Disappointing. That’s the word I would use to sum up A Quiet Place: Day One, the prequel to A Quiet Place and the third movie in the successful trilogy. John Krasinski wrote and directed both A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II. Krasinski only has producer credits for the final installment. We felt his absence. A Quiet Place: Day One lacked originality, coherence, and suspense. It was a cash grab, which I played into. Michael Sarnoski (fresh off writing and directing credits of his debut film, Pig).
This film offered little resemblance to either predecessor and worked even less as an alien-invasion story. You couldn’t call this an origin story. We never do learn why the aliens invaded. That could have been purposeful, but why? We didn’t learn what we hoped to. Instead, we got an uninspired action story that we didn’t need. The flimsy script and derivative dialogue were overshadowed by numerous easy-to-spot plot devices and thinly defined characters with whom we failed to connect.
Even the talented Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave, Black Panther), who stars as Sam, a cancer patient living in a hospice facility just outside New York City and our film’s lead protagonist, couldn’t save a script full of continuity errors, minor annoyances, and story inconsistencies. Day One was 100 minutes of Sam narrowly escaping one harrowing situation after another. The aliens felt straight out of a computer graphics program. It never felt like we were seeing characters ever leaving a greenscreen room.
Sam certainly doesn’t hold the movie together, but she does keep it from completely unraveling. We are with her throughout the film. Unfortunately, we are with her therapy cat, Frodo, too. It didn’t work for me. She’s seeing hundreds, maybe thousands of deaths around her, but instead of trying her best to stay agile and survive, she’s constantly carrying this cat around. And this isn’t a kitten. It’s a decent-sized cat. Frodo was no Wilson from Cast Away or Sam (ironically named) from I Am Legend. The sidekick cat was almost as silly as Sam’s determination to walk across New York City to eat a slice of pizza from Patsy’s, despite the Apocalypse happening. Less ridiculous but equally annoying was the coat-and-tie-wearing Eric (Joseph Quinn – Gladiator II, The Fantastic Four), a law student from England who becomes Sam’s traveling partner for the film’s second half. The look might have worked for Tom Cruise in The Firm, but for a movie like this, remove the tie, ditch the coat, and replace your loafers with sneakers from one of the deceased corpses you are tripping on while running down Park Avenue.
Many consider A Quiet Place nearly perfect. Krasinski created a world that created tension and unease from its devastating first scene. For a monster film in which the monsters infrequently appear, his modern horror classic relied on building tension as we walked with our lead characters, knowing that even breathing too heavily could lead to destruction. The film’s desolate landscape and harrowing score added an extra element of dread, darkening our view of a world ravaged by monsters it could not stop. The few who remained had unique skills that have helped them survive.
One of my issues with Day One was that the entire movie took place in a single day. We had average characters go through the gamut of emotions, from being attacked by monsters falling from the sky on an otherwise typical day to witnessing the violent deaths of other characters they knew, to process all of these events to the point where these characters feel like they are the same people, despite all that has happened to them. In an ordinary popcorn flick, that’s not a big deal. You might not remember a film like that, anyway. However, as the concluding chapter of one of the best-regarded horror trilogies of the century, I expected more. We deserved more than what we got.
In fairness, Day One didn’t claim to be an origin story as much as it was a story of what happened on that first day. An origin story would have required more time than we had or, likely, the patience for. I would have just liked a movie that felt like it was part of the same franchise and had worked just as hard as the other two in the series. Unfortunately, we got a film that was more like Those Who Wish Me Dead or Lara Croft: Tomb Raider than Alien or Jaws.
Plot 6/10
Character Development 6/10
Character Chemistry 5/10
Acting 6/10
Screenplay 4/10
Directing 6/10
Cinematography 8/10
Sound 8/10
Hook and Reel 7/10
Universal Relevance 5/10
66%
D-
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