 Look at me, talking about something for more than 60 seconds. There are a few words in a movie's promotional materials that can get me more excited than shot with IMAX film cameras. If we accept that movies are the best and that the big screen is the best way to see them, then is anything better than seeing a movie on the biggest of the big screens? No. But to get the IMAX experience, you really need to see movies made with it in mind. And while that's less of a monumental task with the advent of digital cameras that are approved for proper IMAX capture, allowing movies like Dune and to a much lesser extent The Eternals to fill the screen in its entirety, it's still incredibly rare. Most of the time you see filmed for IMAX on posters like Top Gun Maverick or the rest of the MCU, they're talking about shooting in a 1.9 to 1 aspect ratio, which actually has less height than your average indie drama shot in good old 1.85 to 1 flat. It's a far cry from true IMAX, though LIMAX is no longer the burn it once was. I get it, though. Shooting on IMAX film is expensive, logistically complicated, and perhaps most important, loud. So loud that any audio you might have gotten on set is completely unusable. Every word you hear in any of those gorgeously detailed scenes had to be done later in the studio. And now you know why the only scenes in Dunkirk that weren't shot in IMAX are the only scenes in Dunkirk that feature actual conversations. Christopher Nolan, of course, is the king of this, using IMAX cameras for every film since The Dark Knight Rises. Although he started with The Dark Knight, he skipped Inception, though that didn't stop me from seeing Inception in IMAX three times. But he's not the only one to do it, he just does it more. And that points to the problem with the line on the poster, how much exactly is shot with IMAX film cameras. Christopher Nolan uses it basically whenever he can, but it's more commonly used for specific sequences, like that phenomenal lunar scene in First Man or the handful of also phenomenal action sequences in No Time to Die. And no matter how much of it there is, it's never enough. Because the drop in fidelity between true IMAX film and literally anything else is like when Netflix misses its buffer, that pristine 4K drops like 240p and you grumble until you finally get your beautiful image back. And that grumbling kind of consumes me on the first watch, which is why I've got to see every IMAX movie at least twice. Such a travesty. Hello, by the way, and welcome to the Week Air Review. You can call me a guy who shares an alma mater with Jordan Peele. And today, I am talking about his third feature. Nope. At this point, I feel confident in saying that Jordan Peele doesn't care much about the internal logic of the worlds he builds in his screenplays. Get Out's metaphor is clear, but its mechanics are pretty shaky, though that didn't bother me nearly as much as the big reveal of us, which I've complained about plenty already. In a video that itself contains an aside that absolutely didn't hold up to scrutiny, so, you know, none of us are perfect. I'm not going to complain about Nope's inconsistencies because as with Get Out, I don't think they're important. And it's unfortunate that some people do seem to be getting hung up on them. Well, there wasn't a lot of audience reaction after the 9 a.m. Saturday screening that I first saw. The 7 p.m. showing a few days later had a much more talkative crowd after the fact. Once the credits hit, the old man next to me literally screamed like a child at two separate points and punctuated a bunch of other moments with, what the fuck, said, he's a genius. Immediately behind me, a woman said to her husband, I'm so confused, and then a couple near her shouted, we were just saying the same thing. But if you're getting confused, you're focused on the wrong thing. Kind of like the characters in Nope, if you think about it. But I understand them, O.J. and Emerald Haywood, the fictional descendants of the black man who rode a horse in the first ever moving picture. I think everyone does to some extent, but folks like me a little more, because everyone who has ever decided to put themselves out there, a.k.a. out here on the internet, has imagined what it would be like to be famous. To have everyone know your name, to be the subject of a puff piece in People magazine or whatever the 2022 equivalent of that is. No one says, hi, welcome to my YouTube channel because they want to be a nobody. All of us want to be a somebody, we want to have done something special and unique, and as a result, have the world recognize us. It's a dream, right? The dream. Everyone on this and any other platform has had it, and also most people off the platforms too. But as a highly respected cinematographer tells the Haywood siblings, it's a dream you never wake up from. I've spent a long time thinking about that line because I really love the ambiguity of it. It is clearly a warning from a man who has achieved success and seen it in many others, but that is a far cry from saying something like, huh, that dream you're having, it's actually a nightmare, some bullshit like that, though it is easy to read it that way. A few weeks ago, SuperEye Patch Wolf released an excellent video about the dark side of content creation, and I felt that shit so fucking hard, and I found some of the conversations that he had with small channels in its back half genuinely heartbreaking. I'm a little sad that I didn't know that he had put out a call for those because I totally would have thrown my hat in the ring, but as a rule, I don't follow people on Twitter who I haven't met in real life or worked with in some capacity, and I've only made two exceptions to that rule, which makes Twitter a much less stressful place to be. At this point, I've become deeply disillusioned with YouTube and seeing people with sub-counts even lower than mine venting about the same experiences that led me to stop looking at the creator studio entirely only exacerbates the feeling. I am apparently in the top 2% of channels by subscribers, and yet I'm still so insignificant. That's fucking crazy, because a lot of people would be incredibly happy to have 15,000 subscribers, but how long would that last? Because the truth is 15,000 doesn't feel that much different than 1,500 did and it's just as impossible to live on. My four-year anniversary on this platform is less than two weeks away. I don't regret much about what I've done in all that time, but I wish I'd done it with a different mindset, without the grind set. Emerald has that, she's always hustling, always networking, she shows up late to set, but when she's done introducing Heywood Hollywood horses, she decides to throw in the laundry list of positions for which she believes she's qualified if anyone wants to hire her specifically and not her family's horses. And sure, we will see her wear more than a few of those hats by the time the credits are all proving that she's not just talk, but... I really hate people who do shit like that. But while that kind of rabid self-promotion has never made sense to me, her reaction to her brother's sighting of a UFO, sorry, UAP, feels pretty, well, duh. You can't be afraid of the unknown in 2022. This is, this is it. This is her, their opportunity. They have to buy new fancy cameras and point them at the sky because being the people to get high quality proof of aliens is a whole lot more important than the fact that they don't necessarily have the funds to buy those cameras. The footage would surely pay for itself. But maybe that's not really a duh, because it turns out, someone else saw the UFO first. Ricky is their only neighbor in the Desert Valley and a frequent customer of OJs as he tries to keep the ranch afloat. He's a showman, a former child sitcom star traumatized by a birthday party episode gone horribly wrong. Now he owns a western-themed amusement park. And when he saw something in the sky one Friday at 6.13 or something like that, he got to work crafting a live show that would climax with an honest-to-god reveal of intergalactic travelers. It's the same desire that the Haywoods have, but a radically different approach to it. Ricky's playing a long game, or so he hopes. He has seen how fleeting fame can be. He's been in the spotlight and he wants it back. And he knows that just throwing something out there into the world isn't going to be enough. Because yeah, you can be the person who took that first video. You can make a lot of money and then get on the daytime talk show circuit but if you run the one show on earth, where a fucking alien is going to show up, that's something else. That's an overflowing parking lot every damn Friday for eternity. But also, this is show biz. And nothing ever really goes according to plan. I think it's odd that the person who gets the most flashbacks and nope is not one of its protagonists. The film starts from Ricky's POV, filling up the largest screen in the United States of America and we get to see that horrific day on several occasions. But O.J. and Emerald get a single brief flashback each and they're not even shot in IMAX. I kept expecting this to somehow connect to the main characters rather than just be some dramatic parable for the audience to make their own connections from. But it doesn't. It does make the key point. You don't tame a predator. You enter into an agreement with one. Unfortunately, that's not the lesson Ricky learned from what happened. If anything, he learned the opposite, that he in particular was special. Sure, the ape maimed his co-stars, but then it went to fist bump him with blood-soaked fingers. He'd been seeing this disc in the sky for months and he was still alive so clearly it is okay with him and whatever he wants to do with it. But Pride goeth before the fall or whatever and what a bloody spectacle that fall is, captured and slash or rendered on the biggest film imaging source in the world. It makes sense that movies set in space are over-represented in the pantheon of IMAX shot films. It's the final frontier an all-consuming infinite nothingness that is really impossible for any of us to fathom. A true sense of presence in VR may one day get us there, but until then IMAX is the closest thing we've got. It is the largest of the larger-than-life. Nope, it's merely about a being from space, but it uses the full height of the Lincoln Square IMAX theater to literally depict these larger-than-life moments. Of course, the flashback to the time a monkey attacked its co-stars gets that treatment. And of course, OJ seeing Jean Jacket for the first time in clear detail does too. The final act attempted capturing the impossible shot is an epic adventure. How could you not? I assume the couple of times it cuts back to Emerald and not IMAX as she's checking the monitors were from reshoots done after they had to give the cameras back because the first shot of her looking at the screens is in the full aspect ratio. It makes the film feel kind of like what it's depicting. The biggest little production ever. Like, Nope is a $69 million movie. And sure, nice, but if you told me it was half that, I'd have believed you. It's got just a handful of locations and a cast so tiny that I actually think every person with a line is named in the opening credits. This does not feel like a big movie and yet it's huge. Similarly, OJ and Emerald decide they got to go big as fuck for this home movie they're making. Wooing the aforementioned cinematographer with the impossible shot and he comes prepared with his own dim IMAX film camera planning for the best possible lighting. The whole thing is ridiculous but that ridiculousness is matched only by the conviction with which it's implemented. And that's indie filmmaking in a nutshell, right? A group of delusional artists so committed to the bit that there is almost no choice but to achieve something. And that something may not be good and maybe some people will die along the way but they'll have done it. And that's worth celebrating. 8.0 out of 10. Thanks so much for watching. Thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, my cat, Cat Seracata, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I am the sword, Liam Knipe, Clairbear, Taylor Lindy's, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, great. If not, oh well, if you want to see more, subscribe. Hope to see you in the next one.