A Quiet Place: Day One

So I wasn't really forward to this. Not because the trailers were bad, they were fine I guess. But because the original A Quiet Place is what I would call a diorama horror movie. It works exclusively in the specific scenario it sets up for itself. Once it starts expanding outward, you start to ask questions that it isn't prepared to answer. I didn't watch the second Quiet Place, by the way. I heard that it wasn't that good so I skipped it. I also keep thinking the title of this movie is A Quiet Place: Year One, so that's a good sign for how well this will stick to my memory. 

What's This Movie About?

A dying poet is in New York City when the aliens from the Quiet Place invade, and she teams up with a British law student to go get a last slice of pizza.

What I Like.

At the start of the movie, there wasn't much to like, not gonna lie. The main character was very unlikable and her goal seemed completely random and stupid. But as the movie unfolds and she eventually explains herself, I actually was on board with the pizza plan. (Yeah, you thought I was joking about that. But I wasn't!) I like the law student a lot. The two best scenes in the movie are when they can just relax for a moment and connect. I also think the tension in the movie is very well done. It's not as good as the first movie, as the background music and more dialogue doesn't create a better atmosphere than the first Quiet Place, but A Quiet Place: Fortnite One does one theme that I personally find really horrifying. The idea that a human's instinct in a crisis is to make noise. When we get scared, we scream. If we're hurt, we yell for help. All of our emergency services use cars with loud sirens and to convey information to each other we talk. All of that gets you killed in A Quiet Place: First Century BCE. It's definitely the scariest idea of the setting and the movie takes full advantage of it. 

What I Didn't Like.

The aliens in the movie. I don't know if they have official names for whatever they are, so I'm just going to call them the Motherfuckers. The Motherfuckers in the original A Quiet Place were terrifying. They were so fast and strong, that basically making any noise louder than shush became instant death. You basically never saw a bit of them until the end, which is when the family discovers how they can kill them. They were basically an existential threat. You couldn't run from the Motherfuckers, you could only hide by being quiet, and the happy ending of the movie is the discovery of how to fight them. 

Meanwhile, A Quiet Place: One Day In Shangri-La turns the Motherfuckers into a horde of idiot grimblies that mindlessly chase anything that makes any sort of noise. My biggest problem is that you see way too much of them. And they look stupid. Their rippling faces are sort of gross, I guess, but I can't not get over their super long arms and giant hands. They look like cartoon characters, especially when they start moving in herds and climb all over the buildings to chase down helicopters. Plus, they get severely nerfed in this movie. There are several moments where characters can out-run the Motherfuckers. That would have never happened in the original movie. Yes, they use car alarms to distract some of them, but still. Plus, in the original movie everyone had to walk on sand barefooted to avoid detection, but I guess walking over shattered glass and rubble in shoes makes the same amount of noise. They also retcon the "can't swim" weakness from the second movie. It's not that the Motherfuckers can't swim, it's that they don't know how to hold their breath. That's fucking stupid.

I have a couple other complaints. The movie is pretty slow, and while I generally liked the pace, it felt a bit shaggy in places. A lot of this movie I wasn't sure if I liked or not, and while I came out mostly positive on them. The cat isn't really one of those things. It's just basically a dog in the movie, but I guess as the weakest justification to keep it alive through some really dumb moments. The cat is the catalyst for the weirdest scene in the film. The law student needs to chase it into a destroyed construction site, where there's this alien fungus that all the Motherfuckers come to eat and I don't know what this is in the movie. Maybe to explain what the Motherfuckers actually feed on since they don't eat the things they kill? But if their only food source came from the planet with them I feel like they should've all died out before the first movie.

Final Summation.

A Quiet Place: Day One is fine. I kinda liked it even. It really does come down to the characters though, speaking with my coworkers who watched the movie with me, a lot of them thought it was too slow and was putting them to sleep. But it worked for me.