Nope
131 minutes; R
Critic’s grade: A-

It’s hard not to still think of Jordan Peele as half of Key & Peele, for my money the funniest sketch-comedy duo of our time. But just three films and five years into his directing career, the filmmaker has found a place for himself near the center of the film-culture universe.

Thanks to the scares and provocations about race, privilege and belonging that he raised with his stunning 2017 debut film “Get Out” and 2019’s shocker “Us,” not to mention their success at the box office, expectations for his big-budget “Nope” have been sky high.

Would his new one, released during a period of time in our country that again feels fraught with racial, cultural and political tensions, have something fresh and trenchant to say about those Big Issues? In a post-pandemic era when at-home viewing is all the rage, and even many major studio films make their debuts on the streamers, could Peele’s latest also do the impossible — lure filmgoers back to theaters for something other than a Tom Cruise movie, and mount “Independence Day”-size box office returns?

That’s a mighty heavy burden, somewhat unfair and, for viewers, ultimately irrelevant. What matters most is whether “Nope” succeeds on its own terms. Short answer: Yep, resoundingly so, although with an asterisk — some thematic elements are loosely connected, at best. Still, I already want to see it again, to catch visuals and dialogue that I may have missed the first time.

“Get Out” is so striking, in part, because it combines insightful social commentary with a rather narrowly focused, readily described horror fable: Black boy meets white girl, girl takes boy home to meet the parents, and boy finds out he’s been betrayed in a manner that nobody saw coming. “Us,” too, has a relatively straightforward narrative — solidly middle-class African-American family of four is terrorized by their doppelgangers — although it comes with significantly more bloodletting.

By comparison, “Nope” is much less tightly constructed, a bit all over the place, as if Peele had been collecting intriguing if not necessarily related ideas and concepts in a giant notebook over the years, waiting for the perfect opportunity — in this case, a $68 million budget and the loyalty of fans who flocked to his first two films — to bring them all to life.

Peele, again directing from his own script, relates a tale encompassing African-American cowboy siblings, a Gold Rush-themed attraction with an alien sideshow, a fake ill-fated ‘90s sitcom about a seemingly domesticated chimp, and a menacing UFO.

“Nope” concerns itself with all of the above mentioned elements as well as themes around the art and craft of moviemaking, the contemporary quest for overnight celebrity, skewed history as entertainment, and something or other about the bad things that happen when humans foolishly try to tame animals, or aliens. Or maybe their worst impulses.

The movie benefits from frightening passages, a bit of (mostly implied) gore, some unexpected twists and plenty of comic relief. And Peele elicits winning performances from “Get Out” breakout star Daniel Kaluuya, Nickelodeon vet and “Akeelah and the Bee” star Keke Palmer, and Steven Yeun, of “Minari” and television’s “The Walking Dead.”

The screenplay’s slightly fuzzy focus, though, doesn’t do irreparable damage to a movie that feels “big” in every sense of the word. Its sprawling mountains-and-desert Western vistas and best, most frightening set pieces — no spoilers, but don’t look up! — deserve to be experienced on the largest screens around, with sound systems capable of handling the volume and intensity of the creative sound design.

And yet “Nope,” after an unsettling prologue — an image of a fallen female body and a bloodied simian wearing a birthday hat, on a TV studio set with a blinking “applause” sign — begins small, as something of a family drama.

Reserved, sad-eyed Otis Haywood Jr. aka OJ (Kaluuya), his excitable sister Emerald (Palmer) and stern aging dad Otis Sr. (veteran character actor Keith David) are striving to sustain their once thriving business breeding horses on a farm in the SoCal desert. The Haywoods made a pretty penny lending their animals to Hollywood until the rise of CGI effects, which let productions replace real horses with digital facsimiles. The family traces its lineage to a forebear who was the horseback rider in the world’s first moving image, “The Horse in Motion,” created in 1878 by Eadweard Muybridge.

Then the craziness kicks in. The electric power flickers and then dies off at the family’s rambling, picturesque farmhouse, as Emerald’s soul and rock vinyl — she loves to blast her tunes loud enough to be heard a mile away — winds down to a dead stop and lights dim and fade out. Weird stuff rains down. A horse is injured in bizarre fashion. Someone suffers a freak tragic accident.

And up there in the big California sky is the only stationary cloud this side of a movie set; defying science and logic, it never moves. Nearby, there’s an odd new alien attraction at Jupiter’s Claim, the Old West tourist trap run by Rick “Jupe” Park (Yeun), once a child star on the TV show, “Gordy’s Home!” referenced at the movie’s start.

The plot primarily centers on the attempts of Emerald, Otis and a pair of new friends — a tech nerd, a famous Hollywood cinematographer — to get photographic evidence of the strange happenings on their piece of the planet. If they could only get “the money shot” or, better yet, “the Oprah shot,” and the financial reward to follow, the siblings could keep the family business alive. In one of many humorous touches, a TMZ cameraman tries to hone in on the alien-pic action, too.

Yes, cowboys, cowgirls and aliens of a sort figure into Peele’s movie, as advertised. But it’s closer in spirit and appearance to a Spielberg or a Hitchcock film than to an overwrought, video game-like film like 2011’s “Cowboys & Aliens,” nominally in the same vein.

Bottom line: Peele has unleashed a genuinely entertaining sci-fi/horror spectacle, with the always welcome bonus of a few thought-provoking narrative strands to ponder after the credits roll. That’s more than enough when it comes to what most folks want from a trip to the theater.

And am I alone in hoping to someday learn the full story of Gordy, the once lovable chimp who went ape, and, in the film’s universe was played by Chris Kattan on “SNL” (another brilliant bit)? Hint, hint.