Review of A Quiet Place (2018) by Angryshark92 — 07 Sep 2018

A Quiet Place is an interesting movie, its premise and idea for plot are interesting, I really liked the idea of having these monsters being ultra sensitive to hearing, and I usually love movies that are post-apocalyptic, so it did not take much convincing for me to watch this flick. Plus its Jim right, what could go wrong?

The movie centres around a family who are trying to survive in a decimated post-apocalyptic world that has been overrun with monsters (aliens?) that have ultra-sensitive hearing. Simple premise, concise and to the point.

A lot of friends who saw this movie in theatres recommended this movie to me simply because they thought that critics had grossly overrated this film, so that was my mindset when I watched this. As stated before, I thought the premise of this movie was interesting, but the execution of the film was mixed for me. As many have mentioned before me, there are lot of plot holes and conveniences that occur in this film to keep it moving along. This movie builds the setting well and wastes no time showcasing the dangers of the creatures that preside over the world as it is. I liked that the movie was able to introduce the threat quickly and traumatically and building a deep sense of worry for the family we have yet to become fully acquainted with. These kinds of introductions hit hard and let you know what you're in for. Unfortunately, it gets worse and worse from there.

I am sorry to say that outside of Emily & John's characters, there is no believability for the writing of the other characters, as in the children. The thing is, there cannot be that much writing to begin with, as most of the movie does not have actual person to person dialogue. It is not that the other actors are children and have little acting experience to speak of, it is simply that they were designed to conveniently cause every problem and raise tension out of sheer stupidity. Normally, you could also attribute this to youth experience, but when you put "Day 472" on the screen, that leads me to believe that these 2 kids have had almost a year and a half of experience in dealing with this world and its dangers, yet every single decision they make moving forward is absolutely asinine and contradicts their experience level completely.

On top of this, the conveniences to raise tension... Why on earth would you ever consider having a newborn baby in a world where you must be absolutely silent to survive? While this lead to one of the better scenes in the movie, where Emily's character has absolutely everything go wrong with her at once and has to work out of a terrible situation, it simply does not make any sense for them to do this, it is essentially a death sentence for the sake of plot tension. You can make soundproof rooms for the purposes of having a baby, but you can't do that to have a proper safe zone where accidental noise won't lead to immediate death... Research and newspaper clippings show that being underground is an exceptionally smart idea, but a normal farmhouse is where you decide to sleep, no fallout shelters in the middle of what looks like "flyover states" and their woodlands? Last resort weapon is a shotgun, but didn't think to find an assault rifle or handgun from the militarized safe zones with a silencer? Or at least look into how to design one? Those are just a few examples and I do not want to flood the whole review with them, but there are just too many to mention, so I can understand the reviews that delve into the red zone (0-3 rating).

+ Good premise.

+ Excellent world building.

+ Some good scenes of tension, regardless of contrived setup.

+ Liked the design of the monsters.

+ Emily Blunt & John Krasinski were great for the most part.

- Contrived plot and over the top conveniences.

- Over reliance on soundtrack.

- Over reliance on CGI for monsters.

- Unbelievable characters for both the son and daughter.

- Poor writing and execution.

- The ending sequence/scene was cringe-worthy.

Overall, this film had an excellent and promising premise, but failed in execution and writing as there were way too many conveniences and plot holes to make the storyline believable. This movie is a 45 for me, and I think some of these critics should seriously re-evaluate how they score these types of films.