For various reasons, I’ve missed a lot of pop culture over the last few years. I’m behind on… everything really. Even after months of lockdown, with all my careful quarantining and marathons of TV and deep dives into directors’ entire oeuvres, I have giant holes in my current knowledge. Which is why I spent a few hours this weekend watching the first two films in the saga known as: A Quiet Place.
And my question is a dramatically screamwhispered: WHYYYY? WHY ARE THESE MOVIES?
Nota Bene: (deep breath) I did not enjoy these films. This review is going to be kind of mean, fueled by frustration and coffee, and as filled with spoilers as these movies are filled with bad choices and brazen stupidity.
By way of a very brief recap for all who remain: A Quiet Place drops us into a world that had been invaded by terrifying aliens who attack when they hear sound. The only way to survive is to live silently. We follow the Abbott family, who are trying to create a decent life on their farm, a goal that’s complicated by grief over the loss of a child, and stress over mom Evelyn’s pregnancy and looming delivery. In A Quiet Place Part II, the remaining members of the family travel to a neighbor’s bunker, things get even grimmer, and much more absurd. One of the family members goes on an expedition to try to find a better way of life for all of them, and things go awry.
Let’s start with some background. I’m one of those people who kind of likes Signs. (I understand if this makes you not trust me.) But as anyone who reads my stuff knows, I’m endlessly interested in the way religion pops up in media, and Signs’ use of aliens as allegory, while not even remotely subtle, was my kind of fun. I also loved the way Shyamalan focused on a ground-level experience of an alien invasion. Rather than watching ships blow the White House to smithereens, we see a small, grief-stricken farming family trying to survive an apocalyptic event with little information and no preparation. (The way it would actually go down if aliens invaded today, and we were all desperately tweeting advice at each other.)
That was the thing I kept thinking of while watching both of these movies, since the aliens are a little similar—they sort of read as a cross between the Signs aliens and Stranger Things’ Demogorgon—and now, in the second installment of A Quiet Place, we’ve learned that since they can’t swim, water is one of their few weaknesses. But honestly, I think Signs made more sense? Like what is the aliens’ endgame in A Quiet Place? They just attack people and kill them! They don’t seem to eat them? And they attack them instantaneously, so it’s not like they’re having the particular type of fun that comes from hunting prey. Why did they come to our planet? Or did they just crash here and start killing? If that’s the case, fine, respect, but that still doesn’t explain why they don’t eat what they kill—or what they are eating, if not us.
Also: <NicCageVoice>WHAT ABOUT THE BEES? </NicCageVoice> And animals in general for that matter—was every mammal and bird slaughtered for making noise in the first couple of days? If so, how did the remaining humans survive the overwhelming smell, rot, maggots, etc.? How is anything still alive if creatures that make noise—like, say, a loud buzzing!—are dead? Unless the aliens do eat what they kill, and we just never see it over the course of two movies? But again, if that’s the case then how are there two raccoons in the first film, who have apparently survived for over a year and a half of alien monster predation? Raccoons dive into metal garbage cans for fun. How the hell have these two cute little fuckers made it so long.
Okay, next: WHAT IS WITH THE FEET. Seriously. I feel like I have a hangover from some sort of cursed liquor distilled from the sweat of Quentin Tarantino. Why don’t they wear socks? Socks… are not loud? Are soft in fact! Why not at least wear them so you have some measure of protection as you walk over the lush post-human landscape? Who cares if you avoid the alien monsters if you all die of tetanus!
If running water muffles sound super well, why the HELL don’t they live by the fucking waterfall?
I hate to bring this up but, ummm, what is the bathroom situation in these movies? How does that… work.
How the HELL do you allow yourself to get pregnant in this situation? On the one hand, I get it, I’m not a total monster—especially in a time of despair and unimaginable stress, people would cling to each other for warmth and comfort, people would want to affirm the possibility of life in the most primal way they can. But wear a condom FFS! How the hell do you expect to live in this Hideo Kojima nightmare world with an infant??? COME ON. And why is the baby so huge and clean immediately after birth? And how can Evelyn even walk, let alone run around as much as she does. And yes, yes, the body is a miracle and can accomplish great feats under pressure, I know, but she literally is either running or shooting monsters for I think three days straight immediately after giving birth. Also we never see her feed this baby. Also this baby is a living saint who only cries when it’s convenient to the plot.
Did none of these people ever watch Arrested Development? WHY CAN’T ANYONE LEAVE A NOTE. I write all day. Literally all day. If I write, with a pen, on paper, it does not make a significant amount of noise? I think I could write directly in front of one of the alien monsters and be fine? So why the hell do these people keep taking off into the monster-riddled wilderness without leaving a fucking Post-it? Regan does it twice, Evelyn tries to leave her traumatized, anxious bean of a son with her newborn baby without explaining that she’s coming back, Emmett leaves Regan alone—and takes her hearing aid with him—but doesn’t bother to leave a scrap of paper saying he went to look for a boat. Did the alien monsters eat all the pens, too????? If not, you people need to goddamn explain yourselves.
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Summer Sons
And then we get to my actual problem, which is the weird retrograde world created in this film. Look, I have a particular set of politics, but I’m more than willing to lock them away in a box in order to engage with art from people who disagree with me. (I mean, not the ones who deny other peoples’ basic humanity, or want to electrocute me or kill me. But pretty much anything short of that? I’ll engage.) But why is this series so stuck on traditional roles? In the first film, Lee takes Marcus on the fishing expedition even though the kid is frankly, openly terrified, and, thus, a liability. He insists Regan stay home with Evelyn, even after Regan says she wants to go.
Yes, in regular times, the kid who’s scared of a thing should be gently nudged into doing the thing, so he can learn and grow. But these are still the early days of the post-apocalypse, Evelyn is about to have another child, and the family should be taking every opportunity to optimize their situation. Take the older, stronger kid, who actually wants to go on the trip! It’s not hard! Of course this snub makes Regan run away briefly, I guess because Girls Are Emotional? Except you’d have to be really, deeply stupid to go traipsing off into the monster-filled woods, leaving your very pregnant mother alone—especially given that Regan is deaf, and thus presumably can’t always tell if she’s making enough noise to attract a monster. (Which, sidebar: I did love how the films gave us a character who uses a thing that our current society sees as a disability and makes it a strength. Credit where it’s due.) And then of course the elder sister needs to be rescued by the little brother a couple times (because Jurassic Park rules I guess?), and in Part II, she has to be rescued by Emmett twice, because even after everything she keeps bumbling into the kind of trouble that you would think you’d learn to avoid when you’ve been living with alien monsters for almost two years.
And about Emmett—they barge into this poor grieving man’s bunker, and immediately demand that he basically fill the void left by Lee? He set traps up to keep people out, he has made his boundaries very clear, but they’re just going to walk in (or, you know, limp in, screaming and covered in blood) and be like “You’re our new Dad now, sorry”??? WHO DOES THAT. And the worst thing, the moment when I almost ragequit Part II, is that of course when the young girl and the grizzled depressed man go off into the wilderness, the girl is threatened with sexual slavery. I’ve seen 28 Days Later, okay? I’ve seen Fury Road, I’ve read and seen (and seen!) The Stand. I get it. I think we all get it. There are other ways to build tension in your goddamn post-apocalyptic horror movie than “Oh, the young teen girl might be assaulted by a sneering pirate in a sec, let’s watch what happens.”
Here’s why I’m yelling about this so much: I love horror. Truly, I love it. The things I’ve read and watched in this genre have become huge touchstones for my life, they’ve gotten me though incredibly dark places and allowed me the language to cope with trauma. Which is why it pisses me off when it isn’t done well. And these movies could be great. Even in the somewhat clunky universe of Signs, you get amazing, terrifying moments—the scene of Merrill Hess seeing footage of an alien on TV, and reacting exactly the way a person would; former priest Graham Hess losing his shit at God because his son is having an asthma attack while the family is hiding in the basement from an alien—I haven’t seen the movie in a decade, but I have a visceral memory of how those moments made me feel, the connection I felt with the characters, and the way aliens illuminated their hopelessness and grief. Which is obviously why, even though the ending of the film is a bit silly, I allowed it to work, because I was with the family, and I wanted them to make it out of the movie alive. About half an hour into A Quiet Place I realized I was rooting against the family, partly because they were making such aggressively bad choices, but also because the movie itself kept jumping up and down yelling “THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR GRIEF!!!”
But because I hate to tear things down without offering at least some constructive criticism, here are a couple ways to fix this thing:
- Kill the music. Don’t give me a movie that’s about the need to stay absolutely silent at all times and then slap a score on it. I need to be with the characters, and to just use silence as a gimmick to let us know we’re in Regan’s POV is kind of a cop out. Let us hear what the characters hear, and only what they hear. Regan’s POV will be stronger if hearing people gradually notice that all the ambient sound is gone.
- FOR GOD’S SAKE LET THEM HAVE SOCKS.
- Please give us a clearer picture of the medication stocks, expiration dates, etc., because again, it’s been two years, but Evelyn is still going to that same picked-over pharmacy.
- No more rape threat ever, okay? Let’s find other ways to deal with this shit, as a society.
- And while we’re here, lets dispense with traditional gender weirdness, and allow the characters to do what they’re good at, the way people actually have to in apocalyptic situations! If that means that a girl who’s a skilled baker and great at sewing feeds people and makes clothes, great! But if that girl is intrepid and physically strong, maybe have her do the things that require physical strength, and allow the child who is clearly more anxious to hang back and care for his extremely pregnant mother.
- Maybe don’t tie the narrative so heavily into the idea that Regan is wracked with guilt over her youngest brother’s death, and that Lee maybe kind of blames her for it, and that the way the two of them get to reconcile is that he finally tells her he loves her while he’s being sliced in half by a giant monster? That’s just a lot to process, especially when the kids have to immediately fight more monsters with their mother and the baby and then trek over to Emmett’s place first thing in the morning.
- To build on that: Don’t make everything so huge.
Alien monsters have invaded the planet and killed almost everyone. It really seems like 95% of this Upstate New York farming community is dead, dead, deadski. That’s plenty to work with! We don’t also need pregnancy/childbirth/fires/flooding basements/puncture wounds/grain silos/A FUCKING BEARTRAP/multiple losses/Emmett’s wife’s corpse/a probable femoral artery wound/more fire/rapey pirates/aliens learning how to pilot boats/etc.! Pick one or two nightmare scenarios, allow the tension to build around them slowly, and then show us the consequences. Here, I’ll illustrate: as soon as the camera zoomed in on Chekov’s Nail, I was terrified. My guess in that moment was that Lee or one of the children was going to run into the basement, step on it, scream, and attract the aliens at a particularly tense point in the story—perhaps while Evelyn was in labor?
But no! Evelyn steps on the nail only a few minutes later, after she’s gone into labor and has to flee an alien monster. The wound in her foot, which she most likely can’t get antibiotics for, is soon only a footnote (heh) to the fact that she’s having to give birth alone, and is subsumed into the horrifying scene later when she has to swim through dirty water right after giving birth, with who knows how many tears in her skin, and a puncture wound in her foot. A foot that she then has to walk and run on, in unchanged, dirty bandages, whilst carrying the new baby and a shotgun and leading her family to safety, but she doesn’t wince or limp or seem worried about tetanus. Meanwhile, all three of the other family members charge up and down those stairs at different points, we zoom in on The Evil Nail, but none of them step on it. The returns diminish each time.
Do you see what I’m getting at, here? The movies pile so many problems on top of each other that the response is totally flattened by the end. I found myself disengaging from the movie because I couldn’t believe that these people, two of whom are children, and none of whom are ER doctors, nurses, paramedics, soldiers, etc., could survive so much trauma in such a small span of time and still function. The more effective scenario would be to let the Nail lurk on its step, biding Its time, until someone steps on it, howls, has to hide from the monsters, and then the family spends a significant amount of time trying to clean the wound and find antibiotics. Because again, the thing that will actually kill you in a post-apocalyptic scenario is not having access to clean water and medical supplies. Think of how much more effective it is to watch the family flee, slowwwwwwly, through a haunted fucking forest, as Lee favors his foot and knows that if it gets infected there’s nothing he can do? And that his family will have to care for him, he’ll be a drain on their resources, and if he dies—from something as dumb as stepping on a nail!—they’ll have to fend for themselves? Not only is he facing a slow, painful death but he’ll be abandoning his family when they need him most?
That’s horror.
This essay on the films was a lot better than the films. Thank you.
For what it’s worth, Leah, I kind of don’t trust people who don’t like Signs. Or rather, who badmouth it and try to poke holes in the water thing, which completely misses the main points about the story!
The Quiet Place films don’t bother me so much for their problems because I can’t take them seriously, and more important, I don’t find myself thinking about them well after seeing them . . . like I do to all the great films out there. When something makes you care for a spell, and has a bunch of unnecessary baggage and plot holes, then I’ll get annoyed.
But a rant is a rant and that’s okay, too. :)
The thing about the aliens just ripping people apart for no good reason bothered me too. And if that’s all they’re capable of/interested in, how exactly did they travel across the galaxy in the first place? They don’t seem very intelligent.
Unless they’re some kind of wild creature that was being transported by another species, on their way to stock a zoo or something?
I enjoyed both of these movies but you’re making a lot of good points here; in the second one Evelyn walks around with bandages on her foot but still no socks for anyone. I guess they could… catch on a stick or something? But still, especially when you’re inside, socks are quieter than bare feet. Maybe there’s a reason that’s not obvious but I don’t know.
When you really look at it critically these movies were very obviously made to tell a Family Story and the various considerations and implications of post-apocalypse survival got glossed over without much thought. I just have to imagine them slowly harvesting the corn, one ear at a time, very carefully cutting them away with a sharp knife, because I’m sure just snapping them off wouldn’t be quiet enough. But corn is recognizable and it’s the signal that they’re growing their food and can survive there for a while, plus you get the classic monsters-in-the-corn scene which is just classic right? I still enjoyed it but it really leans heavily on the viewer’s acceptance of their choices and premise, so when they lose that there’s not an easy way back in to enjoying the rest of the movie.
And the waterfall thing makes almost no sense. If these creatures are so sensitive to sound, they can tell when there’s a change in the sound near the waterfall. Sure maybe they have more trouble tracking it, but they certainly wouldn’t fail to notice someone yelling just because it’s near the waterfall. And ultimately what was even the purpose of that thread anyway? It only served to remove them from the home and create later tension when they returned, maybe some foreshadowing of dad’s choice to die later on – but on that subject I’m not a huge fan of the “parent sacrificing their self so that their child survives” trope anyway, dying is easy and I almost always end of thinking that those parents didn’t do much to find alternatives that would let them stay in their children’s lives to better protect them the next time. They’ve obviously thought of distraction strategies – they have the fireworks set up – but it seems obvious that that could work on a smaller scale as well. That leads me down a rabbit hole of “well if it were me I’d survive way better than these fictional movie characters” which is a pretty unproductive thread to pull on so moving on. Still…. it’s easier to throw a rock than yell and get killed, and even with yelling you’re a distraction for all of two to ten seconds and then your kids are still in danger and on their own, I don’t feel like this is a great plan.
I still liked it but I never felt like they needed to make a second movie. The opening bit was pretty great, I always love seeing an apocalypse-in-progress, but it shows a lot of the same gaps as the first one. Things that should be obvious to people in the situation that aren’t thought of until during the movie, like the gang of rapists and (one assumes) cannibals – it’s way too easy to make noises, how have they ever kidnapped anyone at all without being killed? They got the drop on our heroes pretty handily and were immediately killed all the same, it’s hard to think it ever worked out any other way. It also plays on the presumption that people (and men in particular) are essentially selfish and violent, which should fit Emmet who is alone, who set up a death trap, but since he’s someone these characters know somehow he’s exempted from that presumption without a word, but these nameless Others near the docks are dangerous and untrustworthy while Emmet is immediately trusted to go after the Regan when she takes off. What if she hadn’t felt safe around him and that’s why she was eager to go against her mom’s wishes? If not for what happens later I would say that the film just doesn’t want to engage with that subject matter, but then they absolutely do so you don’t really get a pass there.
Still, they’re flawed (deeply flawed) movies but I’ve enjoyed worse. What worries me is that I’ve heard people saying that the end of the second one is setting up a third – I disagree, but I wouldn’t be surprised, and I guess it leaves the door open more than the first one did and they sequelized that one already so there’s no real reason to think they won’t do it again. I hope they don’t, though; the more they try to expand this premise the more holes it’ll show and it’ll diminish the original’s ability to stand on its own. It’ll be like The Matrix – an enjoyable if flawed movie (whose premise also makes not much sense if you think about it at all) that then gets saddled with unnecessary sequels that recontextualize the original and make it worse retroactively.
As for the aliens’ motives? It’s a cop-out to say “they’re alien motives of course we don’t understand them” – the only thing that makes sense to me is that they’re a bio-weapon created to eliminate the dominant life forms on any given planet, intentionally released. That would go a long way to explaining their One Convenient Weakness, surely that’s how their handlers will control them once they arrive to extract the Earth’s resources for their own use.
Barefoot cultures around the world for millennia haven’t worn socks. Socks go with shoes. Socks without shoes rot and they fall apart. In like a day or two, or a week tops. Socks are not the problem here.
Hah! I haven’t watched either film (nor do I intend to) but this would rank as one of your funniest reviews – although maybe not as funny as your Aquaman review?* You do seem to raise some salient points. These creatures have mastered interstellar technology but on landing on earth behave like a bunch of rabid dogs? Hmmm. What is their gameplan? Also, I’m starting to realise I’ve been conflating these films with some other film starring Sandra Bullock, but am too lazy to find out why.
* which I ended up watching. Thanks for that.
Why do they kill? Why did they come to our planet?
That doesn’t matter. This movie is about the humans.
What about the animals?
That doesn’t matter. This movie is about the humans.
Why don’t they wear socks?
Because film is a visual medium and they are visibly more vulnerable if they don’t wear socks.
Why don’t they live by the waterfall?
Because then there wouldn’t be a movie. Assume there is a reason they didn’t tell us because it doesn’t matter.
And when it started with the pregnancy stuff I stopped reading this. All of this is extremely petty and nitpicky. Who cares about those things. This is a mood piece about humans. it’s not real. And it’s not supposed to be real. *shrug*
Your final paragraph is the movie that we deserved.
The thing that immediately lost me was the trails of sand.
Anyone here know how far a 50-lb bag of sand goes?
Yeah, so we need about 50 dump trucks worth, transported from somewhere, somehow, spread out and maintained to remain free of leaf debris and….arrgghhh!
I didn’t like A Quiet Place and so didn’t see A Quiet Place 2. IMO A Quiet Place seemed cliched and trope ridden. However, IMO Signs is a great religious flick disguised as an alien invasion flick. After watching Signs several times over the past 20 years, it dawned on me that creatures attacking the farm family and the rest of the planet are demons!
I liked A Quiet Place, but not enough to see it again or watch the sequel.
The thing that struck me early on was wondering how they planted, harvested, and processed the stuff growing in their giant field we just got a nice, scenic shot of, without making any noise.
Once I realized that the filmmakers hadn’t thought about that, it was easy enough to just sit back and enjoy the ride.
@oafgeek: ” the only thing that makes sense to me is that they’re a bio-weapon created to eliminate the dominant life forms on any given planet, intentionally released.”
The Tomorrow War ripped off the same Alien franchise trope and it was dumb there too. Didn’t work in the most recent Alien sequels either.
I only watched the first one and I watched that one in a theater. The absolute best part of the movie…was the audience. It was sooooo quiet. I mean theaters are normal “quiet” but during this move….it was almost unnaturally so. It was cool. The movie was ok but the audience gets a 5 star rating from me.
@11 Sunspear: haven’t seen Tomorrow War but I did think of the recent Alien movies – although at least the xenomorphs make more sense as a species than these sound-hunting aliens. But this bioweapon idea also struggles to hold water; your plan to cleanse a planet of potentially annoying local lifeforms is to send an even more dangerous lifeform to go kill them. The resources required to deliver so many of these creatures as to hit so thoroughly so quickly is pretty staggering.
But I guess if we needed a reminder that these movies aren’t meant to be analyzed this closely, we can look at the newspaper page from early in the first movie. “It’s sound!” it says, warning against the danger of loud noises. Printed on a newspaper. I guess they used one of those new, completely silent newspaper presses.
“I’m one of those people who kind of likes Signs. (I understand if this makes you not trust me.)”
I admit this gave me SERIOUS pause. But your takedown of the A Quiet Place movies is spot on, IMHO.
Granted, I had a great time with the first one, warts and all. I don’t see the point of the second one, since apparently does not give any kind of explanation about these completely inexplicable “aliens” who apparently crossed time and space to… run around killing people with their bare appendages?
I didn’t like these movies, but I also didn’t like this review, so I guess this has been a day well spent.
The thing I don’t get is why the aliens are winning. It would have taken maybe an hour for someone to figure out they go after sound. After that, big noisemaker in an open field, add high explosives, you do the math about what happens next.
What idiot person puts a nail upside down in a step to begin with. I never got past that stupidity and walked out at that point. I worry greatly for the people who think this is a good film series.
@@@@@9. Paladin Burke. Yes, demons! That also explains Bo talking about the water being “contaminated.” I’m not sure if she’s a child saint, a bodhisattva, or what, but she’s got some kind of holy power that spreads to the water.
I haven’t seen A Quiet Place and don’t really have an opinion. I did read somewhere that the aliens had evolved to survive drifting through space in a dormant state. They reach a planet, come out of dormancy, and kill, eat, and reproduce till the planet is destroyed. Then, they move on.
Which seems to beg the question of how an organism would evolve these traits. And how do they leave planets? But, it does explain some of their actions. They aren’t acting on logic or with any kind of intelligent purpose. They’re acting on instincts they can’t modify or change.
My headcanon for the conception of these movies is as an acting exercise, perhaps as a party game, at the Krasinski/Blunt household.
See, we’re going to do a family drama with hyped up emotions. Why are they so tuned up? Because there are sightless monsters who are absolute killing machines and will kill you if you make the slightest sound. What if there aren’t any around? THEY ARE ALWAYS AROUND!!!! THEY ARE NEVER NOT AROUND!!!!
Ok then. Well, how did they get here. On spaceships that crash. So they survive crashing spaceships. How did they fly them across 10s or 100s of light years only to immediately crash when they reach Earth? Wait. They don’t have vision. Do they only have audible flight controls? How do they know there are stars, much less planets, if they can’t see anything? How do they know not to fly into the Sun?
Doesn’t matter; don’t ask any questions. They’re here, they’re scary, and they will KILL YOU!
Why are they so savage and angry? What’s their purpose? Are they a metaphor for something?
STOP ASKING QUESTIONS! “THIS IS A MOOD PIECE ABOUT HUMANS!”
Actually, the only time I thought the aliens had any amount of intelligence was when one of them hid in the boat going over to the island in Part 2. “Be vewy vewy qwiet… I’m hunting humans…”
Of course, this made the humans look even stupider: it doesn’t even occur to them that these aliens flew spaceships; boats are simply beyond their understanding. These are the same people that broadcast the location of the safe haven by radio.
I have to agree about the small town conservative values that are also broadcast by these two movies. Part 2 starts with the dad simply bagging some stuff at the local store and walking out: “Just put these on my tab, nevermind what I grabbed.” Then we see a homey kids’ baseball game. The whole setup wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Jimmy Stewart movie from the 50s.
Maybe that’s the cipher to all this: it’s really a metaphor for a political nightmare. “WATCH THE SKIES!! THE ALIENS WHO HATE OUR WAY OF LIFE ARE COMING!!”
I haven’t seen the second film, but having watched the first film this far at least, from the context this is ‘fishing trip’ is more of an excuse for Dad & his son to talk about stuff they maybe wouldn’t be comfortable talking about in front of other people than it is about a HE-MAN NO WOMAN CLUB (No females allowed) bit of adventure.
My impression wasn’t that Dad wanted the kid to toughen up, more than he wanted the kid to open up (It also bears pointing out that leaving his heavily pregnant wife completely alone in the middle of the apocalypse would be pretty darned cruel and quite probably more than a little stupid).
It also seems not unreasonable to suggest that the aliens we see aren’t a species or a race so much as they are a WEAPON – something tailor made to murder Humanity while leaving Planet Earth to get herself nice for her nice new overlords.
@@@@@ 20:
“It also seems not unreasonable to suggest that the aliens we see aren’t a species or a race so much as they are a WEAPON – something tailor made to murder Humanity while leaving Planet Earth to get herself nice for her nice new overlords.”
That would be an interesting angle. Sadly, it is never suggested in the movies themselves.
@Ashgrove: yeah, not even remotely, not even slightly addressed. It’s just full-on throwback paranoia.
@@@@@ 22:
The default mode for American thrillers and horror movies is –the Other comes to threaten the nuclear family, and the Other needs to be dealt with, preferably by total obliteration. The nuclear family is by definition perfect and sacrosanct, no matter the failings of the individual members.
That’s why movies such as The Babadook and Hereditary are such a welcome fresh of air for me.
@Ashgrove: Haven’t seen Babadook, but Hereditary was amazing. I appreciate any thriller, or horror movie, or any amped-up emotion style story that engages my intelligence and curiosity, rather than running on pure Id fumes. Id movies are inherently just base emotion, “filled with bad choices and brazen stupidity,” as our reviewer said.
Ultimately, they have nothing to say, no catharsis, never ask “why,” just “Were you scared?” And they fail at even that.
@@@@@ 24 Sunspear: Hereditary‘s biggest strength for me is that 90% of the time everything depends on the actors. And what actors!
It made me look up Ann Dowd, whose performance goes from motherly to terrifying in five seconds flat. Even remembering “PETER! GET OUT!” gives me chills.
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In the second movie, we learn they cannot cross water. What happened to the US Navy?
I could write an entire essay on how I agree with all the points listed here. Instead, I’ll end by simply saying of your summation of the films: Nailed it.
Along with the points already made, no one snores. How likely is it that no one makes noise in their sleep?
Never saw the second movie because I hated the first with the intensity of a billion supernovas. From the first scene, I hated the movie because it was apparent these were the worst parents ever. They’re creeping about a store, looking for stuff, and their youngest, and most vulnerable is allowed to wander about unsupervised, inevitably almost causing a noisy calamity. But do these two morons learn anything from this? Nope. They march off into alien-infested woods with youngest trailing way behind the group. And because young children are inherently self-destructive, little brother switches on a noisy toy and gets ‘et by the aliens. That was the point where I lost all sympathy for the adults in this movie. It just got stupider after that.
I love genre movies, even, a lot of poorly plotted, ridiculous genre movies. But the appeal of this franchise utterly escapes me.
Most horror movies are pure stupid, with idiocy the only reason there is a plot
God I hated this movie.
Every single part of it made absolutely no sense. The basic premise of not being able to make any noise is immediately destroyed by absolutely everything these people do. Please explain how you can plow a field, sow it with corn and harvest it in an environment where the sound of moving a game piece on a board might spell instant doom. Please explain why you don’t live near the waterfall if that much background noise is enough to make regular conversation safe. Please explain what’s wrong with you when you think that putting a newborn baby in a (possibly?) soundproof box with an oxygen mask is in any way a sane idea. Oh, and assuming this family is comprised entirely of morons, please explain how the rest of the world was defeated by these monsters. They hunt sound and can be killed by anything more powerful than a shotgun, eh? Well we just so happen to have a bloated military and over-equipped police presence in this country that can make a lot of noise and has MUCH more powerful weapons. Did everyone else figure out how to eliminate the aliens and just forget to tell these idiots?
God I hated this movie!
So, I assumed the aliens were invaders who react to humans the way I react to flies in my house- if i hear it I attack with full prejudice, lol.
But in all seriousness, I assumed they were first wave invaders and they just came to wipe us out before the colonies land.
I enjoyed the first one, watching it in theatres with an audience that is just silent was an experience. The second was a lot harder to get into for a lot of the reasons you mentioned, I just could not agree with their thought processes or actions.
I saw both films, because I too love horror. I went into the first one annoyed, because Tim Lebanon already wrote a book called The Silence, and I swear these movies ripped him off. I think his book was even optioned for a movie long before these two trainwrecks, and certainly before the Netflix travesty of his book. This article was just *chef’s kiss*, and I’m making my wife read it.
Tim Lebbon, autocorrect.
One flaw I don’t think anybody mentioned is that, under the circumstances, deafness would be a death sentence, because you wouldn’t know if you were making noise, or if something near you was making noise.
Monster movies, like these or Jurassic Park, all suffer from the problem that no biological organism can stand up to modern, armor-piercing weapons. In the JP movies, you will note, firearms somehow always fail to work, except when required by the plot.
#37; good point, except one doesn’t even need firearms (much less high explosive) … homo sapiens came up with all sorts of interesting ways to kill megafauna with little more than the ability to think ahead, scout the ground, and organize, with nothing more than human muscle, stone, and wood for weapons. Add the bow and/or throwing spears, and there’s a reason there are so few megafauna species left.
One example:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/bison-bellows-3-31-16.htm
I really disliked the first movie, and am not planning on watching the second. The family makes aggressively stupid choices all throughout, and it just made me root for the aliens.
Plus, the way they set up the kid’s death at the start was so blatant and obvious that it actually made me crack up when it happened. Obviously a child’s death is horrible, but the way it was shot just had me laughing.