Admittedly, I was not in the camp of those that loved the John Krasinski project, A Quiet Place. Even though I like him and wife/actress Emily Blunt and wanted to like the movie, I just couldn’t get on board.
This happens with a lot of earth-based sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, and/or alien invasion scenarios. We’re left with so many questions like, how did things get to this point? is it like this all over the earth? how many people are left? how many died? how did you create a mostly sound-free existence while not making sound? And, of course, WHY WOULD YOU HAVE A BABY IN THIS SCENARIO? Did they forget that babies cry?
Okay, okay. You get where I was coming from. I found it enjoyable but forgettable entertainment and, thus, I skipped the second installment, A Quiet Place: Part II. So why am I here for the third movie? Because this one was going to answer the question I wanted to know and probably most people wanted to know:
How did this all start?
I went into A Quiet Place: Day One thinking that, as implied by the name, this would be the origin story of the aliens. This would answer all my questions. And if that’s what you’re hoping for, it’s only fair to say you won’t get the answers you’re looking for.
Here’s what you will get: a prequel of sorts with a nearly entirely new cast of characters.
A Quiet Place: Day One begins at a hospice facility where we meet Samira (Lupita Nyong’o) looking remarkably thin. When we find out she’s a terminal cancer patient, we understand why. Begrudgingly accepting her fate, she seems determined to live out her days in misery with her service cat until she is overtaken by her cancer. But one fateful day, her nurse and friend, Reuben (Alex Wolff) decides to take facility residents into NYC for a brief show. Samira reluctantly agrees to go on one condition only: they make a stop for good old-fashioned New York pizza.
Now, as you might guess, they picked a realllllly bad day to head into the city. And before long, we see the same havoc that introduced us to the aliens in the first 12 minutes of A Quiet Place: Part II. They seemingly come from nowhere with no warning raining death and destruction throughout the city.
Samira (and her cat) remarkably survive as they quickly, as with the last movie, determine that silence is the only opportunity for survival. Her mission, despite her state of shock, is to travel to Harlem for a piece of good old fashioned NYC pizza.
At face value, it sounds ridiculous. The city is in ruins and the end of the world is nigh but this girl wants to get some pizza. But it works because Samira is dying and yet she somehow becomes motivated enough to want to recapture a few more tastes of life. She, who is dying and has everything to be afraid of, meets up with stranded law school student, Eric (Jospeh Quinn), who has everything to live for and is frightened of it all.
It’s an unlikely duo. A black American terminal cancer patient woman and her cat traveling through the remains of the city with a white English anxiety-ridden, suit clad white collar man. And yet they need each other before realizing that they need each other. It’s a surprisingly tender-hearted story.
Oh, and then there are aliens that come in and kill lots of people.
Did that seem abrupt to you? That’s how the movie felt. While this is meant to be one story of Day One, and it is a lovely story, it seemed very oddly juxtaposed in a high stakes, suspenseful alien invasion movie. At times, you forgot there even were aliens, and perhaps that was the point. But it made the movie a little slower than I would have liked or expected.
My bigger beef, though, is with the bigger picture. And this continues to be my issue with this movie and others like it. They never gave us more. We still don’t know where the aliens came from or how they got there. We don’t see any realization or discovery along with the characters that hey – they are using sound to locate us!
More importantly, this movie doesn’t seem to follow any rules, which are required for any good sci-fi flick, horror or not. How much sound can the aliens hear? Is it 10 decibels or 50? Is it okay to whisper? If they are attracted to sound, can you just sidestep the alien if you accidentally make a sound? Are they using echolocation (which has been implied) in which case sound is mostly irrelevant? Are they here to kill us? Eat us? Destroy us? Destroy the earth?
It’s hard for me to fully appreciate a movie like this if they haven’t given me the framework in which to enjoy it. Now, maybe you don’t like to think too much about your movies. In which case, you might like this movie just fine. But if you’re looking for a lot of action, I think you’ll be a little disappointed by the pace.
Bright spots in this film: The acting is top notch! And it’s lovely to see Joseph Quinn (Eddie from Stranger Things) back on screen. And although I didn’t see A Quiet Place: Part II, I do know that Djimon Hounsou is a character in that movie so it’s a nice tie-in that his character was included here too.
A Quiet Place: Day One opens in theaters on June 28, 2024.
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