Peele welded a pastiche of horror subgenres into art in Us, so to top that he decided to cobble together horror, scifi, action, comedy, and westerns into art in Nope. Peele and his team crafted a film that gives a flying fuck about composition, acting, color, lighting, and foreshadowing, that makes use of movement in order to control your attention, that sculpts sound into tension, that indulges in the alien form. Its ideas are embedded as much in the plot and dialogue as the imagery itself - an entire film where the themes are conveyed through images within the image we are seeing. While he's far from the first to use his film to comment on filmmaking, Hollywood, and the lust for fame, he tackles it in a refreshing manner and adds in an awareness of history, race, and the artform of film and television that makes it feel like you're in on an inside joke from the start.

I remarked to my good friend that Peele has a knack for taking something mundane but still uncanny and turning it into horror. Hands Across America or skydancers are both very real, but also things that, when you put even a little thought into them, are just... weird. They beg the question "why does this exist?" And Peele takes these curiosities and uses them to remind us that the world we live in is an odd place, and that under the surface (or in the sky above), it is terrifying. In this film, he also takes something objectively terrifying (chimpanzees) and gives it its rightful place in the pantheon of horror villains all while not even having the chimp even be the villain in the story. And while doing it, sets up the theme of looking into the eye of the beast (which is in turn the camera) right from the (literally) bloody start.