Nope Movie: From UFOS To Sea Monsters! All The Inspirations of Jordan Peele’s Behind Nope’s Alien

Nope is a success with the public, with a total of 100 million dollars in box-office receipts. Some of those who have already seen the film, however, may wonder what the meaning of the film directed by Jordan Peele is, or what represents being NOPE (Not Of Planet Earth) that we see in the film. If you want to get some answers, you can listen to our interview with Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer. To fully understand Peele’s vision, however, it is necessary to examine the inspirations behind the “alien” protagonist of the film., which seems to have its roots not only in American UFO sightings but also in marine biology and even the world of anime. Before continuing to read this article and analyze Jordan Peele’s ideas for Nope, however, we remind you that this article contains spoilers on the plot of the film.

Nope Movie: An Alien From the X-Files

Let’s start from the obvious: Nope is a story based on UFOs that starts from the most classic premises relating to the sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object. In the first half of the film, the flying saucer is called UAP, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, a more modern acronym that still betrays a strong closeness to the world of UFOs themselves. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the being who gives the moves to Nope seems to have come out of an episode of The X-Files or a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is Spielberg’s film that has profoundly influenced the work of Jordan Peele, who over and over again quotes and references “Close Encounters” during the plot: for example, in both productions the unidentified flying object uses clouds to hide, while the first “aliens” encountered by the protagonist of Jordan Peele’s film are kids wearing costumes that mention the creatures seen in Spielberg’s masterpiece. Finally, both the protagonist of Nope, OJ, and that of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Roy, have their first “contact” with their respective aliens while in their pickup.

Beyond the citations to Steven Spielberg’s science fiction icon, Nope makes constant winks at the UFO culture of the United States, citing for example one of the multimedia progenitors of this culture in America, namely the “Ancient Aliens” series. Although around the world there are relatively few people who believe in the existence of UFOs, in the United States the belief that they are real is much more rooted, also because it is precisely in America that the highest number of sightings of flying objects occurs every year. unidentified on the planet: the phenomenon has spread to the point of making flying saucers enter popular culture and, subsequently, also in the world of cinema. Originally, however, UFOs had different shapes from those we know today: up to the 1940s, they had the appearance of submarines or even ships.

Things changed shortly before the Second World War when Zeppelins and balloons were used by aviation all over the world, including the American one: being fewer common objects than planes and ships, spherical aircraft were immediately labeled as “UFOs”, giving them the iconic flying saucer shape. What makes the idea behind Nope UAP even more brilliant, however, is the link that, historically, unidentified flying objects have had with clouds. At the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, the movement in support of the existence of UFOs was convinced that they were hiding in the clouds., or even that they were the clouds, especially the particularly regular and slow ones (exactly as happens in Nope). In reality, the first theorists of UFOs did not believe that they were linked to alien civilizations, but simply that they were American warplanes capable of modifying the climate, perhaps to give an advantage to the United States in the hypothesis of a war against the Soviet Union.

It is no coincidence that UFO mania was born during the Cold War: according to Donald H. Menzel, one of the leading experts in mass psychology, “UFOs were born because everyone, at that time, was anxious: the world had suddenly become hostile and there were forces that were impossible for a person to control, like the atomic bomb. “Only with the thaw between the United States and the USSR, and then with the end of the Cold War, did UFOs bond with the aliens, also taking on the narrative we know today.

In The Depths Of The Ocean

However, it is not only UFOs that have inspired the being that terrifies the protagonists of Jordan Peele’s latest effort. What many may not know is that the film’s production teamed up with a University of California marine biologist, Kelsi Rutledge, to make the film’s “alien” realistic. The great revelation of half the film is in fact that the UAP is not a spaceship, as viewers are led to believe from the beginning, but an animal is never seen before, whose origin is not revealed, however. leaving the viewer to decide whether it is an alien or an endangered terrestrial species. Specifically, the creature is an Occulonimbus Edoequus, a nomenclature invented by Rutledge herself, who in the fiction of the film (or at least of her bonus materials) became the scientific advisor to OJ, Emerald and Angel, impersonating herself.

The animal’s name should translate to something like “horse-eater hiding in the clouds”: a fitting nomenclature, although perhaps too explanatory of the nature of the UAP protagonist of the film. Rutledge herself, in addition to the name of the animal, also took care of making it as similar as possible to a creature of the ocean depths, since Jordan Peele wanted to create a being that was scientifically consistent with the fauna existing on our planet.

Peele’s needs in terms of naturalism, however, had to be combined with the fantastic nature of the film: the “alien” could not be too realistic, because otherwise the connection with UFOs, which was instead required by the plot, would have been lost. and by manufacturers. For this reason, Rutledge decided to take inspiration from octopuses and cuttlefish: from the former, in particular, the square eye of the creature was borrowed, while from the latter the inspiration for the “hunting” modes of being was taken. capable of attracting its prey with a form of hypnosis. Not only that: in the final bars of the film, we discover that UAP can change color, a reference to the chromatophore cells of the cephalopods, which allow them to take on a variable pigmentation according to need.

The two animals that most inspired Nope’s co-star creature, however, are the Charon Appendix and the Sandy Dollar. The first is scientifically known as Bathochordaeus Charon and has a “giant” variant: it is a rather common marine invertebrate, which is found in some areas of the Ligurian Sea, but whose classification was completed only in 2016. In, the animal would have given Rutledge the idea for the swallowing and digestion of prey by the UAP of Jordan Peele’s film. The Sandy Dollar, on the other hand, is a much smaller and better-known echinoderm: it is essentially a flat sea urchin with inconspicuous spines, which give it the shape of a coin (hence its name), or that of a record. It is therefore no coincidence that the animal, belonging to the order of the Clypeasteroida, inspired the color and shape of the creature we see in Nope.

From Paradise to Tokyo-3

Finally, alongside marine biology and UFOs, Neon Genesis Evangelion was also a source of inspiration for Jordan Peele, as confirmed by some production notes accompanying the film. In particular, it is the Angels from the anime of Hideaki Anno that have inspired much of the design of the “final form” of the UAP. It is also likely that Nope’s and Evangelion’s production both drew their cues from the biblical depiction of the Seraphim and the Thrones (or Ophanim). The first are beings with six wings, of which only two are suitable for flight, while the others are used to cover human hands and feet. The Thrones, on the other hand, are angels formed by a chain of golden circles, each covered on the outside by a series of eyes and which, even without wings, can move by floating in the sky, exactly like our UAP in its “disc shape”.

Even in the real world, the Ophanim has attracted the attention of many among those who believe in the existence of UFOs. According to a theory of former NASA employee Jose F. Blumrich, for example, the Ophanim would be one of the oldest existing pieces of evidence that UFOs were sighted even thousands of years ago, and are not just a recent phenomenon, attributable to satellites, meteorological probes and balloons. Next to the Seraphim and the Ophanim, then, it seems that the “open” version of the UAP is strongly inspired by Sahaquiel, the tenth Angel of Neon Genesis Evangelion, who can expand by opening his wings and revealing a huge central eye. Nothing too different from what we see in the last minutes of Jordan Peele’s new sci-fi horror, therefore, to reconfirm how Hideaki Anno’s anime has influenced all Western cinema in recent years. Meanwhile, if this review of inspirations for Nope’s UAP has intrigued you, the advice is to run to the cinema and review the sci-fi horror signed by Jordan Peele: before doing so, however, you can also take a look at our Nope review!