Following months and months of mystery, we now know that director Jordan Peele’s Nope will involve extra-terrestrials. But there’s a lot more to it than that. Speaking with Empire Magazine, Jordan Peele has teased the themes and issues he hopes to raise amongst the terrifying alien action, with the filmmaker setting out to make a cinematic spectacle.

The brother and sister in question are OJ and Emerald Haywood, played by Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer. Nope finds the siblings attempting to use the presence of the U.F.O. to make some money, setting out to capture the U.F.O. on film and perhaps save their ranch from closing down. Of course, the aliens inhabiting the UFO do not take kindly to this, deciding to torture the Haywoods and the rest of the town as punishment.

“I started off wanting to make a film that would put an audience in the immersive experience of being in the presence of a UFO. I wanted to make a spectacle, something that would promote my favourite art form and my favourite way of watching that art form: the theatrical experience. As I started writing the script, I started to dig into the nature of spectacle, our addiction to spectacle, and the insidious nature of attention. So that’s what it’s about. And it’s about a brother and sister and healing their relationship.”

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Peele’s desire to make a spectacle is not just in the name of our entertainment, with the director wanting to tell a fable about the pitfalls and “toxic nature” of attention. With this in mind, Nope will make reference to the Muybridge experiment, using the famous clip to continue his affinity for social commentary.

“The part of African-American history that this addresses more than anything is the spectacle-isation of Black people, as well as the erasure of us, from the industry, from many things. I think in a lot of ways, this film is a response to the Muybridge clip, which was the first series of photographs put in sequential order to create a moving image; and it was a Black man on a horse. We know who Eadweard Muybridge is, the man who created the clip, but we don’t know who this guy on the horse is. He’s the first movie star, the first animal trainer, the first stunt rider ever on film, and no-one knows who he is! That erasure is part of what the lead characters in this movie are trying to correct. They’re trying to claim their rightful place as part of the spectacle. And what the film also deals with is the toxic nature of attention and the insidiousness of our human addiction to spectacle.”

Nope Will Land in Theaters Later This Month

     Universal Pictures

Written, directed, and co-produced by Jordan Peele under his Monkeypaw Productions, Nope stars Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott, Wrenn Schmidt, Keith David.

Nope begins after random objects begin falling from the sky. Ranch-owning siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood attempt to capture video evidence of an unidentified flying object with the help of tech salesman Angel Torres and documentarian Antlers Holst.

Nope is scheduled to be released on July 22, 2022, by Universal Pictures.