The time I spent in rose-tinted glasses praising the “A Quiet Place” series has….well and truly passed. I’ve grown older, I’ve gotten tougher skin and my appreciation for what I once thought was an innovative refreshing horror concept has dimmed exponentially. I felt next to nothing watching that “A Quiet Place: Day One” trailer, for I expected it to be more of the same.
Yeah…..it’s just there. At this point, it might as well be just noise.
Michael Sarnoski adjusts quickly to the reins as director, being knowledgeable to the rules and boundaries this franchise has already established and if anything, he gives more depth through his gift of nuance than with the script he conjures up.
The tantalizing New York setting makes for a fantastic end-of-days type of playground to experiment with these types of stories but because it’s been used so often, the novelty of its usage has drastically diminished: something the production design sadly illustrates despite the ash-ridden, desolate, crowded rawness it hoped to provide. Playing fast and loose with geography is practically a given at this point too, by the way. Unfortunately, not every desolate world is ripe with stories to tell as the atmosphere here, while ripe with uncertainty in the opening few minutes, gets lost in translation the longer we go on.
Pat Scola’s cinematography has no shortage of beautiful screensaver-esque shots, although the constant use of grey and other muted colors doesn’t make the visual aesthetic look as appealing (although one could argue that’s kind of the point). The editing is thankfully consistent and does the absolute bare minimum in keeping everything look crisp but none of that can help the action here; if anything, the imprecise set pieces hamper that that the most out of any other factor.
Marco Beltrami is sorely missed here but Alexis Grapsas fills his shoes well enough to what I thought was an equally competent replacement and while the pacing can be considered questionable, sound design is immersive all around in the way it helps amplifies the hand-held camerawork (and to be honest, conjures up a more definite sense of suspense than the script ever does) and at least it sticks to a lean 99-minute runtime that doesn’t overstay its welcome or overstimulate itself.
Our cast of characters aren’t the best this time around, their personalities shallow and undefined outside the main lead and in the context of this wider universe, they’re given less time for us to care about them. The actors do their best to make up for what little they’re given but Lupita Nyong’o’s empathy and emotive composure stands out above all else.
Sucks the dialogue they’re stuck with is amateur. But as expected, we get the most mileage out of them when they don’t speak.
Conceptually, Day One’s story seems reasonable; showcasing how different people across the country or other sides of the world dealt with the same scenario. The first movie showed us how a family torn apart by tragedy dealt with it in the middle of nowhere while the second one expanded the desolate world they left behind while trying to find some semblance of salvation. Day One’s attempts to show us how people in one of the biggest and loudest cities handle it would’ve been fine…..if they weren’t literally rehashing almost the exact same stories from the previous films. Way too quickly does the film revert back to formula way too often and while said well-trodden formula has its benefits (after all, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it), its promise to deliver a more expansive look at the mayhem from other parts of the world never gets fulfilled and reducing the once-terrified monsters to glorified jumpscares is something I don’t think I can get behind. I don’t want to take away how tangentially self-contained the story is but it’s not told with the same intimacy, heart, or valor as the previous entries and the structure is thinner than before.
It still has some credence attached considering Djimon Honsou’s character is involved so we see how he got to where he was in the second film but considering ITS A PREQUEL, that already should’ve been a given. Sacrificing this series’s nuance and selling point by turning it into a standard monsters-on-the-loose narrative with a much wider scope than it probably needed cheapens the horror of it all and more often than not, horror works best when we’re still left in the dark about the details; the more we know, the less interesting it can become. It only just keeps your interest the entire way through but not without testing your patience too, because this isn’t scary in the slightest.
This is a character study first, survival movie second. Even the main character’s predicament though, how it opens a lot of doors for existential discussions about facing the literal end of the world when you’re at the end of your rope, is either given surface level treatment from the script or again, we’ve already seen it before. And yet, it stays firmly within the themes already explored based on grief, hope and life dissected in a melancholic light by going through all of its five stages.
So much of this feels like a second draft for what could’ve been a richer, more complex experience. As is….its strictly fine.
When we do get an official third film (and you know they’re going to do it), for all intents and purposes, that has to be the final film. But even then, I have to question just what the gameplan will be because if this film is of any indiction, we barely have much ground left to cover here.
