NOPE

IN PROGRESS

NOPE. Jordan Peele, director, script, producer (one of two producers). Ruth De Jong, production design. USA: Monkeypaw Productions, Universal Pictures (production) / Universal Pictures, Universal Pictures International (distribution), 2022.[1][2]

IMDb lists the film as Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller. For SF, the film is primarily an Alien-Contact movie, with strong use of the surveillance motif common in all four of the mentioned genres, and SF-ish in NOPE in its concern with the technology of surveillance.

NOPE is also a "Hollywood movie," or more exactly Burbank, with concern with the moving image and still photographs that can be made to appear to move (the famous precursor of movies of a running horse with jockey is featured in NOPE — with additional implications for race and class in entertainment industries).[3] And whether as an actual location or a reconstruction on set — the store is now out of business — Fry's electronics in Burbank is important in the film.[4]

Plot elements follow.

Central to NOPE as it develops is capturing the image of a UFO (or several images of UAP: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena),[5] rendered more difficult since the film uses the motif that UFO contact involves dangerous magnetic phenomena and, relevant here, losing electrical power: not just the current going off (which a backup battery can handle), but a temporary loss of electricity as a form of energy that can do work, e.g., run a movie camera. So we get a hand-cranked movie camera which isn't Steampunk in design but useful for the study of such images, and we get a rather baroque combination of wishing-well, selfie-device, and generic Polaroid camera.

Note that the alien visitors are at best careless about their magnetic effects — resulting in an important death — and somewhat fascistic, psychopathic, or arrogant in apparently observing without stopping, if not causing, dangerous behavior in at least one non-human primate. This alien disregard for Terran creatures reduces potential sympathy for the aliens vs. the photo-takers, if the human image-chasers might be perceived as an exotic variety of the paparazzi that to some extent still infest the Greater Los Angeles area.

RDE, finishing, 2Aug22