The film Boop (Ben non) opens with a sequence that perfectly sets the tone and content of what will follow. We see OJ and his old father Otis, a rancher, exchange a few banal words interspersed with looks that speak more than the words spoken. As OJ heads home, a mysterious rain of small objects falls on the paddock where Otis is riding. At the hospital, an X-ray reveals that a coin pierced the latter’s skull, killing him. Where does this unusual shower come from, or rather, enough to does it come from? Jordan Peele’s new production quickly answers this question.
In fact, the first act barely begins when OJ sees in the sky what can only be a flying saucer. The furtive appearances of the ship, which sucks in humans and horses, are also observed by Emerald, OJ’s bohemian sister passing through the ranch.
It should be known that in parallel, the brother and the sister collaborate with Hollywood shootings for equestrian scenes. Founded by the late Otis, the company was born, we learn, to honor the memory of an ancestor who was the very first person to appear on a series of animated images. Which sequence is inspired by the series of chronophotographs by Eadweard Muybridge The Horse in Motion (1878): one of the sequences shows a black jockey who, in Boopbecomes this ancestor pioneer of the cinema.
It’s Emerald who explains all this, still near the beginning of the first act, to a uniformly white, and obviously uninterested, film crew. This “meta” passage is in this case far from being anecdotal, both in terms of content and form. Jordan Peele immediately places OJ and Emerald on a stage in front of a green screen, the symbol par excellence of special effects blockbusters, with the team listening to them in the background: black in the center, white on the periphery, in an inversion of the Hollywood model which, while tending to slowly change, remains dominant.
Terrific performers
In short, in this real “special effects blockbuster”, combining western and science fiction, the stars are two black actors and the main supporting roles are played by performers with Latino and South Korean heritage. They will have, as the fifth wheel of the carriage, a white partner, in the third act. In this regard, Jordan Peele does not hide it, he makes “social thrillers”, as he recently reminded Variety, and the very distribution of Boop constitutes a statement.
Beyond the message, the interpretation is, fundamentally, formidable. Daniel Kaluuya, discovered in get-out, the first mega success of Jordan Peele where racism is literally horrifying, is fabulous. His OJ is a young man of few words, aged before his time due to immense responsibilities. Taciturn, he also displays an often hilarious phlegm in the most tense moments. The antithesis of OJ, Emerald is verbose and unsteady, and Keke Palmer (Hustlers) is priceless in the role. Same for newcomer Brandon Perea, tasty as a conspiratorial electronics store clerk.
As Jupe, a former child actor who has since reinvented himself as an amusement park owner, Steven Yeun (walking dead, Mayhem) is given a sub-plot on which Peele insists a lot, without however managing to tie it to the rest of the film. It concerns the escapades of a monkey during the disastrous filming of the final episode of a comedy of situations in which Jupe was the star.
There is therefore, in the past, this “trained” monkey, and, in the present, these “tamed” horses, each time for filmed entertainment purposes… Obviously, Jordan Peele is trying to convey another message, even trying to feed one of these metaphors of which he has the secret, but this part remains unfinished, vague.
Uncomfortable in between
The same is true for the extraterrestrial entity. If Jordan Peele has no difficulty in establishing what this visitor from elsewhere wants, and the answer turns out to be as simple as it is logical, the director’s propensity to imply – by means, here, of a replica cryptic, there, of a shot that stretches unduly — that this extraterrestrial vessel “represents” something larger, confines the film to an uncomfortable in-between, between the backfiring Independance Day (Independence Day) and the cerebral Arrival (The arrival). don’t realize Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Encounters of the third type) who wants.
There are plenty of spectacular, harrowing (that nighttime trip to the stable!), or wonderfully strange scenes, but these are interspersed with lengths where the depth of the proposition is presumably supposed to emerge.
What is this flying saucer (which takes on a ridiculous appearance at the end) a metaphor for? Humanity sucking up the resource and spitting out its waste and choking on its own plastic? Who knows. At least Jordan Peele spares us the over-explanations that plagued the second half of Us (We). To choose, the disjunctions and imperfections of Boop are more interesting.