Park is a survivor of the chimpanzee’s revenge who nonetheless looks back fondly at the series.
Our protagonists are, of course, trainers of horses-teachers of performance-and their pupils are not above resenting their treatment.
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Peele’s current obsession is revealed in an early flashback to a television series when Gordy, the chimpanzee star of the show “Gordy’s Home,” decides on the set that he’s had enough of performing for humans. Although co-stars Kaluuya and Palmer are Black, Perea Latino, and Yeun Asian-American, “Nope” is not about race. “Get Out!” was a polemic on intense white genetic racism, “Us” a treatise on race and class. Despite the “animal’s” ability to create frightening hurricane-force winds, the ranch house and barn remain something of a safe haven. One learns almost nothing about the invading entity, except that it’s shaped like a flying saucer, can turn off electricity and hide itself behind a never-changing cloud, and may be an animal, with a large mouth/hole with which it can blow fiercely or suck up and ingest people, and sometimes horses, while spitting out metal objects. One of the low-tech ways OJ and Em combat the aliens is with inflatable, waving tube men. OJ (“I don’t think they’d take you if you don’t look at it”) and Em find absurdly low-tech ways to deal with the new enemy (flags and a giant blow-up doll may do the trick), but the others just want to make money off what’s happening, whether by filming the invaders (if, indeed, they are that) or, in the case of the promoter Park (Yeun was Oscar-nominated in “Minari” ) using them to stage an open-air performance.
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There are no scientists (as in “Arrival”, or “The Day the Earth Stood Still” ) to figure out who the extra-terrestrials are, or what they want, or how to engage, befriend, or defeat them-questions that would appear to be of little concern to Peele.
Peele’s engagement with science fiction and alien invaders seems equally perfunctory.
A final scene, in which a spectral OJ emerges from a cloud of dust on horseback, just outside the “town” and framed by an arch, can only be understood as an ironic, overly-determined reference, bringing to mind John Wayne’s more meaningful door-framed exit in “The Searchers” (1959). There is no romance in “Nope.” Nor does director Peele have any serious interest in the West as a place or phenomenon. Only OJ, a courageous loner on his isolated ranch, has some wider sense of obligation: to his sister, the ranch, and their animals-certainly not to society at large, threatened by aliens. They do not, however, form a community, not even one like the dysfunctional trio of John Huston’s 1948 “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” Everyone is either isolated or operating in a simulated environment. Three other male characters-a brash young tech guy, Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), who works at Fry’s Electronics (a California big-box store that ceased operations in 2021), a crusty, expert cameraman (Michael Wincott), and Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), promoter/entertainer-round out the ensemble cast.
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