Movie-goers will be glad to see the last reel of Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” because the sham Ennio Morricone music reminds us that the director and writer who gave us “Get Out” and “Us” has a sense of humor. Those movies were even more serious than are the strange and original first two hours of “Nope.”
It would have been easy for Peele to cut material from the first reel, especially, if he had wanted a more direct and efficient film. “Nope” uses Keke Palmer and big-eyed Daniel Kaluuya to give us memorable characters. She’s a funky groovy self-promoter, who plays loud music at home in order to give her a beat for her solo dancing. He’s her brother, the cowboy type who is trying to make their family ranch pay after the odd death of their father.
Dad died when a nickel fell (they think from a plane) into his eye and then got into his brain. The family trains stunt horses for the movies, and the siblings’ great-great-great grandfather was the jockey in the first motion picture. This, the movie is right to point out, was photographed by Edvard Muybridge, a Brit, convicted murderer, and a traveling soft-porn exhibitor early in film history.
O.J. (Kaluuya) has been hawking horses to the his neighbor, former child star Ricky Park. He runs an old west-theme amusement park. But an incident in Ricky’s Hollywood past keeps showing up as flashbacks in “Nope.” He was one of the cast of a sitcom that was taping an episode when his co-star, a chimpanzee, went ape and started beating and eating other humans.
“Hollywood gone dangerously chaotic” is central here. Because what Ricky is doing now is showing paying guests one of the predictable appearances of a flying saucer out at the theme park and ranch. The siblings (helped by a home-store clerk and a veteran cinematographer) want to make a photographic record of the space ship.
But the aliens visiting us turn out not to be friendly, and not to be cooperative. The ship vacuums up the folks at the theme park. And they deposit what’s left, after their crushing examination, on the ranch house--blood, keys, and change. Ranch daddy was apparently killed by something that fell from the saucer.
Before it attacks, making a daunting loud sound, the saucer also sends off an electric pulse that shuts off everything electrical on the ground. This is why the cameraman sets up to use a hand-powered camera to get pictures of an attack on the ranch. The film’s associated tongue-in-cheek attack on gossip video specialists TMZ is pretty funny.
To set up the photos, O.J. saddles up a horse to act as a decoy, bringing the flying saucer right to the camera. Heroic, no? Sort of Western. And wait until you see the final weapon used in the battle between the ranchers and whoever is running that saucer.
The movie is so off-beat it just about has to be amusing. But it is not short, and it has less-contributory passages and some over-long camera shots. So it isn’t perfect. What’s up with those inserted titles, anyway?
But the movie ends with a smile. And this helps make “Nope” difficult to dislike.
