Nope: a science fiction treasure hunt of dizzying inventiveness [critique]

After Get Out and Us, Jordan Peele aims even higher and signs his best film.

Updated July 21, 2024: Two years after his appearance in the cinema, Nope is broadcast for the first time in free-to-air television, tonight on France 2 (at 10:40 p.m.). If you haven't yet watched the third film by the brilliant Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us), it's the perfect opportunity to catch up. And if you've already seen it, don't hesitate either, this clever deconstruction of the summer blockbuster is even better the second time around. Finally, if the schedule is too late for you, don't worry, it will be available tomorrow (and for free) in streaming on the France Télévisions website. Here is the glowing review that we published when the film was released:

Article from August 9, 2022: It's time for Jordan Peele to take off. The ordeal of the third film, after the sensational Get Out And Usthe moment or never to break down the resistance of the last skeptics. His first two feature films demonstrated an extraordinary appetite for cinema? Now it's time to see even bigger. With the mischief that characterizes him, Peele has also placed Nope under the patronage of two of the most famous “third films” in the history of cinema: Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Spielberg (Duel was a TV movie) and Signs by Shyamalan (assuming that Sixth Sense had been a new start for Shy, since no one had heard of his previous attempts). Nope will therefore be a flying saucer film set in the great American outdoors, an enigma, a profession of faith, a call to look (or not) at what is going on above our heads… A variation on what Peele himself called, in a recent interview with GQ, “the Great American Flying Saucer Story“.

The references of Nope not only designate an aesthetic territory (the meeting of American pastoral and extraterrestrial mythology), they also bear witness to the monstrous ambition of its author: to measure himself against the great filmmaker-magicians, to take up the torch of summer blockbuster “original”, non-franchised, which wants to make the hairs on the arms of the spectators stand on end while soliciting their gray matter, in the collective fervor of a summer evening. Having called upon Christopher Nolan's regular director of photography, Hoyte Van Hoytema, is another way for the filmmaker to assert himself as the organizer of great cinematographic masses refusing formatting and pre-chewed sensations.

Mission accomplished: the film's resounding success, one of the most original and eccentric Hollywood productions of the last ten years, immediately propelled Peele to the heights he had been seeking to reach. But if Nopein the journey of its author, crystallizes a form of artistic plenitude, it is first of all a puzzle for the spectator. A puzzle. During the time of the screening, everything seems to fit together perfectly. But you have barely walked a few meters after leaving the cinema, trying to reconstruct the film mentally, that a piece seems to be missing… Questions abound, and we are not sure we have all the answers. We will have to see this film again, that's for sure, to have the feeling of embracing it entirely.

It's about a family of horse breeders working for the film industry, who must deal with the brutal and mysterious death of the patriarch. About a former child actor who experienced a traumatic event on the set of a 90s sitcom, who has since become an amusement park entrepreneur. About a big cloud hovering over a Californian ranch, and perhaps sheltering an unidentified flying object… For an hour and a half (at a guess, we didn't want to look at our watches), Jordan Peele, at a deliciously “Shyamalanesque” pace (allusive, elliptical, captivating), constructs a maze of signs, a labyrinth of images, intriguing shots, floating sensations, horrific flashbacks stopped before their end, ideas opening onto dizzying chasms…

The film's heroes, Otis Junior (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer), present themselves as descendants of the first man ever filmed, the horseman from Eadweard Muybridge's seminal short film. The Horse in Motiona black actor whose name history has not wanted to remember… Peele, here, aims at nothing less than starting the history of cinema from scratch, and brings into collision the imagery of the western with that of the fairground show (already central in the intro of Us), delineating a universe that is both magical and very prosaic, mythological but depressing, a world of dust, pennants flapping in the wind and horses suddenly taking off into the air.

It is to a moral fable on the meaning of spectacle and images that Peele invites us here. Otis and Emerald have set out to film the ETs that are moving above their heads and their mission will lead them to cross paths with actors and fairground workers, scavenger reporters and aesthete camera operators, all in search of the perfect shot, all confronted with an otherness that they think they can only capture by pointing a camera at it… What should we do in the face of the spectacle of the impending catastrophe? Are there more heroic ways than others to capture the ultimate “money shot”?

The questions Peele asks could be utterly mind-numbing, but they're wrapped in a euphoric sci-fi spectacle, a TRUE First contact film, creepy and mysterious, with an anthology alien ship (we won't say more) and terrifying visions of horror, all the more impactful because they appear on the screen like flashes of pure brutality, before disappearing as quickly as they came. In a gesture not so far removed from Tarantino (quotes included from old westerns with Sidney Poitier as The Battle of Devil's Valley Or Buck and his accomplice), Nope pours his thoughts on the forgotten people of the great history of cinema into a succulent popcorn movie.

The third act, a wrinkled electrifying, will undoubtedly satisfy those who felt that the biggest flaws of Get Out And Us were their endings rushed or too abstruse. More of that here, but, on the contrary, the demonstration of strength of a filmmaker in full possession of his means. We are impatiently awaiting the fourth film, of course. But Nope should keep us busy for a long time until then.