REVIEW:
This is the series that just gets worse and worse. And while you can probably say that about most series’, that the first one is the best and then the rest are just copies or far lesser films (like the Matrix movies,) with this one, they are getting really bad. Let’s back track for a minute and talk about the first movie. A Quiet Place. It was fantastic. Creepy. Creative. And Original. It featured a family doing sign language for communication on a farm where they were surrounded by monsters. Then came the sequel. Out was the sign language and in came the talking. It wasn’t half as good as the first movie. And now comes A Quiet Place: Day One, which is even worse than that.
Here’s a movie where not even the title makes sense. You see, we’ve already seen Day 1. In the second movie. It began with a flashback to the family of the first movie (including characters who died in the first movie,) and showed us how they experienced the monsters for the first time. It took us all the way through before the monsters attacked, when everything was normal, to the attack itself. So now, for the third movie, we are going to see Day 1 again, only from the perspective of characters we don’t know and haven’t met before. It’s not just an already done that situation, it’s a lesser version of the already done that. This time it’s not even characters we care about.
Okay, so there are new characters. So what? The movie can still be good right? Sure, it can. I mean for the first time they are totally changing up the location to go into a city. Manhattan, no less. During the time of the monster attacks. Surely that’s enough to make a good movie right? Wrong. Very very wrong. They don’t even do Manhattan right. There are tons of shots of the city streets after the monsters attack, and no human bodies anywhere. Just abandoned and broken cars. There would be bodies everywhere. And maybe the idea is to try to keep this one PG-13, but then just have the bodies facing upside down or something. Don’t have any blood. There are ways to do this that aren’t blatantly obvious mistakes of carelessness, or just not caring at all.
Let’s get into the characters and story. Lupita Nyago plays a woman who has cancer and is going to die soon. She lives at a hospice care center with a bunch old elderly people. They take a trip into the city for a puppet show and the monsters attack. From there, she spends the rest of the movie running through the city. About half way in, she meets a man who stays with her for the rest of the time. Oh, and she wants NYC pizza. Really bad. In fact, her whole motivation in this movie seems to be about getting pizza. More than she cares about living.
Here’s why this movie is bad, First, there’s almost no talking. And no sign language or anything else either. Second, there are barely any monsters. They are there a little bit during the first attacks, and then they practically disappear until the end. Third, the action is lousy. There’s not one single action moment that feels native to New York. Have the monsters attack people in a skyscraper. Have them attack people in Central Park. Have them attack people on a subway train. None of it. And instead of being about the monsters, this one is about the character finding places that had meaning to her when she was younger. That’s where the pizza comes in. It is dull and boring in a genre where no movie should ever be dull and boring. What a waste.