NOPE's Science Consultant Reveals the Name and Inspiration for the Movie's Alien

Table Of Content

• Jellyfish, squids, and other real-life aquatic creatures
• Jordan Peele's 'Nope' is a rollicking alien invasion adventure
• Sahaquiel from Neon Genesis Evangelion
• ‘Nope’ Alien Design: How Jellyfish and ’90s Anime Inspired Jordan Peele’s New Monster
• How Jordan Peele's UFO thriller Nope Drew From '80s Classics Like The Goonies & Gremlins
• Storyline
• Everything to Know About the Abigail Movie Soundtrack

Some of it is using air currents, some of it is the idea of it almost breathing to stay up there, in the same way that, underwater, you get these jellyfish that are neutrally buoyant, and they have this sort of breathing motion. There's lots of different ways that we thought about trying to explain those mechanisms. There's a scene that is not in the actual movie that says a bit more about the origin of Jean Jacket—and I won't spoil that, if it comes out later—that also could play into trying to understand where it came from, how it functions.

Jellyfish, squids, and other real-life aquatic creatures

"I definitely pushed back a little bit because I was worried about his comfort," she explains. "We were playing with the idea that Jupe is still obsessed with artifice," she continues. Whenever Jean Jacket feeds, it must eventually regurgitate inorganic material that it cannot digest (coins, glasses, etc.).

Jordan Peele's 'Nope' is a rollicking alien invasion adventure

(He was struck by falling debris from something.) They come from a long line of horse trainers/stunt performers and are desperate to keep the business afloat. But they’ve got other things to deal with – mainly the sinister flying saucer that seems to be hiding in a cloud just above their property, as well as the former-child-star-turned-theme-park-impresario living next door (Steven Yeun) who wants to buy the ranch. This is much bigger than anything Peele has done before and he and his many talented collaborators pull it off beautifully. The fact that some of the minimalist "Evangelion" Angel designs artistically inspired "Nope" is funny, considering that the anime's production team had a more practical reason behind them. As the series progresses, the Angels in "Evangelion" get less anthropomorphic and more simple in terms of shape. According to a fan-translated interview from the "RahXephon Complete" book, Anno noted that the Angel designs became less complicated because not doing so would have made production more challenging.

Sahaquiel from Neon Genesis Evangelion

This aspect of its metabolism, which is established in the opening minutes, gives Peele an excuse to drench the Haywood household in a monsoon of blood shortly after the alien noshes on former child star Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yeun) and his gathered audience of thrill-seeking spectators at Jupiter's Claim. It's an iconic and Kubrickian visual in the making that wouldn't feel out of place in a 19th century gothic horror novel. At first, the good folks at MPC ran "some tests to drop some large-scale blood on the house," but ultimately decided to use CG with a few practical flourishes. Peele and his trusty VFX wizards never wanted to go overboard with too many bells and whistles in our current age of bloated CGI excess (a rather ironic philosophy, given the movie's subtext). "Very early on, we embraced something very minimalistic in terms of the design, where it was just like, ‘Okay, function and design work together,’" Rocheron says. "Which is very much the opposite of what you do on films today now that you have the ability to put as much detail as you want on the computer model."

‘Nope’ Alien Design: How Jellyfish and ’90s Anime Inspired Jordan Peele’s New Monster

The inclusion of Canyon Snow Irises on the back of Jupe's jacket foreshadows the monster's final form in the third act. While no concrete explanation on the origin of the UFO-like creature is ever provided, Peele apparently referenced everything from "jellyfish" to "flowers," Bovaird reveals. "[He was] always talking about some sort of organic thing. Membrane-y." Whatever the thing is, it considers the Haywood Ranch (inherited by OJ and Emerald after the mysterious death of their father) as part of its territory.

Nope‘s alien’s scientific name is Occulonimbus edoequus, which translates to “hidden dark cloud stallion-eater.” More on that badass choice in our conversation with Rutledge, below. And Peele was inspired by art, as well as science, when it came to Jean Jacket’s final form. “Nope” follows a pair of siblings (played by Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer), who inherit their father’s horse ranch following his mysterious death.

Storyline

He really wanted that rectangular geometry for the eye, that flapping motion. You don't typically see that too much in biology, those really regular features, but, in a sense, I think that was intentional here. To say that there are parts of this, even by earthly biological standards, that are bizarre and really not of this world. In a phone conversation with Thrillist, Dabiri went in depth on how he and Peele's team created this creature, which animal behaviors they used for inspiration, and whether there could be more Jean Jackets hiding in plain sight amongst the clouds.

We have a real scientific illustrator who’s illustrated the figures of the creature. The authors of this mock manuscript will be the character’s names and then mine. I don’t know of any other movie that has ever written up a whole scientific manuscript to debut their creature. She shared the news in an unconventional way, posting professional photos as if it were a birth announcement. Rutledge provided information and graphics of ocean critters that inspired the VFX team’s final design. She shared that slideshow with Nerdist and answered our burning questions about Nope.

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Or this could be just a charming line of hooey they’ve cooked up for the clients. It doesn’t hurt that Peele’s latest boasts some of the most inspired alien design since H.R. Giger left his mark on the genre, or that Kaluuya’s eyes remain some of Hollywood’s most special effects, as “Nope” gets almost as much mileage from their weariness as “Get Out” squeezed from their clarity. It’s through them that “Nope” searches for a new way of seeing, returns the Haywoods to their rightful place in film history, and creates the rare Hollywood spectacle that doesn’t leave us looking for more.

"Geometry where you move clouds around and you construct the pieces and place them where you need. Then you take them and you run them through large fluid simulations." In order to wring fresh terror and social commentary out of a genre that's been thrilling audiences since the Martian Tripods first landed on Earth in the waning days of the 19th century, Peele needed an iconic movie monster; one whose design would not only break all the rules, but linger in the viewer's memory long after the credits had rolled. The Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Get Out and Us grasped this immediately, reaching out to VFX studio, MPC, while still in the process of writing the screenplay two years ago. One of the questions was, are there features from that really efficient body plan that we can adopt for Jean Jacket, which makes Jean Jacket so effective being able to stay motionless in a spot for a long period of time without expending too much energy? Doing that selectively, depending on how it interacts with people who are interested in the spectacle, that whole aspect of the relationship between Jean Jacket and all of us trying to get a shot of it is also really cool. You have this thing that's up in the air, and so there's the other question of, how does this thing stay aloft?

Nope's Alien Explained: What Is The Alien & What Does It Want? - Screen Rant

Nope's Alien Explained: What Is The Alien & What Does It Want?.

Posted: Thu, 18 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

If they achieve their goal, they can combine forces with the remnants of Adam to trigger the Third Impact, a devastating event that would wipe out all life on Earth as we know it. In order to prevent any of the 16 Angels from entering the Geosphere, NERV created the Evangelion project and the massive mechas that have become cultural icons. As a scientist, you're not always jumping at the chance to engage on a movie or something because the science can be either too on-the-nose, so that it just doesn't get people excited, or it's too much of a caricature of the way the science might actually be. I think Jordan was interested in finding that mix of keeping his artistic vision, but making sure that the science was injected well. That last scene, where you're seeing the display from Jean Jacket, with those sort of ribbons coming out and flapping, we had some interesting conversations about what that might look like in a real animal versus what he had in his mind.

The ultimate goal, Bovaird explains, was to "create iconic looks" akin to Michael J. Fox's famous wardrobe of jeans, sneakers, denim jacket, and puffy orange vest Back to the Future. "I suppose every costume designer is trying to do that, but we we wanted this big, bold, bright Goonies-esque ensemble," the costume designer adds. "There was a lot of riffing. In the art department and the costumes, [we were] sort aping certain things, for sure." To do some of this research, Rutledge partnered with John Dabiri, an engineering professor at Caltech who studies fluid mechanics and flow physics.

This seemed unsatisfactory since, in even the best cases, you can really tell – it just doesn’t feel right. MPC Art Director, Leandre Lagrange started coming up with what would ultimately be the design language for Jean Jacket, inspired by Japanese origami, lending the creature “striations and those lines.” When they showed those designs to Peele, he “fell in love” as well. Sarah El-Mahmoud has been with CinemaBlend since 2018 after graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in Journalism. In college, she was the Managing Editor of the award-winning college paper, The Daily Titan, where she specialized in writing/editing long-form features, profiles and arts & entertainment coverage, including her first run-in with movie reporting, with a phone interview with Guillermo del Toro for Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. All her writing should be read in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 voice over. I thought it was going to be Peele’s alien invasion movie, with full-on first encounters and perhaps a solid social commentary about the dynamic of the two and so forth.