December 3, 2025 Share this Article: We take a look back at writer-director Jordan Peele’s 2022 genre piece, Nope, and what it says about our obsession with spectacle and social media. NB:: The following contains major spoilers for Nope throughout. Whether you call them UFOs, flying saucers, foo fighters or UAPs, aerial phenomena have been a familiar sight in movies since … Nope | Jordan Peele’s 2022 sci-fi horror and the power of spectacle We take a look back at writer-director Jordan Peele’s 2022 genre piece, Nope, and what it says about our obsession with spectacle and social media. NB:: The following contains major spoilers for Nope throughout. Whether you call them UFOs, flying saucers, foo fighters or UAPs, aerial phenomena have been a familiar sight in movies since the middle of the 20th century. Full credit to director Jordan Peele, then, for making such an aged genre staple feel scary again; not since Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, or the lesser-known Fire In The Sky, perhaps, have pebble-shaped alien vehicles felt truly threatening (though it’s probably worth throwing in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival here for their own ghostly presence). It helped that Nope’s marketing gave relatively little away when the genre-straddling movie first emerged in 2022. The trailers gave us a hint of the premise: horse trainers OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Em (Keke Palmer) encounter something otherworldly floating above their remote Californian ranch. What those trailers didn’t give away, though, was just how flat-out freaky Nope really is: serving as co-producer and writer as well as director, Peele gives himself the latitude to explore all kinds of sub-plots, visual non-sequiturs (or are they…?) and abrupt changes in tone. The prevalence of horror in 21st century cinema – besides the superhero movie, it’s one of the few genres people reliably leave their house to see – means that scenes of violence and outlandish gore are commonplace on the large screen these days. What are less common are truly unpredictable movies, like Nope – where, just as you feel as though you’ve settled into its groove, the narrative’s swerved off in another direction with a stomach-fluttering lurch. Nope could perhaps be described as a compendium of oddities from UFO lore; at times, watching it feels like flicking through a copy of the Fortean Times. Peele heaps just about everything imaginable into his story: early on coins, keys, and other metal objects rain from the sky, seemingly at random, echoing real-world reports of strange weather phenomena. Later, there’s what at first appears to be a textbook case of alien abduction. There’s the mutilation of livestock (though UFOs seem to be more interested in cows than horses in real life). There are also allusions to UFO-adjacent phenomena like lenticular clouds and weather balloons, with the flying object in Nope looking strikingly inflatable at certain points. Then there’s that third-act twist: the UFO isn’t a spacecraft, but a sentient creature that just happens to have chosen the area around OJ and Em’s ranch as its hunting ground. It’s here that Nope tips over from Close Encounters to a monster movie, or ufology to cryptozoology, as the remaining cast attempt to avoid being eaten – and grab a potentially lucrative photo of the thing trying to eat them while they’re about it. And by the time an anonymous photographer shows up on a motorcycle – apparently from TMZ, according to one character’s outburst – we might just wonder what on Earth Peele’s trying to say here. Certainly, Nope lacks the clearer subtext of Get Out (racism, subtle or otherwise, in liberal white America) or Us (an exploration of the class divide through the lens of a black middle class family). That Nope wasn’t as big a hit as either of those movies might suggest that audiences weren’t prepared for the wild ride Peele had in store for them. We’ve gotten all these paragraphs in, and we still haven’t even mentioned Gordy – the chimpanzee we see in Nope’s terrifying opening set-piece. We’re shown the set of a low-rent sitcom some time in the mid-1990s, where Gordy goes berserk, leaving one child actor horrifically disfigured and another traumatised for life. In the present, the latter, named Ricky (Steven Yeun) has grown up as the proprietor of a Wild West-themed theme park. Suggested product Source: https://filmstories.co.uk/features/nope-jordan-peeles-2022-sci-fi-horror-and-the-power-of-spectacle/