I feel with the success of Get Out Jordan Peele has a target on his back for constantly making top notch films, and while Get Out was a stellar experience, Us was definitely a step down and Nope rounded off a trilogy of films that was the lowest.

Nope follows siblings, OJ and Emerald, who live on a ranch and rent out their horses to Hollywood. However things take a strange turn when OJ sees an unidentified flying object in the sky above his ranch and soon finds that it’s a lot more than he first thought it was.

This UFO turns out to be an alien that a rival ranch has been feeding horses to as a spectacle for the people visiting the ranch. This man, Ricky, was made famous through a sitcom style show that involved a chimpanzee that one day went crazy and killed and maimed a few of the cast members, but surprisingly left him unharmed. Through these two very polarising characters, OJ and Ricky, we see how these people react to this phenomenon and how really in our own lives as well we’re not so different.

Reading up on this film, especially with the use of the first ever moving picture being heavily shown in the film, it’s clear that what it’s trying to tell us is that we like looking at things that maybe we shouldn’t. We take advantage of things that maybe don’t deserve to be taken advantage of because they are living beings in their own right. With the first ever moving picture it is a black jockey on a horse and everyone remembers the film maker but no one remembers the name of the black jockey, and it’s the same with Ricky and the chimpanzee, the chimpanzee was worked to basically death and soon realised that it was being exploited and took a turn against its captors. Much like the alien does where we see the alien just kind of living above the clouds but when it is discovered by the human’s they exploit it to a point where it ends up killing them because of their own greed.

I went into this film with high hopes because of Jordan Peele’s name and who he is as a film creator and while I don’t think it’s a great film as a whole, because it was very slow and I’m not a huge fan of science fiction anyway, the premise and the ideas that it brings to the table of how humans exploit others for their own greed definitely stayed with me and resonated with me for a while after. I often look at films like this like I did with Midsommar, in that the film was fine but nothing incredible in my eyes yet the feeling I got from it for months afterwards was what made it so great, that is exactly what Nope is for me. Nope is a film that is slow and methodical and a bit long in my opinion but the way it’s left me after watching it is an experience I won’t forget for a long time.

What do you think of Nope?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding