Listen to this post:
|
The original A Quiet Place was an excellent bottled low-budget horror film that impressed us with its intriguing premise and Christopher Nolon-esque high-concept worldbuilding. Its 2020 sequel was a solid continuation of the Abbot family story, only with Cillian Murphy replacing director/actor/writer John Krasinski as co-lead with Elizabeth Blunt, which allowed for the lore to be expanded while still maintaining the emotional investment of the original film.
via YouTubeNow released from the directorial hands of John Kransnski to writer/director Michael Sarnoski (Pig), the series seeks to shake things up with a prequel featuring an entirely new cast (besides cameos) of unlucky survivors. Unfortunately, without the crutch of familiar faces to lean on and suffering from the waning novelty of the original film’s premise, A Quiet Place: Day One fails to justify its importance in any way besides as an extended cut of the previous film’s opening scene.
The film, as the title suggests, takes place on the first day the aliens literally “crash-landed” across Earth, sending the world’s denizens into quiet hiding while the food chain’s hierarchy shifted overnight. We now follow Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), a terminally ill cancer patient desperately trying to get across the city during the harrowing first days of the invasion. To no one’s surprise, Nyong’o shines in this role, breathing life into multiple emotional scenes that tend to falter from pacing issues that arise in the later half of the film. She’s eventually joined by Eric (Joseph Quinn), the “across the pond” law student with no family in the city. While emotionally resonant, their journey fails to provide any tangible reason for existing in this cinematic universe.
The hectic beginning days of First Contact were obviously this film’s main selling point going in and, fortunately, contained some of its best scenes. Especially during Act One, as the initial moments of the alien invasion harken back to 9/11 imagery, covering the streets in a thick fog of cloudy debris while violent aliens tear apart anyone making noise. Michael Sarnoski directs this particularly visceral sequence, giving us a personal ground-level experience of the distorting first moments of this new threat. Unfortunately, the rest of the film fails to recapture this feeling as subsequent set pieces lack the impact of the original, leading to a lack of tension in the third act.
With solid writing and strong performances, this film might have overcome these issues if not for its most glaring problem. Some of the previous films’ best moments surround interesting ways humans adapted to this new threat (think sand paths and sound traps) integrated into the plot, and Day One’s lack of new ideas on this front is felt throughout. Rehashing old concepts, like the alien’s inability to swim or natural sounds masking human voices, ends up leaving one of the series’ main features severely lacking. Granted, this is a prequel, so people didn’t have time to adapt yet, but to me, that only further highlights the film’s fundamental problem.
A prequel with only a passive interest in expanding the lore or providing new context to the previous movies, A Quiet Place: Day One fails at its basic promise and ultimately reduces the viewer’s investment. Without the novelty of the original film’s high-concept premise or the sequel’s baked-in emotional attachment, the film does little to expand on these concepts or take them into new and exciting territories. But hey, at least we know what the aliens eat now, so that’s something.