Top Movies of 2022: No. 8 - Nope

8. Nope, dir. Jordan Peele

Nope's trailers were writing checked that seemed impossible to cash: A 19th century silent film of a black man on a horse. Armies of wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-men in the desert. A bloody ape's hand reaching under a table to give a child a fist bump. A man in a mirror helmet riding a motorcycle. A girl with no face. A horse in a glass box next to Steven Yeun dressed as a cowboy fop. What could all those ideas and images have to do with aliens? What could all that have to do with anything? 

Incredibly that whole diverse set of weird iconic moments come together to make narrative sense in Nope. The trailers only cheat one time: there's a shot of a crab climbing around a doll house that is not in the movie. (Audience boos) But everything else that was promised was paid off, and we got even more incredible things in this movie itself. Even in very first frame is another incredible sight: A girl's shoe balanced impossibly to stand vertically upright, right next to a fallen body in a deserted sound stage. That too, pays off in Jordan Peele's script.

All that imagination, as dreamlike as it sounds, did not come together into some experimental art film. No Nope is pure genre. It is a big silly monster movie! Nope is Tremors but with the sand worm coming form the other direction. The climax is a loving homage to Jaws. Jordan Peele took the idea of a flying saucer and transformed it into one of the weirdest and most terrifying predators in film history. I immediately thought of Evangelion Angels (but when aren't I thinking of Evangelion?). What happens to people "abducted" by the craft is a wonderfully nasty surprise. We see only hints of the ordeal to come, but we hear of screams. We hear those screams for so long. Then, it only gets worse when the screams stop.

One telling detail we get in Nope is the POV shots from inside the creature. The heart of this thing, whatever it is, oloks out onto the world in a very particular shape: a rectangle. I think the dimensions are actually 1.85:1, the standard widescreen aspect ratio of modern cinema. Inside the core of Nope is film making. 

This is not even subtext, since the main motivation of the characters becomes about capturing the invader on camera. Our heroes are a family of Hollywood horse trainers, claiming descent from the unknown jockey in Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 The Horse in Motion series. During the course of Nope, the characters must turn back the clock on film technology. The craft's powers disables electricity, so modern digital cameras are out. An attempt with mechanical cameras fails. By the end, they're using the most basic method of capturing motion: still photography shooting frame by frame, the same way that first 19th century black man on a horse was immortalized.

I've heard a lot of criticism of Nope that people "did not get it" or that it somehow did not live up to the standards of Get Out and Us. Nope is less blatant a work of social criticism than those other films, I suppose. But also, Jordan Peele managed to tie together the very foundation of cinema and the largely ignored contribution of a black man in that seminal work, into the survival of a black family struggling in the business. If that commentary is not sufficiently rich for you, I cannot say that is the movie's fault.

More importantly, Nope is a fun damn movie. It has a great cast of heroes you want to root for. Daniel Kaluuya's OJ becomes a heroic cowboy (itself a notoriously whitewashed archetype in cinema history), Keke Palmer's Emerald gets to do a motherfuckin' Akira slide. Those two have a great sibling bond, they're one of the best duos of 2022. Steven Yeun, one of the best actors working today, is playing Ricky, a theme park operator whose inability to process his childhood trauma might have created the entire monster problem. Michael Wincott has a big role. There is what appears to be a one-off wacky tech salesman character in Angel (Brandon Perea), who in any other movie would be in only one scene. Instead the guy sticks around to the end. Nope has likable characters coming with intelligent solutions to their monster problems, that's what you want out of this genre. 

And anyway, why do I need to rank Jordan Peele's work in order to appreciate it? I don't care if Get Out was "better", there is no universal scale to all cinema - hypocrisy of a Top 15 list noted. Get Out was doing something different. It is the not a meaningful comparison. Nope is the best Nope I've ever seen, and that deserves celebrating.