Day Unfun.

The A Quiet Place series reminds me of Eight Crazy Nights in the sense that it’s a very well produced film wrapped around a plot and script that doesn’t deserve it. And yeah, A Quiet Place, its sequel, and now the prequel, are very well shot movies. Beautifully shot, fantastically rendered, with an incredible sound that should win the movie awards in those fields. But it’s a terrible plot and utterly stupid.

John Krasinski has gone from director/writer/star to director/writer to producer. There’s a third mainline film coming out in 2027 where he will resume his director/writer role. For the spinoff, however, we get Michael Sarnoski whose only other film and directorial debut was 2021’s Pig starring Nicolas Cage. Okay, I’m more on board. The film stars Lupita Nyong’o as Samira, a woman in hospice care who finds herself struggling for survival after the alien apocalypse starts in New York City. Being a terminally ill cancer patient, Samira does what anyone would do in the face of the world ending. She goes on a mission for pizza.

I’m not joking, and honestly if the world seemed to be ending I’d probably be seeking out my favorite restaurant and grabbing a bite to eat before accepting death as well. Big mood, lady. She meets up with Joseph Quinn who plays Eric who ends up turning the movie into an unwanted escort mission because Eric isn’t very good at taking care of himself and won’t stop following her when she asks him to stop. He actually ends up being the most endearing part of the film. Lupita is very talented, but her character wastes that talent.

Day One has some good names in it like Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsou, Eliane Umuhire, and Ronnie Le Drew. But again, it’s really really stupid. Once again we find ourselves in a world where super strong, indestructible aliens that showed up on Earth alongside crashing meteorites have powerful hearing and can literally pick up the sound of flies having sex from ten miles away. Until they can’t of course. There is absolutely no consistency in the ability of the aliens to hear and differentiate sounds. One moment characters will be too scared to sniffle, lest they be instantly torn down. Then in the next they’re talking at levels well above a whisper with no background noise to cover it and nothing happens.

And then they scream during a thunder storm. I think the scene that exemplifies how dumb the movie is kicks off at the beginning when the power to the building the characters are in goes out, and the generator kicks in. We get a tense-ish scene of the character desperately trying to cut the gas to the generator to turn it off, and when he does not a single monster shows up. And then he walks one footstep and his shirt tears. We get a tense few seconds where the characters lock eyes like ‘oh shit’ and then a monster rolls in and just carries him off. Dumb.

Also you know from the first chapter how the movie is going to end. Alien apocalypse. Two unlikely people meet and end up growing fond of each other. One of them is terminally ill anyway. This is a film series that already plays heavily on personal sacrifice. I couldn’t help but laugh at the missed reality that Sam’s cat would have absolutely screwed them several times over in the course of the film. So many glass cups to knock over. Service animal or not, you can’t train a cat to be that quiet all the time.

A Quiet Place: Day One is bacon-wrapped shrimp, where the bacon is top quality but the shrimp is from the dollar store and is starting to go green. Being a prequel we still don’t get an explanation on how the newspapers kept printing for weeks after the alien invasion, although Manhattan itself seems to be ripped into desolate shreds over the course of 24 hours.

Rating: C+