Nope Is About Filmmaking, Human Nature, And Exploitation - It Demands Your Attention

thegamer.com:

In my review of Nope, I wrote that I felt it has reinvented what it meant to be both a Jordan Peele film and a summer blockbuster. It's one of the most refreshing big summer movies in years, but it also has clear roots in the first ever big summer movie, 1975's Jaws. Get Out was crystal clear in what the movie was 'about' (in the broad big picture sense that it was about racism and white people robbing Black culture while devaluing Black lives), but both Us and, to a greater extent, Nope leave things a little more ambiguous. I've always read Us as a statement on how America treats its citizens, and by the same token, Nope feels like it might be about how America treats its filmmakers.

This article contains major spoilers for Nope.

Nope is defined by the film industry. Daniel Kaluuya's OJ, the film's lead, is a Hollywood horse trainer who is barely scraping by despite the decades of loyal service he and his family have provided to the movie biz. Steve Yeun's character Jupe, meanwhile, is a former child star who was subjected to massive trauma after a sitcom scene involving a chimpanzee went wrong, leaving him frozen in time. His career never recovered, and he now lives off meagre applause while running a run-down amusement partk full of relics of his past. Add in the fact the plot's driving motivation is not escaping life-or-death situations as in Peele's previous work, but instead capturing footage that will go viral and land OJ and his sister, Keke Palmer’s Em, a spot on Oprah, and it's clear this is a movie about the concept of fame and cinema itself.

Related: Nope's UFO Story Works Because It Isn't About Saving The World

This is underscored by the Jaws connection. Not only is Nope’s UFO-like beast largely unseen until