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It’s Peele’s simplest and most straightforward picture yet, thankfully absent the convoluted mythology that bogged down his 2019 sophomore effort “Us,” or the ham-fisted moralizing that marred his script for Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman” reboot last year. “Nope” is a throwback to funny Friday night fright flicks like “Tremors” or “Signs,” an audience picture full of good, old-fashioned jump scares and blessed with an economy of scale. I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to see a summer sci-fi blockbuster in which the fate of the world isn’t hanging in the balance. This one all boils down to a few colorful characters trying to take a photograph without getting eaten by a monster. Does that have anything to do with all of the horses Jupe’s been trying to buy lately?
How Evangelion's Terrifying Angels Inspired Jordan Peele's Nope
"Nope" uses audience expectations to its advantage, particularly when it comes to the alien monstrosity that gruesomely eats and digests its victims. Much of the film hints that the Haywood siblings' UFO — which gets dubbed Jean Jacket — is a flying saucer probably containing little strange people from a distant galaxy. However, the saucer itself is actually alive, and its simple circular form evolves into something akin to an artistic origami kite or even a jellyfish. Speaking with Befores and Afters magazine, "Nope" visual effects supervisor Guillaume Rocheron revealed that Jean Jacket's form was partially inspired by classic sci-fi movies like "The Day The Earth Stood Still." However, minimalist Angel designs from "Neon Genesis Evangelion" also played a significant part. While Jordan Peele has fast become one of the most relevant and profitable of modern American filmmakers, “Nope” is the first time that he’s been afforded a budget fit for a true blockbuster spectacle, and that’s exactly what he’s created with it.
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One day at the Haywood ranch, small metallic objects violently fall from the sky. One of these objects, a nickel, strikes Otis Haywood Sr. in the eye and kills him. Nope (stylized in all caps) is a 2022 American neo-Western science fiction horror film written, directed, and produced by Jordan Peele, under his and Ian Cooper's Monkeypaw Productions banner.
Nope Featurette Explores the Creature Design of the Horrifying Jean Jacket (Exclusive) - ComicBook.com
Nope Featurette Explores the Creature Design of the Horrifying Jean Jacket (Exclusive).
Posted: Tue, 20 Sep 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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Shout-out to Jordan Peele for turning “watching anime” into legitimate artistic research. Jean Jacket will no doubt be haunting all of our nightmares for many years to come.
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Before diving any deeper, it would be remiss of me to not acknowledge the possibility that you may have never heard of "Evangelion" before or haven't had the chance to watch it yet. Don't worry — we won't go into any important plot details here, but having an elementary knowledge of what Angels are is mandatory to understand why its influence in "Nope" is so apparent. The "hyper minimalism" and "biomechanical design flair" of the otherworldly entities known in "Evangelion" as "Angels" were directly cited as one of the influences behind Jean Jacket's design — and it is extremely obvious and welcome. So for humans, we’re in kingdom Animalia, and then we go down to Homo sapiens. And so for each of those levels, we have to follow specific rules for naming something new.
While the extraterrestrial menace at the heart of Peele’s latest, dubbed “Jean Jacket” by Nope protagonists OJ (“Otis Jr.”) and Emerald Haywood, is commonly referred to as a UFO (unidentified flying object) early in the film, the alternate term — UAP, or “unidentified aerial phenomenon” — is perhaps more accurate. But that term doesn’t come close to describing the creature’s actual appearance, which was drawn from a variety of sources. The Angels’ appearance and abilities vary wildly, but there are some angels that Jean Jacket’s design calls back to, mainly the fifth Angel Ramiel and the sixteenth Angel Armisael. When appearing as a saucer, Jean Jacket can maintain a stationary form similar to Ramiel’s seemingly unbreakable appearance as a blue octahedron. When Jean Jacket puffs up near the end to meet the challenge of the Haywood family, the transformation has been described as resembling biblical angels, most likely the Ophanim. It has been theorized by Jose F. Blumrich, a former NASA employee, that the Ophanim might have been what people spotted and labeled as a UFO sighting.
The big screen UFOs of post-World War II were an obvious analogy for America's fear of the Soviet Union. Peele's contemporary interpretation of the same visual, on the other hand, critiques modern society's insatiable appetite for spectacle and how people are always trying to find ways to exploit it in exchange for a quick buck and 15 minutes of fame. There is no denying the massive impact "Evangelion" has had on popular culture. Thought-provoking and action-packed, it was one of the series that broke down the common western assumption that Japanese anime, and even animation in general, was mindless entertainment for children. Sure, other anime also had a part in the disintegration of that stereotype (the "Gundam" franchise famously has a lot to say about the military-industrial complex), but few have perfected the bait-and-switch between fun mecha action and psychological surrealism quite like "Evangelion."
So I created different names for all those different categories as well. And then for the unfurled form, the creature unfurls to reveal this beautiful kind of sail-like structure. So it kind of has this main sail that looks like its head and then these very dynamic pulley-like systems that control that sail. And then in the middle of that structure is its very ominous-looking square eye. Invest in quality science journalism by making a donation to Science Friday.
"The first thing that I thought about this movie, in terms of an overall feel for the characters, was The Goonies," she says of the 1985 adventure flick conceived and executive-produced by Spielberg. Angels are otherworldly creatures that date back to the First Ancestral Race, created by an all-powerful entity named Adam. Varying wildly in appearance and ability, they come to Earth in order to try and reach the Tokyo-3 Geofront, or a subterranean cavity carved underneath the surface of the industrial city.
One of the summer’s biggest blockbusters has been the alien horror film Nope, from director Jordan Peele. Nope has elements of many classic UFO films, with the Spielbergian charm of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the horror and destruction from The War of the Worlds. There are some marine species, most popularly electric eels but also ghost knifefish (great name), that generate electric fields.
Peele had hired Dabiri to consult on the physics of his fictional alien to learn how fast it could fly and how rain would move around the animal, among other things. When Peele mentioned he was also looking for a biologist who understood how animals behaved and who had discovered a new species, Dabiri recommended Rutledge. The movie, which is in theaters now, tells the story of a small group of determined people who confront a dangerous species that appears to be from outer space. In the first part of the movie, you're just seeing glimpses of Jean Jacket. Some biological creatures, they do as much as they can to stay under the radar, so to speak, by keeping a pretty rigid shape.
The crowd was sucked into the UFO, crammed into its “mouth” before their blood was poured onto the Haywood house. That’s when I started to realize that this was a ride I was meant to go on and my preconceived notions about what it might be were not taking me anywhere and telling me something more uncomfortable than I was ready for. I thought Nope was about aliens, and the marketing wanted me to think it was about aliens too, when at its core the movie is way more about humans I’d argue (which I’ll get to later).
It's really cool to see the analogy between feeding time in my lab, when we put little tiny baby shrimp in there and they all get pulled and caught with the tentacles, versus what you see at the end of the movie, that same type of unfurling of Jean Jacket. Obviously, it's science fiction, but in most cases, you could come up with plausible ways in which Jean Jacket could do what it did in the movie. I hope there'll be a director's cut later on, because there's some really cool scenes outside of what you see in the two-hour six-minute runtime theater version, that I think are also really awesome. Jean Jacket is one of the main features of the movie, and the way it's described in the script and in my conversations with Jordan, it was fun to think about ways that we could pull features that people would say, "Oh, that's impossible." But, in fact, in the ocean, you find these very exotic creatures that would have these different characteristics.
Just be careful to know when you are paying homage to another artist’s work and when you are casually plagiarizing. Filmmaking still requires you to add your take on a subject, design, and structure. Make sure you are serving your story rather than overindulging in references.
And then obviously we simulated the clouds then you simulate all this so you get something realistic, and then we rendered them, because they needed to fit perfectly into the photography every time,” Rocheron said. Rocheron got involved from a very early stage, while Peele was still working on drafts of the screenplay. “He had some ideas of creating an iconic flying saucer that would then become another creature, a bit more wind-based and we talked a lot about the concepts,” Rocheron said. "There were so many iterations of them. We kind of knew that we wanted to create something that was uncanny. So [it turned out to be] this mixture of latex and fur, which could be done really badly. We tried to sort of do it well, but [also] badly to make it uncanny," Bovaird concludes. "We wanted to do this scene differently in line with our philosophy of trying to keep our audience engaged. We didn't want to reveal the horror of the chimpanzee too clearly [or] too quickly," Rocheron recalls.
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