Thank you for posting that. Sometimes you feel like you misremember details from a movie.
I think where this movie slipped up - making it pretty good but not amazing - was that I felt like ti didn’t quite get the friction between dad and daughter right.
This idea is not entirely formed in my head yet. In the months since I finally saw A Quiet Place, it’s just something about it that I felt was off/kept it from being legitimately great. I think I might be remembering some of the details wrong as well (as in when certain people communicate specifically about Regan thinking Dad blames her ). This reminds me I need to listen to the Podcast.
Obviously the daughter is feeling guilty because she gave baby bro the toy that got him killed. It’s not her fault that she didn’t know he would swipe the batteries, of course. Or turn it on. But she’s going to feel guilty about that, and the death of baby bro is going to leave a scar on the family. If memory serves mom is not preggers in this sequence, so it’s at least 9 months before the movie proper. Thinking about this now, it must be not long after the fall when all of this occurred, so noise discipline is probably “in development” and it will always be harder with a child.
As an aside, it’s interesting that mom has a bun in the oven once we get to the present. On the one hand, that’s an extraordinarily difficult thing to do given the circumstances, and a decision that is probably not going to carry with it a high degree of success. For a family still feeling the (brutal!) loss of a child, it’s even harder. OTOH, not having a kid is sort of giving up on the human race so I applaud Mom and Dad’s decision to keep on keeping on because I’m always for rejecting nihilism queue’s Gold Soundz by Pavement
So here we have Mom and Dad and Regan and Marcus and they’re doing the best they can given the circumstances. Baby Bro’s death is obviously still impacting everyone. It may or may not be haunting Regan, that’s not clear at first. She is chafing against all the structure in her life, which is fitting since she appears roughly that age (early to mid teen). The attempt to enter the secret lab helps show that, I think. But this also culminates when Dad announces he is taking Marcus on Walkabout.
This felt like a big deal to me, something that will become ritual in this world. As these are the only kids they have, it hasn’t been done before (any sort of “one parent and one child” trip) but it’s something Mom and Dad have clearly been planning and it’s important. It will directly contribute to the ability of both individuals and the family to survive. Dad’s decision not to take Regan feels like kind of a dick move. She’s the oldest and this isn’t 200 AD, where she’s in line to get married off while the oldest son is in line to inherent the family whatever. Apparently part of the reason Dad takes Marcus is because he can actually hear, and he both wants to show him the Waterfall and allow Marcus to hear his actual voice. I liked this scene, and when you haven’t heard someone - someone you love/are close to - speak in over a year hearing their voice would be pretty amazing. But we also learn about Regan thinking Dad is punishing her for Baby Bro’s death. I can’t even remember if she had communicated this to Marcus yet in the story or not (I seem to recall Marcus and Regan having a discussion on the water tower later where this gets further hashed out).
When Dad tells Regan how much he loves her, before drawing the creature away with a Barbaric Yawp, I don’t even recall them getting to specifically discuss the (misplaced) feelings of blame. I don’t necessarily need that spelled out directly between the characters, but neither did I feel like the situation resolved in a way that showed they both understood. The acting for this scene is fine. But it felt more perfunctory than satisfying.
Watched it last night (Amazon, $3 rental). Overall I liked it, though most of my enjoyment during those 90 minutes derived from watching my wife and daughter jump from a few too many cheap scares for my taste. . .the raccoons falling off the roof, the brother grabbing his sister’s arm when he was hiding under the tractor (great way to have someone inadvertently yell there, little bro). . .but also several really tense scenes with preggers Blunt.
When it ended I wanted to complain about inconsistencies with the aliens and their hearing, but the more I mulled it over I couldn’t focus on anything specific to highlight this feeling. If you’re inside a house and worried about knocking something small over and being heard by something 50+ yards away in a field, that same creature stalking you because it knows it keeps hearing things and stands very still in immediate proximity, unbeknownst to you, it’s probably going to zero in. I guess my one complaint is the movie consistently conveyed the weight of these creatures except for the one scene with Krasinski.
I think the film is too short at 90 minutes, and could’ve benefited from spending another 25-30 fleshing out the world, efforts to contact those lighting the nearby fires, the interpersonal dynamics of the family post-Rocket Boy, etc. Regardless, it was a decent horror film, not a classic but certainly more enjoyable than something like Signs.
I watched it this week-end and I absolutely disliked it.
Unlike John, I thought it would have benefitted from being a short movie instead. I didn’t care much for the inconsistencies (well, nothing is really consistant at all), but I thought that dropping out all the baby nonsense would have been a necessity (seriously, the plan is to make him born and then put it under - for what, the rest of his life I guess?). The film also felt stretching and stretching out.
I also didn’t understand why it was set up as post apocalyptical, since it was stripped of any of the existential horror that benefits the genre, and made the omnipresence of the creatures silly. They could have been locked down in some base somewhere, it would have actually made more sense.
The only nice things I’d have to say about it is that the script was so stupid, it managed to make the aggravating last shot work for me. I thought that the creature, a straight ripoff of Parasyte’s, was kind of cool. And Emily Blunt was wonderful as a mother.
But most of all, this was an amazing opsis to listen to.
Found it rather boring and incomplete. How did they have electricity? Walking in front of your family where you can’t keep an eye on them? Where did they get all the sand? Walking barefoot can be more painful, thus creating noise, than walking in, even makeshift cloth or leather coverings. How do they get running water? Simple everyday occurances not dealt with…sneezing, coughing, bathroom, etc., let alone having a nail go through your foot. The main thing is accepting that no one in the military/science realm across the world, would have rationalized that different frequencies of sound affected them. Concept was okay, but it was too much of a stretch. Not so much tension, as it was more annoyance. I felt myself finding more and more flaws, than thinking about the characters. The dad giving up and martyring himself was just a death warrant for the rest of the family.
I, too, found this movie boring and incomplete without the family’s thrilling run on the sand quarry. Hopefully, the director’s cut restores this pivotal scene.
Turns out that town had a board game store and they emptied out all the Boggle hourglasses.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. That did look like Boggle sand!
-xtien
I thought it was just Quikrete, aka sand from any hardware store, the kind you get from Home Depot and such to lay down paving stones. A pallet of that would have gotten them quite a long way.
Sheesh, you guys. What part of…
…is unclear? Also…
-Tom
Wow, I somehow missed the fires in the distance and the implication that there are other humans somewhere nearby (why aren’t they going out to find other survivors and band together?) I figured having Dad spend a big chunk of the day checking all the radio frequencies and sending out morse code with no response was indicative of there being very few survivors, not a ton of people within a relatively short distance. Let’s say the tower is 100 feet high. The horizon would be 12.2 miles away. That’s not so far that they couldn’t get to those fires if it was actually people.
Yeah, but those people are busy leading their own quiet lives. I’m not sure how much they would welcome you bringing trouble to their homes.
I think the main reason for showing the fires was so that later on you could see the fires are no longer there; the world had a ton of attrition.
Good tense movie, but I also found it quite boring in parts. I write a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff, so I had a lot of questions throughout the entire movie. No one in their family snores? What about taking a crap, or farting? LOL. Why didn’t they make a soundproof room? Insulation and egg cartons could have done the trick. Or live in a bank vault, and as someone else pointed out, how did they still have electricity?
The movie did well, so there’s going to be a sequel.
A couple of months ago CinemaWins did a great video about this one, he spent the 2nd half of the video explaining most of the issues people had with the movie, which he almost never does. What interesting is his theory that it’s not the sound waves defeated the aliens, but electro-magnetic waves:
Watched this and Bird Box one day after the other. Both were okay, but I’m a little surprised at the derision for Bird Box. It seemed to cover a lot of the goofy things NOT covered by Quiet Place (though it of course had its own goofy things).