2022, d. Jordan Peele - VOD
Toasty just posty'd his Nope write-up and he was unabashedly excited by the film. I, on the other hand, have been feeling pretty uncertain about the movie since viewing.
As Toasty notesy'd, it's a great looking movie. Peele, working with DP extraordinaire Hoyte Van Hoytema (Tenet, Ad Astra, Dunkirk) delivers a COVID production that never feels like a COVID production. They use their Californian desert setting (Agua Dulce) to such a grandiose and maximal effect that the picture feels huge, but features barely a dozen speaking roles. It's a vibrantly-shot picture, full of life and colour, which is a stark contrast to the more tempered Get Out and the shadow-heavy Us. Its night scenes will test the limits of your home screen's contrasts as it sends shadows streaking through the moon-illuminated sky (mine failed the test, with the blacks and gradient grays and blues looking hella pixelated). I do wish I'd seen it in theatres.
Toasty in his review gets deep into spoilers, and it's hard to talk about this film without saying what is going on. The highly effective trailers for the film took pains to be particularly unclear on what exactly was happening in the film, so it's clear that surprise and uncertainty is considered a big aspect of the viewing experience. It makes me wonder, then, how strong the film would be upon repeat viewings.
We expect Peele at this stage to be operating in the realm of horror, but this film operates more in the realm of wonder. Sure there are some disturbing elements or even whole scenes (Gordy's Home), which are there to hit home the point about humanity's relationship to wild animals, and our limits on taming them for our own entertainment. Perhaps it's an even greater statement about deriving pleasure from the exploitation of others (be they human, animal, or alien), but if so, it's not a crystallized point being made. Since I was expecting a straight-up horror, Jordan Peele-style, I wasn't really sure how to deal with the film as presented.
(I have to do some spoilers ahead)
The crux of what our protagonists are attempting is to capture video or photographs of the "UFO". But we live in a society where just the concept of deepfakes can undermine the authenticity of any video or picture, and the general public, particularly the American public, call into question anything reported from a valid news source, but are quick to embrace anything that seems dodgy but backed by an effusive pitchman.
What is the gameplan of our protagonists once they get "the shot"? How do they expect to retain ownership of their images once they release them when the internet will take anything and everything, even monetized social media would prove limiting (especially when something like TikTok has been documented in how the algorithm undermine POC creators, specifically Black contributors, on the platform). Although, Em Haywood (the fabulous Kiki Palmer) seems to be particularly adept at hustling, it would have been good to get some dialogue, at the very minimum, of what their get rich quick scheme was off all this. I think it would have worked better as an 80's period piece overall, just take modern technology and discourse out of it altogether.
My other issue was, at the end of the day, in this Jaws-like scenario, we humans can't help but destroy what we can't control. The whole set-up of pacifist big-game hunting (eg. photography) culminates in the demise of a unique life form, and seems more tragic than heroic. But I guess that parallels the story of poor Gordy the chimp.
It's clear that Peele, working again with composer Michael Abels, wanted this to be more of a spirited adventure than horrifying. Ables' compositions wouldn't seem out of place in an 80's Spielberg-produced young-adult adventure. The sounds are bouncy and triumphant rather than ominous (though at times it seems at odds with the screaming wails from inside the belly of the beast that resonate out as through an echo chamber...but this is Peele's sense of humour coming out as well).
If, in the end, I didn't love this as much as Toasty, it may be because Peele doesn't make his intentions fully clear. If he just wanted a Jaws-esque adventure, lite on horror, big on fun, then it's largely a success. But if there's a message within this, it feels buried and difficult to extrapolate.
BUT...IS IT HORROR?
Nope.
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