertise. Holst agrees to help the Haywoods when he hears that they are trying to get the legendary, perfect shot of Jean Jacket. Holst quickly becomes consumed by the idea that he may be the one to record this elite footage. Getting carried away by the plan they have all made to capture Jean Jacket on camera, Holst begins to follow his own agenda instead. With his camera recording in stride, Holst goes out into the valley in plain sight of Jean Jacket and gets obliterated by the alien as he essentially takes his own life for filming's sake .

Who Is the Villain?

It can be argued that Jean Jacket is the villain of Nope for directly terrorizing the Haywoods and all the people in the surrounding area. It can also be argued that Jupe was the villain for exploiting not only himself but also Jean Jacket, and all the horses he fed to the alien. Jean Jacket and Jupe’s relationship, though, can serve as heavy symbolism for the American dream and how that can often be the true villain based on society’s varying interpretations of what that is supposed to mean and look like; and, more importantly, what the idea of the American dream drives people to do.

Is 'Nope' Scary?

Nope likely had audiences on the edge of their seat with fear and anticipation at some point during the film, if not many points, or the whole thing. Jean Jacket as an extraterrestrial creature, who inhaled as much as it could physically handle, definitely acted as a scary monster for the film. What also proved to be frightful and unsettling in Nope were the ways in which certain events can truly change a person's character, or, have them act on their truest, darkest sides. Through this, audiences saw how easy it is for humans to take traumatizing events in their lives or around them and flip them on their heads , wielding them for personal gain.

Who Dies in 'Nope'?

Early in Nope , the first signs that all is not well on the Haywood ranch that viewers get is when Otis Haywood dies in an inexplicable way. Just about in the middle of Nope , Jupe is hosting his show “The Starlight Lasso Experience” when Jean Jacket decides not to take the usual horse bait, and instead, inhales everyone in the audience of the show, most of the attractions of the theme park, and Ricky “Jupe” Park and his co-star, Mary Jo, who was in the audience as well, finding their fate together in the belly of the beast. Later, when the Haywoods are executing their long-winded plan to lure Jean Jacket close to them in order to get footage of it, an indistinguishable man on a motorcycle appears.

It turns out that he is a TMZ reporter, looking for his own claim to fame by trying to get his own footage of the alien. He is unsuccessful, falling victim to the hungry clutches of Jean Jacket just like cinematographer Antlers Holst. Many horses also died at the mouth of Jean Jacket, but at the end of Nope , Jean Jacket itself also dies. After trying to eat a giant balloon of a cartoon Jupiter, Jean Jacket is unable to digest the balloon, and it implodes in the sky. Before Jean Jacket disbands itself, Emerald gets the “Oprah shot” of it on an old-fashioned well camera that was a part of Jupiter’s Claim . The camera, which is located at the bottom of a well, captures the image of what is directly above it, and lucky for the Haywoods, Jean Jacket was perfectly positioned over the well for just a moment.

What Are the Takeaways, and What Does 'Nope' Mean for Jordan Peele Films Moving Forward?

Since Nope ’s release, themes that audiences have been eagerly unpacking are speculation, exploitation, and what part we as humans play in the preservation of these behaviors. In this age where social media aggressively dominates all of our lives, Nope has helped to demonstrate how nobody is free of charge when it comes to engaging with spectacles, and how different people’s engagement with the spectacle is indicative of just how large the spectrum of exploitation can be. Considering the ever constantly expanding scope of Peele's films , he will have no problem curating the team and budget he desires to make his next idea come to life. And we already can't wait for it!

Nope is streaming on Prime Video in the U.S.

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Nope Movie Review: Jordan Peele’s Best Film Has All The Tricks

Nope stars daniel kaluuya and keke palmer and is directed by jordan peele.

Review: Nope is not just Jordan Peele’s best movie – it’s his most unique, using a Western backdrop to lay the groundwork for a strange Sci-Fi blockbuster. Certainly one of the best films of 2022.

Few creatives demand an audience’s attention quite like Jordan Peele does. The famed director of Get Out and Us has built himself a reputation of being one of the medium’s most astute and polished visionaries with his society-defying, brain-melting antics. He’s one of the few cultural zeitgeists to pop up in the last decade that doesn’t have significant tie-ins to a superhero property – and it’s for all these reasons that I was dying to get my hands on Nope when it came out back in July of 2022.

Combined with trailers that were essentially toying with an audience’s expectations of significant plot details, Nope was basically a meteor hurdling towards Earth in a summer that felt absent of big-budget, blockbuster hits that are essential for the film industry. He also brought back the leading man of his breakthrough hit Get Out in Daniel Kaluuya – a performer who’s garnered a reputation for being one of the industry’s most precise and charismatic actors (quite simply, he’s one of the best). Peele newcomers Keke Palmer , Steven Yeun and Brandon Perea round out a significantly accomplished cast.

So with expectations sky high, a cast of veteran actors and actresses, a nearly-blank check budget, and a crew of all-timers behind the camera ( Hoyte van Hoytema as cinematographer is truly an epic combination of wits with Peele), could the acclaimed director deliver on the potential of a new classic with all the tools at his disposal? Could he continue to usher in the new, post-pandemic era of Hollywood that Top Gun: Maverick helped set up?

Unilaterally, yes. Quite honestly, Nope is one of the best films of the decade and certainly competes with Jordan Peele ’s previous two works. As a raucous, crowd-pleasing sci-fi epic, it checks every box for a film attempting so much in its themes and grand gestures. An obvious ode to the best Steven Spielberg projects (hints of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and clearly inspired by the second half of Jaws ), Nope blows away its contemporaries in terms of scale and scope.

Every shot oozes with detail. The haunting and dreadful images send chills down your spine and the comedy sticks in almost every instance. The terrifying set pieces, from Gordie’s birthday party to the bloody storm over Haywood ranch, are some of the best this year has had to offer.

Reviews for Horror Movies like Nope (2022)

The film does have a meticulous and slow-building set-up – one that’s been a common complaint by critics who were less favorable towards the film. But Peele has built up enough equity with his audience to strain a bit for the reveal, and Nope has quite the reveal. The grab-at-your-chest unfurling (literally) of the third act is one I’ll never forget seeing for the first time in theaters, and it sure doesn’t lose its effectiveness after multiple viewings at home.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like Nope will have enough steam heading into the awards season this year, and it’s a shame. Nope is a powerful genre-defying, tense thriller with a bit of splash for everyone. This generation’s closest thing to Jaws , it’s a powerful look at our obsession with viewing – viewing the good, viewing the bad, and viewing what we shouldn’t. Curiosity rules our generation, and Peele taps into it as well as anyone. Undoubtedly, it’ll be high in my year end list. A film that I was satisfied with as I left the theater, and one that I’ve consistently thought about since its release.

Nope delivers on its promise of spectacle. Its set-up helps deliver one of the most rewarding third acts of the year, and one I’ll surely return to in years to come. Those don’t come around very often, only a handful of films lend themselves to repeat viewings, and Nope is certainly one of them. A dazzling and hypnotic viewing, and one that doesn’t leave your mind once you leave your theater. The best films make you think, and Nope gives you enough to sink your teeth into.

Genre: Horror , Sci-Fi , Thriller

Watch Nope (2022) on Peacock and VOD here

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Nope Movie Cast and Credits

Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood

Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood

Brandon Perea as Angel Torres

Michael Wincott as Antlers Holst

Steven Yeun as Jupe

Director: Jordan Peele

Writer: Jordan Peele

Cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema

Editor: Nicholas Monsour

Composer: Michael Abels

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Nope ending explained: The deeper meaning of Jordan Peele’s sci-fi thriller

Nope is one of Jordan Peele’s finest movies yet. It may be his most complex, too.

If you’ve never worked on a movie set, then you probably aren’t familiar with the long hours, exhausting efforts, and the sighs of relief that come when the cameras stop rolling.

Whether it’s a Hollywood blockbuster or an underfunded student film, the goal is always the same: capture the perfect shot. Due to numerous factors like outdoor weather conditions or the quality of indoor lighting, it can actually be really difficult to get the shot a director desires.

It’s this battle of attrition for the sake of art that director Jordan Peele metaphorically explores in his newest sci-fi horror movie, Nope .

Set in the California desert — where Hollywood’s first Westerns were shot thanks to the abundant sunlight early cameras needed to capture images — Nope is about two sibling horse ranchers who team up with a tech store employee and an accomplished cinematographer to capture proof of an all-devouring UFO-shaped monster that resides above their backyard.

Nope is more straightforward than Jordan Peele’s last movie (2019’s cryptic doppelganger thriller Us ), but it can still be a headscratcher if you miss even one little detail about the alien, how it works, and how our heroes capitalize on their few advantages. Here’s a breakdown of the ending of Nope and exactly what it’s all about.

Warning: Spoilers for the end of Nope ahead.

Daniel Kaluuya stars in Nope as “OJ,” a horse rancher who discovers an alien monster hiding in his own property.

Nope ending explained: Looking it in the eye

The alien at the center of Nope is not a spaceship full of green men. Rather, it’s a beastly, otherworldly creature that disguises itself as a cloud in the sky. When it hovers to the ground for feeding, it bears a striking resemblance to a ten-gallon cowboy hat. In its final form, it resembles a giant jellyfish. Fans of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion might liken it to the series’ “angels” — it just so happens that Peele might be a fan of the anime, too.

The alien, nicknamed “Jean Jacket” by the movie’s characters, doesn’t have any definite origins or even a species name. But what the characters do learn about it is that 1) it has the power to shut down electronics within its radius, 2) it will devour any organic being who dares to look it directly in the eye, and 3) it cannot digest inorganic matter.

That last part is established very early in the movie when stray objects mysteriously fall from the sky, fatally wounding the elder owner of Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, Otis (Keith David). It’s also foreshadowing that Otis is felled by a nickel shot through his brain and out of his eyeball, nodding to the fact that eyesight plays a critical role in falling victim to Jean Jacket.

Throughout the film, the characters’ encounters with Jean Jacket allow them to pick up on its strengths and weaknesses. With all they know at their disposal, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) team up with electronics store employee Angel (Brandon Perea) and award-winning cameraman Antlers (Michael Wincott) to capture footage of Jean Jacket.

While OJ is arguably the main character of Nope , it’s his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) who we follow in the climax and physically achieves the movie’s goal of capturing evidence of Jean Jacket’s existence.

Nope : Getting the shot

In the film’s climax, Antlers breaks from the group’s plan and is sucked up by Jean Jacket while trying to get the perfect shot. Jean Jacket then goes after Angel, who’s become wrapped in barbed wire that both protects him and injures Jean Jacket. In response, the saucer-shaped creature unfurls into an airier, balloon-like state.

Emerald and OJ find themselves on opposite ends of their property, with OJ on horseback and Emerald on an electronic motorcycle left behind by a TMZ photographer. Because the motorcycle is electronic, Emerald can’t escape with Jean Jacket close to her. OJ dares to capture Jean Jacket’s attention so his sister can get away.

Emerald makes it to the nearby Jupiter’s Claim, Jupe’s (Steven Yeun) now-deserted cowboy theme park, where she unleashes a large Jupe-shaped helium balloon for Jean Jacket to devour. Because Jean Jacket cannot feed on inorganic matter, the balloon winds up being the final blow, allowing the movie’s characters to win against Jean Jacket.

Not to let their opportunity go to waste, however, Emerald makes use of a novelty analog camera at the theme park, allowing her to get one good shot at the alien — the proof of its existence they were looking for — before Jean Jacket explodes.

Before Nope ends, however, Emerald sees her brother on horseback, learning that he survived his decoy efforts. It’s an homage to the old movie Westerns where the (usually white) hero is depicted heroically on horseback, signaling a happy ending.

When we meet Jupe (Steven Yuen), a former sitcom star turned carnival owner, he has been feeding Jean Jacket horses — loaned to him by the Haywoods — for months as an attraction at his show. Eventually, his provocation of Jean Jacket comes to bite him. Literally.

Nope ’s ending explained: A deeper meaning

Nope is an overall commentary on the erasure of Black people from Hollywood’s very beginnings, which is made clear by the movie’s verbal allusions to Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion . OJ sitting on horseback in the style of Hollywood’s classic Westerns is a symbolic act of reclamation for Black contributions to Hollywood as an industry.

As for the characters in Nope , getting the shot of Jean Jacket was no easy feat. But with OJ and Emerald taking on the roles of directors and leading a team of trusted allies, they manage to do the impossible. Ask anyone who has been on set after a long day, and they might feel the same way.

Nope is now playing in theaters.

• Science Fiction