Nope: A Weird, Wonderful Twisting of Genres

I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. I love country music, even some of its cheesier and campier tunes that are a tad annoying to people less weird than I. Generally speaking, it's sound digs deeply into a culture that too many people are, sadly enough, just fine making fun of. Whenever I hear it, it's never difficult for me to imagine that I'm somewhere else, riding the range in someone else's movie. Its cinematic companion, the Western, is a genre that has existed for a long time, and this makes its tropes far more recognizable and, in the case of Jordan Peele and the team that worked on Nope, far easier to bend. Nope is a Western. It's also a horror movie and even a paranormal science fiction. You see, something in the skies of California is causing trouble for the Haywood Ranch, and OJ and Em Haywood are determined to both find out what it is and capture proof of its existence. Along the way, they'll have to work with Angel, a mouthy tech assistant, and a disillusioned cinematographer named Holst to get the photographic evidence they so desire, which is harder than it sounds when the UFO in question behaves like an electromagnetic weapon. Think UFO Hunters, if they liked to ride the range to music you might hear in The Roy Rogers Show.

The ways in which Nope blends genres are simply delightful, and despite its seemingly endless barrage of references to cinematic history, this movie never feels like anything less than its own animal. It's the type of movie that only someone like Peele could come up with - and I say that because it's a well-known fact that the man smokes cannabis to get ideas for his stories. I'll just say that the weed worked here, because Nope is a non-stop onslaught of incredibly unfamiliar filmmaking that also respectfully pays homage to even the earliest forms of cinema. It's also a beautifully shot movie. Director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema, practically a rock star in the world of cinematography, does some remarkable work with Nope, especially when the sun is low in the sky. We call the hour right before sunset golden hour because the natural light perfectly imitates a studio setup at this time, and Hoytema's best images are the ones taken during golden hour, perfectly blending shadows and light.

Likewise, the sound design of Nope is some of the best I've heard in a long time, a remarkably creepy and trippy thing to experience. Screams of fear? Screams of delight? Who's to say what they really are? But something is up there in the sky, making people scream, or perhaps even ghosts. My advice? Watch this movie on a laptop with headphones, because I'm not sure your television speakers could convey to you precisely what I heard. But unfortunately, though the technical and creative achievements of Nope are many, its story never outruns a level of conventionality. On the level of plot, Nope is a much more familiar and therefore predictable piece than Peele's incredible Get Out, and even if most of the sights in this movie themselves have gotten a facelift, many of the actual story beats will be very familiar to you if you like UFO movies. While far from bad, Nope isn't particularly surprising, and most of its strengths lie in its aesthetic. If I had to describe it to you, Nope is like what would happen if you gave a world-class artist a crayon and a piece of printer paper, and asked him to make you some art. The artistry would no doubt be breathtaking - if not necessarily surprising - even though the materials themselves may be fundamental.

While not Peele's most precise, exacting, or surprising work, Nope nevertheless remains a flamboyantly imaginative blend of the science fiction and the western, drawing from a rich well of cinematic history to, strangely enough, bring us something that feels genuinely fresh. It's a film that knows when to be silly and when to be scary, two things it doesn't just do well, but differently from any other movie. Nope is also an excellently-made movie on a craft level, featuring breathtaking cinematography and incredible sound design. And though it might never outrun a level of predictability, all things considered, you'd still be making the right decision to say yep to Nope.

Nope - 8/10

Luke 21:25-28