If you’ve just watched Jordan Peele’s new sci-fi horror blockbuster, Nope, you may have questions about how the thrilling ending will be. Or maybe you are stuck with the question of what the film 2022 really is and the meaning behind it.
Nope follows the story of two brother horse trainers, namely OJ and Emerald Hayworth. They find something large and mysterious hiding in the sky near his ranch. However, like the ominous cloud over the Southern California desert, many of you may be confused about the news film’s meaning and ending. So, let’s describe the ending.
Throughout the film, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) are threatened by a figure that looks like a flying saucer. The saucer flew low over the remote California hills where they lived. The dish sucked horses and people at a nearby amusement park through a tornado-shaped dust funnel.
OJ realized that the object was not a spaceship. But an organism. The animals and humans he carried were not teleported. But they are being eaten.
OJ and Emerald, along with enthusiastic technologist Angel Torres (Perea) and film director Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), devise a plan to lure the organisms out during the day. So that they can film it and reap the prize money.
During the film, they discover that the creature turns off nearby electricity and only eats what it sees in the eye. To trap him, OJ will act as bait, wear a hoodie with two reflectors attached to the back of the hood, and double as eyes.
He rode his horse out of their house to the ranch. Meanwhile Emerald monitors surveillance cameras with Antlers and Angel filming the scene with a non-electric camera from above.
Plans get complicated when a journalist from TMZ shows up at the farm and asks about the recent tragedy. Against OJ’s warnings, he rides his motorbike at full speed towards a power outage zone, and bounces off the bike. He doesn’t die right away and OJ tries to save him. Unfortunately, OJ failed because the organism devoured him.
Right after that, OJ ran back towards the house, the hoodie with the reflector stopped, making the creature chase after him. Antlers gets the scene, and OJ escapes just in time. But the Antlers were seduced by the thrill of the chase, ignoring the precautions they had put in place and exposing themselves to the creature for the perfect shot in the twilight light. A decision that got him eaten too.
The creature goes on a rampage, destroys the Haywood family home and nearly kills Angel. Luckily, he escaped because he was wrapped in barbed wire. Emerald and OJ both try to escape, but he can’t go on the journalist’s motorbike unless OJ rides Lucky in the opposite direction. Which meant he sacrificed himself.
After Emerald escapes, the creature expands, unwraps it into long tendrils and transforms into a butterfly-like shape. Later, Emerald releases a large human-shaped balloon at the amusement park, hoping that the creature will fall in love with her fake eyes.
When that happened, he used the camera attached to one of the amusement park attractions to photograph it just before the act of digesting the compressed air. Lastly, the balloon manages to blow up the creature once and for all.
What Does Nope Really Mean?
In a July interview with Today, Peele spent a lot of time talking about the film’s themes. In a chat with Craig Melvin, Peele said Nope is “about a lot of things,” including spectacle, race and human nature.
“I felt like I was fighting for the cinema, I was fighting for the theater experience when I was writing this film,” Peele told Melvin. “So it’s about spectacle. And from there, I explored it and started to uncover what I think is like the dark side of our relationship with spectacle.”
On that “dark relationship,” Peele says we can use spectacle “to distract ourselves from the truth.” Or distract ourselves for things we can obsess over.
“When we’re driving, we’re in traffic right, then there’s an accident, the traffic slows down,” Peele said. “That’s because everyone was peeking at the horrific spectacle and it slowed everyone down. So I hooked it up and intended to make a film about it.”
Peele didn’t directly dismantle the ending, but Melvin asked him what he wanted the audience to think when they exited the theater. Peele gave a cryptic reply, “If I have too clear an idea of what I want them to think, I feel like I’m not going to talk to the audience. That’s up to them.”
