Qt3 Movie Podcast: A Quiet Place

Very good call. I assume however that you are trolling me by calling it an Aussie movie.

Also, I would like to note that today is Wednesday. @Dave_Perkins knows what that means.

-xtien

“God blinked, and the whole world disappeared.”

Not trolling, just making a mistake. But it was worth it for the Flight of the Conchords clip. Loved that show.

Me too. Problem is I fall into a YouTube hole whenever I go watch one of their clips.

-xtien

Also, @baren, excellent bringing up Phase 7. I freaking love that movie. It has one of my favorite in theater movie experiences ever. I got to see it with Kelly and Tom, in a mostly empty theater in Burbank when AMC was doing this weird limited release experiment. A couple got fed up and left about, I don’t know, forty minutes in? Anyway, as soon as they cleared the exit, the shotgun blast happened and the three of us just broke out into laughter.

It was great.

-xtien

The opsis was so funny it made me laugh out loud, especially the bit about not playing with toys that require batteries, except for “mom’s toys.”

Really enjoyed this movie and the podcast.

So, at one point in the podcast, Tom mentioned the newspaper headline we see a couple times: “It’s Sound!” I think he thought it meant that people figured out (before things got bad enough that the printing presses stopped) that the creatures could be killed/incapacitated by sound.

But I had assumed it meant that people had figured out that the creatures could find you by sound. Which I think makes more sense.

Anyway, sorry to hear Tom didn’t like it. I can’t disagree with any of his criticisms, really, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Not at all. On the contrary I thought it was dumb they didn’t figure it out. If the People of Earth knew enough to figure out that the creatures have sensitive hearing, why didn’t they know enough to try to incapacitate the creatures by using their sensitive hearing against them? After city after city after city fell, after military power after military power failed to stop the creatures, no one figured it out? Why did it fall to one random yahoo on an Iowa farm tinkering around with his daughter’s hearing aid to stumble across the magic bullet?

Imagine if humanity invaded a race of blind people. At a certain point the blind people realize our sight is our advantage. What kind of idiot civilization wouldn’t figure out to use flashbangs against us?

That’s why I prefer Mars Attacks. At least Tim Burton knew how dumb it was to have aliens allergic to Slim Whitman songs. By the way, here’s the handy player aid provided for viewers of A Quiet Place:

A%20Quiet%20Place%20Player%20Aid

I can’t decide if my favorite is the Post-It note declaring NO PATTERN, the two question marks after How many in Area, or the box around the word “weakness” on What is the WEAKNESS.

-Tom

Well I can’t argue with that. I still liked it though! I’m sticking my tongue out at you and wiggling my fingers. You’ll just have to imagine it.

… or that throwing water on the witch would kill her, or that the common cold could kill a life form not adapted for our planet, or that rubbing cold mud on you could defeat the creature that has heat vision, or that freezing cold could kill a nebulous blob, or destroying the scroll that gave the mummy it’s life, or a hydraulic press on a machine made of metal, or using explosives on things that come from and shake the ground, or sunlight against a creature of the darkness, or …

… it’s a trope. I mean it’s almost a check-off item for a monster horror flick.

I could fault the method in which it comes about within the movie, but not that they stuck with a trope. It would be more unbelievable if it involved some obscure and advanced theory he came up with after capturing hundreds of aliens and performing tests torturing them with multiple means until he found the best method to kill them.

The audience has already bought in for the monster and it’s reliance on sound. The easiest buy in for the demise of said monster is some form of its existence.

I think you just made my point! Every single one of those examples is about the monsters losing and civilization winning. They’re first encounter situations, where humanity prevails because we realize whatever deus ex destroys the monster. And it’s usually so simple! It was there all along! Whew!

But not in A Quiet Place. In that movie, the moment is delayed months after civilization has collapsed and billions of people have been killed. And not a one of those people screeched whatever magic frequency disables the monsters. No scientist or general or engineer or survivor desperate to save his family or random dude fiddling with a hearing aid or radio or feedback on a mic figured it out. 8 billion people in the world, and not a one of them figured it out. Why?

Because the script needs to wait for our protagonist’s moment!

-Tom

P.S. Note to self: “medical supplies”

I think the Wicked Witch of the West (presumably the East was vulnerable to water too, as well as the less common falling houses) was around for quite a while before Dorothy discovered her one weird trick.

Oh, and as the whiteboard inevitably got posted, I’ll add that it’s easily my least favourite thing about the movie. It’s just so dumb and unnecessary, and totally spoils the excellent, exposition-free worldbuilding that had been done up to that point.

They used soft exposition though, newspapers flapping where the focus was held a bit, etc. Then the slow pan around that room a few times before later in the movie where the whiteboard is highlighted. I forgive the exposition versus having to hear a narrator monologue or a long whispered conversation to explain the same.

I think so too, but I guess my point was, yeah they went with the trope, but I don’t fault them for it. I would rather it be a trope than some massive weapon he had concocted or a potato cannon or something. Lord knows they had enough crops that still seemed to be growing around that farm without any equipment being able to run for over a year.

But instead it was a mistake. He was fixing the cochlear implant for the daughter (was it their daughter?) and though it was broken, again, it had a failure that ends up saving them.

So it doesn’t seem like I’m all happy with everything in the movie, my gripes:

  1. That’s a hell of a lot of sand.
  2. Crops are still going strong a year plus later. Who planted this season? And with what equipment?
  3. They do runs into the city, but we only get one glimpse of anyone alive outside of the family for the scream scene. And I think the flashes of light from other silos out in the night, as though grain silos had become the defacto standard for where to have a signal fire and show you’re still living the silent dream.
  4. All those crops and fish and nobody had a bad case of gas?
  5. Where in the hell did all those mattresses come from?
  6. Where is Dwight Schrute when you need some beets?

My impression was the family did, but I was curious how they managed to get the rows so neat if they were doing it by hand.

Not to mention doing it silently. How do you till the soil? Pull an ear of corn off a stalk? Do you have to gently place each ear in a bushel?

Part of the problem with A Quiet Place is that it really didn’t think through the full implications of its premise, such as its idea that civilization has collapse and billions of people have died, but no one tried to fight the creatures with noise. And the only danger was whatever danger was contrived at the moment. Monopoly pieces made of cloth! A raccoon scampering across the dirt! It’s that dangerous! A screaming baby is okay, though.

As a creature feature, it’s a pretty sloppy one.

-Tom

In case anyone is keeping track, I also spell “grey” with an “e”. The color “gray” and the color “grey” look different when I picture them. Or maybe I’m just being pretentious. Probably the second one.

I was scandalized when my first-grade teacher marked me wrong on a spelling test, and brought The Hobbit to school the next day to show her where it clearly said “Gandalf the Grey”.

Man I completely agree with you that the write up / setting was sloppy. But similar to Kelly and Dingus, I enjoyed the movie a lot. I thought it worked in multiple ways. Sadly I can’t explain 100% why?

I can imagine, however, something like the premise of this movie set in a more somber setting. Something like the setting for This War Of Mine. Imagine a post war or post Armageddon-ish setting where there was less ambiguity and more hardship and even less hope. I think it would have amplified a LOT of the plot here and also most likely hidden a few of the exposition and setting flaws you guys pointed out.

Well, you should never feel obligated to explain why you enjoy something. I enjoy soooo many things that other people would dismiss for being dumb. For instance, I’ve seen this movie countless times:

No, really, countless times in that I don’t know how many.

And, frankly, I’m jealous of people who liked A Quiet Place. It’s exactly the kind of movie I want to like!

-Tom

I enjoyed A Quiet Place too but I don’t think it holds up to much scrutiny. There are some lovely details and moments in it (like the painted floorboards showing where to tread) that were really thoughtful so I think it just surprised and jarred all the more when baby arrives and the creatures magically don’t zero in on it as fast as they did everything else.

And for something so fast and deadly, they sure knew how to quickly navigate the environment without being able to echolocate their prey! Did anyone ever simply throw something to distract them? I recall the egg timer trick but that seemed unnecessarily elaborate. I think they’d have struggled to find a seasoned stealth gamer because of how easy they were to manipulate. “Must have been rats.”

Like Tom said, it blew my mind that nobody worked out the creatures’ weakness and harnessed that before it was too late. At the very least I can imagine the military using controlled explosives to systematically draw them in and destroy them.