A Quiet Place: Day One Is A Pointless Chore

Paramount. Shutterstock Images.

The first A Quiet Place is a legitimately great horror movie. There is so much care that went into building that world. Director John Krasinski did an amazing job balancing the scares with caring about that family. The constant silence just helped build the suspense. A Quiet Place Part II was written solely by Krasinski and the story suffered.  It just felt like a crowded epilogue to the first movie. But as unnecessary as Part II, A Quiet Place: Day One manages to be even more pointless.

After A Quiet Place: Day One, I am officially done with this franchise.

You can't blame Lupita Nyong'o. We know that she can do horror. Check out Us. It gets lost in the shuffle a little bit because it was Jordan Peele's follow-up to Get Out. I think it's a pretty damn good movie and Nyong'o should have been nominated for an Oscar. Here's she's wasted in a movie with literally no story. Her character is terminally ill with cancer and aliens arrive. That's about it.

For a movie that takes place in a city of 8 million people, they didn't give us many people to care about in this movie. Other than Nyong'o, there is a nurse from her hospice and a law student she meets along the way. That's about it. The producers did a bait and switch by saying Djimon Hounsou (from Part 2) has a major role. He's on screen for maybe five minutes. Krasinski and Emily Blunt wisely never appear on screen.

Usually with prequels, you get more backstory regarding the events of whatever story you were told earlier. Here, you learn nothing. We don't see how society dealt with these monsters or even how they felt. It appears they did initially land in other countries but nothing of interest regarding this world is fleshed out at all.

Paramount. Shutterstock Images.

That cat in the picture above is a great example of the lazy filmmaking on display here. The cat vanishes for entire scenes yet always finds it way back to Nyong'o. Explosions and thousands of people getting killed mean nothing to this cat. It even goes underwater at one point and has the swimming calm of Michael Phelps. The movie has no real stakes so it uses the cat as a way for the audience to give a shit about anything going on. It doesn't work.

It's already made over $100 million dollars worldwide so we'll be getting another one of these movies. I'll be skipping that one. Why should we be asked to care about a movie that plays like such a cash grab? Michael Sarnoski directed a movie that is about a woman trying to go 40 blocks for a slice of Patsy's Pizza and I paid money to watch it.

It's one thing for a movie to be a thoughtless waste of time. It's quite another to rub my face in it.

Grade: D