Why "A Quiet Place: Day One" Isn't Worth Your Time
The post-apocalyptic franchise film turns aliens loose to quiet down NYC, yet again
Returning home to my small-town yesterday, I wandered around it, admiring the quiet. Saturday night, and nobody out, and no noise — except the random fireworks at about 10pm. I had just returned from a bustling urban American city The difference was striking.
I suppose that difference is what the “Quiet Place” franchise is going for at this point.
This new third movie — subtitled “Day One” because it showcases the first moments of the evil-alien invasion — begins with a supposed fact. NYC, the fact purports, has a decibel level of 90, which is the equivalent of a human scream.
Well, you can’t scream if you face this movie’s aliens, who can hear a pin drop. And when they do, they kill you. So don’t cough, sneeze, burp, fart, or sigh.
But you can sing in the shower!
That no-noise premise made the first “Quiet Place,” the 2018 film by John Krasinski, endurably intriguing. At its heart, that film was about the need to keep children quiet in awkward moments. The aliens were exaggerated surrogates of relatable real-life scenarios for parents, such as crying kids at supermarkets. The parents in “Quiet Place 1” struggled to shush their children, permanently and forever, an impossible task as every parent knows.
“Day One,” though, is just about the basic formula of the franchise, and not about a relatable, particular human problem. That formula is too generic to be patented: “Make noise . . . monster come get you . . . run!”
Repeat that fifteen times, and you can make another film in this franchise.
Also, with that formula, there are no surprises. The audience waits for the same problem to occur, with the same result, for 100 minutes, over and over, until the movie ends.
This tiresome exercise should’ve been overcome by adding a striking aesthetic move— either a script complication or the injection of a different genre or style — as chosen by director Michael Sarkowski. His movie “Pig,” with Nicolas Cage playing a culinary-minded John-Wick character avenging his pet swine, was pretty weird and fascinating, even if I didn’t care for it. But nothing like that artistic angularity in “Day One” at all.
The movie features the main character of a cancer patient, played by Lupita Nuongo, whose nurse gives her an outing in Manhattan for a day. Since that happens to be the day of the alien invasion, their opportunity for mediocre pizza, which she’s dreaming of, is ruined.
Aliens land, they kill a lot people, she hides, she needs to evacuate. So goes the entire plot, in which the best character in the film is her service cat, which there’s not a scene without.
I pause here to say that while the cat is cute, I find it implausible that such a feline friend wouldn’t make any noise for days. All of my cats have been chatty. All of them have hated water. The cat in this movie, however, never meows, and it’ll remain sedate even if you clutch it while jumping into water after sprinting for blocks as huge aliens chase you down. Meanwhile, some of my cats refuse even to be picked up!
“Day One” also features another implausibility, really a stupidity that’s lazy screenwriting. Even though the characters must evacuate immediately, knowing they have to make a boat that’s departing from a nearby dock, the two main characters in Act 2 pause to wax nostalgic about the pre-apocalyptic world. Never mind that it’s only been *two days* since the alien-invasion! They decide to go stop at a jazz club for pizza and a long sentimental scene.
As they are doing so, their boat leaves them behind. That’s right in time for an Act-3 chase scene that never would’ve been necessary had the characters actually tried to save their own lives.
Such is this film, a pure tiptoe-and-chase romp all the way through.
I noted that during the previews, every single trailer featured the same scenario: human characters in a closed environment attacked by invading monster. It didn’t matter if it was zombies, aliens, or tornadoes. None of these movies have anything intriguing to offer the thinking viewer.
“Day One” follows the same formula as those trailers, using Manhattan as the closed environment. For those of you old enough to remember other movies that did this, yo may recall “I Am Legend,” “Escape from New York,” “Warriors,” “Cloverfield,” “Independence Day,” ad infinitum.
You’ve seen one of those, you’ve seen this movie too.