firm ape

Spoilers ahead, please watch this great film! I would suggest those who rated NOPE with 1 star go out and expand their media literacy. Nowadays people refuse to actually analyze the themes and deep messages of films and only form takeaways from what they see at face value. Yes, this movie may be hard to understand or seem random because of its heavy emphasis on thematic elements in the plot, however, once you can understand the core message, everything fits into place seamlessly. At the surface level of the film, there are two plots: the main plot following Keke Palmer as Emerald and Daniel Kaluuya as OJ trying to gather evidence for the mysterious alien spaceship entity in the sky who killed their horse-training father, and the subplot of animal spectacle capitalism plot following Steven Yeun's character, Jupe. Peele intricately connects his personal message across the film from the title cards being the animals' names to using eyes as motifs for social agreements. He presents the theme of spectacles driving people to the limit for either money, fame, or selfish desire, which mostly involve animals. This is seen with Jupe's character who capitalizes on his traumatic past as a child actor involving a murderous chimpanzee named Gordy, who reacted freakishly to balloons popping on a reality TV show. The bigger picture of the UFO, which is confirmed to be an animal itself, is that the main cast is exploiting the alien for publicity and money in the same way as the chimpanzee. The idea is that animals have a set of rules you must respect or they will go wild, the main rule being that you do not make eye contact with animals. The TV producers and actors did not abide by this rule when dealing with the chimpanzee, however, a young Jupe's eyes are covered by thin tablecloth as he hides under a table in fear---this detail is important as Jupe misses the concept entirely and instead believes he has a special affinity for handling animals and using them for profit. The chimpanzee scene is also one of many homages by Peele to classic movies, which in this case would be a twisted version of E.T.'s fingers scene, where instead of a heartwarming moment between alien and boy, there is a traumatic, ominous moment between Jupe and Gordy. Jupe's false sense of "being chosen" leads to him spending 6 months taming the alien, who again is a gigantic UFO with a whole at its base for a mouth. When Jupe makes the alien a part of his carnival spectacle, the alien freakishly reacts to a crowd staring at it by eating all of them. Peele captures the horrifying, gruesome, and unsettling nature of the alien with one of the most unnerving scenes I have seen in a while, which is the alien's consumption and then digestion of a crowd of people. The alien is brilliantly designed where instead of the traditional 12 small gray men in an advanced futuristic flying saucer, Peele uses a UFO as a living creature. The alien itself connects different sci-fi myths and conspiracies like flying saucers, weather balloons, and clouds by being made of balloon-like material, and hiding in a fixed cloud for half a year. The plan to capture the alien on film is riveting and connects back to the overarching theme of profiting off animals. The final form of the alien becomes that of a biblical angel and the last scene is a nice ending to the movie, calling back to a small moment with Emerald and the well in the beginning. Overall this film is excellent and marks Peele's evolution as a director, with a new twist on the sci-fi/horror genre.