yes, i watched this again in the span of two days.

thinking about writing a review on this film has haunted me ever since i first saw this. there's so much to unpack in jordan peele's latest film nope that i felt that whatever i was going to write wouldn't do this film justice. but now, after watching this a second time and doing a little digging on theories about this movie, i feel i can finally write. i'm sitting at home, on my laptop just after leaving the imax theatre for my midnight showing of this film, and i am just fuelled with creativity to write my thoughts and my theories on nope.

first off, i want to address the elephant in the room. the shoe. now, when i first saw the standing shoe i thought nothing much of it, but after watching videos on just how important the shoe is to not only jupe but the entire story, i have come up with my theory. i think the standing shoe is one of the few bad miracles we get to see. it is a one-in-a-billion chance that during this terrifying event, such an unlikely thing would occur. it is something that draws jupe's attention at the right moment, distracting him from paying too much attention to gordy's freakout. during the flashback, we are put in young jupe's pov and barely see the attack, we focus more on the shoe, which puts us in his mind.

the gordy event takes such a toll on jupe that as an adult, his coping method for this is just to obsess over it. he becomes the pinnacle of the fanatic, except he is doing this over his young self. someone that died in 1998, on the filming of the episode 'gordy's birthday'. he obsesses over himself before that event, and just how happy and successful he was then. and, as we see during the star lasso experience scene, so does mary jo elliot. the young actress who was viciously disfigured during the 1998 incident. she is covered in gordy's home merchandise and makes it visible who she was and now is. her story is the one that stuck with me the most after my first viewing since it's partially based on the trevor the chimp incident that happened in 2009. i'm not going to go into full detail about what happened but i do recommend searching it up on google. it's crazy that something like that actually happened to someone. and if you want to see what the woman who suffered the attack looked like after, watch the opera interview. there the woman wears a veil identical to the one mary jo sports in that climactic scene.

unconsciously, jupe does the same thing to the ufo he calls ‘the visitor’ that the crew of gordy's home did to that monkey. he creates a spectacle to entertain his audience, and by doing so he messes with the nature of an animal, a predator. a predator that now feeds off jupiter's claim and the surrounding area of agua dulce.

another part of the movie that left me scratching my head on my first viewing was the character of antlers holst. now, after giving it some thought. i feel like he is the caricature of the impossible shot. he falls in love with the alien at the end and wants to capture it in the most beautiful way ever, even if it means sacrificing his own life for the greater good of the impossible and the spectacle.

speaking of the ending, wow. what a finale. everything is just perfect. the final 'form' of the alien and how it moves reminds me so much of a preying animal. the way it tosses and catches the inflatable cowboy, the way the green squares pop and pop. i love it so much.

i feel like, apart from these few scenes, the rest of the movie focuses more on the horror that this ufo causes to our main characters. and how sometimes things are better left alone. the entire movie is a hate letter to how hollywood and just the world, in general, think that they can use these wild animals and turn them into a spectacle for the world to see. by doing this, they try and remove the natural animalistic instincts in the animal, and that only works temporarily, because as shown, anything can make these unpredictable creatures snap. to gordy it was the balloons, to lucky, it was the VFX ball, and to the alien, it was the plastic horse. most of the movie focuses on this, but there are so many other genres mixed in. comedy, drama, and action. damn it, i just love this movie so much.

in conclusion, i still don't think i did this movie any sort of justice at all. there is so much i want to say but it's 2 am and i don't know how to word it all. please, please just watch the movie and interpret this for yourselves. do a bit of research on it after, and watch it a second time. it's worth it. i loved this. jordan peele, you are a genius.