A Quiet Place
You know what I hate even more than a movie that obviously was a piece of stupid trash before the cameras even rolled? A movie that shows some potential for being something different, something original, something surprising that we haven’t seen before … and then blows it at the end. I hated, hated, hated this film because it blew it bigtime. I am going to reveal the ending, and I am deliberately not going to give you a spoiler warning, because I want to warn you off, so that you don’t waste an hour and a half of your time, like we did.
Premise: The whole planet has been taken over by some sort of blind, giant super-crabs. (From where? Doesn’t say, and doesn’t really matter. They’re there, okay?) They have killed and eaten almost all the humans and noisy animals because they home in on any sound. (What will they eat when all animals are dead? Who knows? They are apparently even more stupid than we are.) (When a movie really sucks, these are the kinds of things you wonder about later. In a good movie, I could have let that slide.) There is a family who have managed to stay alive by staying very quiet. We see only their little valley, but there are no radio stations transmitting anywhere, not even ham operators. One of their children is killed in the early minutes. Two kids survive, including a deaf daughter. She doesn’t know when she is making noise, which heightens the tension. The wife (Emily Blunt) is pregnant. Holy cacophony! Giving birth without making a sound is going to be interesting, and probably no fun.
It’s all interesting, for most of the movie. Ingenious, tense, different from anything you’ve ever seen. There is not a spoken word of dialog until around the 40-minute mark! That was terrific!
Skip to the horrible, idiotic, stupid ending.
It turns out that the wife is able to kill one of these crustaceans … with a shotgun. Hell of a magic weapon, shotguns. Not many of them around. Goddam it, if these things can be killed by a pregnant woman with a shotgun, it makes no fucking sense that they have been able to kill almost every human on the planet!!! I can think of nineteen different ways for a dozen people to sit quietly and lure the bugs into a kill zone with a ringing bell, then blow them straight to hell. Fucking stupid!
And it gets even worse. All through the show, Dad has been working on making a device so his daughter can hear. Nothing works. Then, at the very end, his last attempt at a hearing aid makes a high-pitched squeak. And the big crab goes bugfuck! The hearing aid kills them.
To believe this heaping, steaming pile of horseshit you have to believe that of the millions and millions of scientists and soldiers and even backyard tinkerers like Dad, no one never thought, “Hmmm. Why don’t we try to drown out their hearing sense with some really loud noises?” Because this idiot plot required all you dead people to be as idiotic as the script writer, John Krasinski, Emily’s husband, who also co-stars.
And the critics loved it!!!! 95% at Rotten Tomatoes. 8.2 at Metacritic, 55 critics without a single dissenting voice, no score lower than 63%! Wiki has a whole page of stuff about themes and similar shit. Who cares, if the movie is silly? Even Stephen King, who can write genuinely scary stuff that also hangs together logically, and should know better, loved it. Jesus Christ. Are Lee and I the only ones on the planet who can recognize a classic idiot plot? Have we all been reduced to the level of M. Night Whatshisname’s stupendously stupid Signs, (also very popular!) where throwing water on the aliens killed them?
I swear, sometimes I just despair. I actually spent some time reading some of the (only) 70 bad reviews from viewers (as opposed to 555 raves) at Metacritic to see if I was insane. I was so relieved to find that those 70 smart people were pointing out exactly the same stupid shit I mentioned … and much, much more that I either hadn’t noticed or was just too discouraged to mention. So happy to learn that there are a lonely few who aren’t brain dead, who know crap when they see it.