REVIEW: A Quiet Place

REVIEW: A Quiet Place - DAY ONE

I remember back when I reviewed A Quiet Place Part II, the thing that was on my mind a world crawling out of a global pandemic.

I now dive into Michael Sarnoski's newest take on the mythology with A Quiet Place: Day One having just this morning heard the news that a certain convicted felon is being granted immunity for his involvement in trying to overthrow democracy, and I am left wondering (not for the first time) what surviving in a world that already balances on borrowed time even means.

This is more or less the mindset of the film's protagonist, Sam, a terminally ill cancer patient who was already done with existing well before killer aliens started dropping out from the sky. The only things she cares about in the world are her "emotional support" cat, Frodo, and getting a taste of some proper New York pizza before this cancer takes her, alien invasion or not! While the rest of the city is running off to catch the last boat off Manhattan, she just digs deeper into the chaos. Her pizza quest puts her in the path of law-student and NYC visitor, Erik, who follows her if for no other reason than because he doesn't think a person like him has a chance at climbing out of the fire anyhow, so he might as well tag along. These two have nothing to offer one another except maybe a hand to hold at the end of the world.

The new talent here are absolutely worthy faces of this new branch of the "Quiet Place" tree, and the way they pull this off is by playing against their natural assets and/or most famous roles. Nyong'o's normal porcelain quality is entirely eroded here into something rough and resigned. Joseph Quinn, meanwhile, is timid, reserved, and all around the total opposite of Eddie Munson. He's the kind of person who, when not running from alien monsters, would probably be sitting in the back of the lecture hall where the professor couldn't see you even if you did dare to raise your hand. In concept, these two cast a wide net for the feelings one might feel in the face of the apocalypse, and in execution, they keep the audience grounded.

Djimon Hounsou's ill-fated character from the second movie is here as our connective tissue to Abbots and their adventures. But overall, this installment feels mindfully, deliberately different from Krasinski's films. Sam and Eric are allowed a few more opportunities for dialogue than the Abbots, and in this way they are allowed to have more textured personalities and histories, something that really carries them through our (presumably) single adventure with them. Even though this is the same band of aliens that we recognize from the first two films, here we face off against them en masse as opposed to one or two at a time, truly conveying the feeling of an alien invasion. That's nothing to say of Sarnoski's specific directorial flavor.

But these divergences only end up reinforcing the larger mythology of A Quiet Place. Stepping into someone else's head during this nightmare and revealing the humanity of some other member of society actually only reminds the viewer that wherever a person lands on the map during the apocalypse, and whatever the shape of their interior world, the common binding thread between all players in the horror landscape is the preciousness of life, in whatever capacity that exists. That deference to humanity was something that Krasinski's films were really good at, something that separated his films from most of the rest of the genre.

I don't yet know what that means for us and our monsters, except maybe that no life is too short or meaningless that it's not somehow sanctified in easing another's passage through the apocalypse.

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: HOPPERS

In the 1950s under the threat of nuclear warfare, Hollywood premiered such exercises as The Day the Earth Stood Still or War of the Worlds where an alien power would pass judgment on humankind, holding its fate in its hands. Here in the 2020s under the shadow of such threats as climate change, Hollywood sends to be our judge ... beavers. Let me back up ... Daniel Chong's new film from Pixar Animation, Hoppers , sees Mabel (Piper Curda), a college student whose self-appointed mission is to preserve the glade where she used to find sanctuary with her now deceased grandmother. Her biggest opponent is hometown boy and beloved mayor, Jerry (Jon Hamm), who has designs to plow over the glade in order to open his new freeway--estimated to save travelers four whole minutes of commuting. Mabel gets her golden opportunity when she uncovers secret technology pioneered by her professor which allows a human to rem...

The Night of the Hunter: Redefining "Childlike Innocence"

I n the early 1960s, American professor and psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg developed what is now considered to be a fundamental cornerstone of understanding humans and morality. He introduced a model by which human beings start out determining what is right and wrong based on which course of action elicits the least punishment. Successful movement through this model sees a person gradually becoming motivated by principles , not simple reward or punishment, and Kohlberg anticipated that a person did not achieve this stage until adulthood, if ever. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) This is interesting because t he media likes to cast children as vessels of uncompromised goodness that adults could only ever hope to emulate. T heir purity forms the bedrock of much of American conversation. Because the future hinges upon their innocence, efforts to preserve their unblemished state can go to any length. You can justify any number of actions as long as you are doing i...

My Best Friend's Wedding: Deconstructing the Deconstructive Rom-Com

Well, Wicked is doing laps around the box office, so it looks as though the Hollywood musical is saved, at least for a season, so I guess we’ll turn our attention to another neglected genre. As with something like the musical, the rom-com is one of those genres that the rising generation will always want to interrogate, to catch it on its lie. The whole thing seems to float on fabrication and promising that of which we can always be skeptical—the happy ending. This is also why they’re easy to make fun of and are made to feel second-tier after “realer” films which aren’t building a fantasy. You know? Movies like Die Hard … We could choose any number of rom-coms, but the one that I feel like diving into today is 1997’s underrated My Best Friend’s Wedding . I’m selecting it for a number of reasons. Among these is my own personal fondness for the film, and also the fact that it boasts a paltry 6.3 on IMDb despite its ...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

I've heard a lot of back and forth over what the purpose of film is and what we should ask from it. Film as a social amenity kind of has a dual purpose. It's supposed to give the population common ground and find things that people of varying backgrounds and beliefs can unify around. On the other hand, film also creates this detached simulated reality through which we can explore complex and even testing ideas about the contradictions in human existence. In theory, a film can fulfill both functions, but movies exist in a turbulent landscape. It's very rare for a film to try to walk both lanes, and it's even rarer for a film to be embraced upon entry for attempting to do so. Let me explain by describing the premise of one of my favorite movies, Morten Tyldum's 2016 film, Passengers . A key piece of this film ’s plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who premat...

Toy Story 4: Pixar's Tribute to Regression

It was about this time last year that I came across the one person who actually hated Toy Story 3 . I was reading Jason Sperb’s book “Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Age of Digital Cinema” as part of my research for my essay on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu . It was in one of his chapters on the Pixar phenomenon that he shared his observation from the ending of Toy Story 3 , essentially casting the film as this nostalgia mousetrap for adults: “ If Andy lets go of his childhood nostalgia and moves on, then Toy Story fans don’t really have to , as the narrative recognition in the potential value in such an act is sufficient. Actually moving on becomes indefinitely deferred in an endless cycle of consumption (rewatching the movies, purchasing new versions of the movie, purchasing more and more Toy Story-related merchandise, rewatching them yet again with the next generat...

REVIEW: Star Wars - The Mandalorian and Grogu

I haven't historically considered myself a "Star Wars" kid. And to be clear, I take no pride in saying that or anything. I respect the property and what it's given to pop culture. But I do feel like it's worth mentioning in this review that I didn't really go into Jon Favreu's The Mandalorian and Grogu thinking I had much of what I'd call nostalgia for this movie to exploit. And yet watching this movie, I found myself hearkening back to the things about Star Wars that caught my attention as a kid. For me, that was the gladiator-style match in "Attack of the Clones." This film offers quite a few roller-coasters along those lines. And as far as the creature designs go for the monsters in these arenas, they were quite good. I wasn't trying too hard to anticipate which were computer-generated and which were puppeted, but the aesthetics of both the Jim Henson era and the Spielberg era sat very well here in this vessel....

REVIEW: Disclosure Day

Maybe it was self-control that compelled Spielberg to build his whole movie around aliens but give the aliens themselves as little screentime as possible. (Or, for all I know, he did it on a dare.) But this is only one of the risks taken by his latest film. This first encounter picture is distanced from something like Independence Day and more toward something like 2001: A Space Odyssey --and it's even closer to something like Arrival . The film sees a cyber-security worker, Daniel Kilner (Josh O'Connor) who defects with the intent to reveal what he knows to the world: the government has had repeated, secret encounters with extraterrestrial life. He has a team of underground sympathizers, lead by Hugo Wakefield (Colmon Domingo), but he also has agent Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) out to stop the truth at any cost. Kilner's only chance getting the truth out there is in joining up with Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a newscast personali...

REVIEW: Song Sung Blue

I came into Craig Brewer's Song Sung Blue with little context for the real-life couple at the center of this movie, for Neil Diamond, or for the world of celebrity impersonators interpreters. There are no doubt subterranean connotations to the specific songs that they chose to sing at certain moments in the narrative that are lost on me. I have no doubt, though, that the intended audience will find this movie before long. But the film was still viable enough that even a relative neophyte like me could still find himself humming along to this musical drama. The film documents the real-life couple of Mike and Claire Sardina, celebrity impersonators who fall in love, marry, and form a tribute band for legendary singer, Neil Diamond. We track their relationship from its beginning through their career aspirations and the crossroads in their marriage, including a violent accident that changes their family forever. Again, I don...

REVIEW: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

The fanboy renaissance manages to reach even higher heights with the new "Super Mario Galaxy Movie." The easter eggs and cameos are back with a vengeance, and in much richer resolution than we'd have thought possible even five years ago. It's for this kind of thing that the movie will be called "wish fulfillment" for video game nerds, but I personally felt fed as an animation enthusiast. To see such caricatured designs playing on such a vivid, textured playground is a rarity. It's only when you see the bricks of a giant, fairy-tale castle splintering and disintegrating that you feel like this world has weight, consequences, and there is something about that which feels strangely validating. And as with the last movie, as with the Mario universe as a whole, the animated world's command over its own landscape lets you swim between all sorts of exotic and eclectic locales and genres at leisure. Every single cast member...

The Pleasantville Lie

Lynn Hunt, American Historical Association, University of California 2002, is best known for her 2007 work Inventing Human Rights , a cornerstone for academic work on the history of human interaction. This landmark work tracked the developing concept of human empathy across European history, especially the function that art and literature played in allowing humans to recognize the interiority and dignity of other humans who were different from them. But in 2002, she shared in the May Issue of Perspectives on History her observations in “presentism,” and the uphill battle of even getting students to engage with history at all, Gladiator (2000) “Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forebears constantly fail to measure up to our ...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog