A Quiet Place (2018)
Not horribly acted, filmed, directed... just the dumbest people alive (failure to adapt) ruined it for me.
Created: 2018.04.07
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There's no way to kvetch on this one without spoilers, so if that matters to you, stop here.
Cliché[edit | edit source]
The premise of something bad getting good people is as old as time. As is people adapting to adversity. The premise of them having to learn to be quiet, or fast monsters would kill them, was somewhat intriguing, and could have been fresh. And the movie was fairly Hitchcockian in its pacing and that it was a lot about the suspense and drama, rather than pure action. While that pacing is slow for some people, I thought it worked.
It was kind of like The Walking Dead... only with armored aliens (d'Artagnan/"Dart") out of Stranger Things. It starts a week (and then year) into the post-apocalypse brought forth by a meteor impact brought these creatures to our planet. Which means there must be a lot of them, and they must breed incredibly quickly.
The whole movie was basically about avoiding these things because they're very fast, armored, and virtually indestructible. So it's another "find the weakness" film. Only anyone could figure that out in about 5-10 minutes.
Try to guess the big reveal:
- Creatures are blind but hunt by sound.
- We have a deaf girl in the film.
- The whole movie is about being quiet (it's even part of the title)
They're indestructible... except the writers needed a war-of-the-world twist to make them vulnerable.... what could that possibly be? In a reveal that should be a shock to no one, why their weakness couldn't possibly be sound, could it? Duh!
A bad surprise ending might not have bothered me, if it was consistent and thoughtful. But it was just dumb and inconsistent with it's own rules:
- The creatures are attracted to sound, but our protagonists never use that to their advantage?
- Why couldn't you just use a wood chipper to lure these things to their deaths?
- Why couldn't you at least set up remote sound distractors for when things got too close?
- Why couldn't you build soundproof rooms in your basement?
- They had time to dump tons of sand around to walk on (and muffle their noise)? But pouring sand is noise... as is hauling it. And leaves and sticks blow on sand, and you still need to rake/remove it.
- Then there's how fast they must breed to have taken over the planet in a few weeks (or even 16 months)?
- They killed everything but haven't starved to death?
- How did they get the birds in trees or cliffs?
- Or the whole falling into a silo, and grain turns into quicksand for the kids, but the monsters walk on it just fine? That's not how grain works.
There haven't been plot holes this big since Jeff Goldblum hacked an Alien super-ship using a Macintosh in Independence Day (1996). Or since Obi-Wan cunningly hid Anakin Skywalker's (Darth Vader) son from him, by taking him back to Vaders home planet, leaving him with his cousins, and keeping the Skywalker surname.
Then at the end, there was the parental sacrifice, Mom becomes Fembo (the maternal version of Rambo), Daddy told his angst-ridden teen daughter that he loved her, and monsters that have wiped out virtually all of humanity across the planet, are thwarted by a Cochlear implant and a pump shotgun? I can suspend enough disbelief to watch SuperHero TV shows... but that was a bit too much for me.
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