Movie Review: A Quiet Place; Day One

Since the announcement of a possible prequel and spin-off to John Kransinski's A Quiet Place, I've been avoiding every trailer and review that has popped up on my timeline, and finally after so many weeks, I made out time to see it.

Quick Recap

A Quiet Place; Day One, follows the story of Sam and Eric on the initial day of the alien invasion as both help each other to find the strength to live.

The Original

I say this emphatically: A Quiet Place 2, not this one, falls under the category of sequels that outmatched their originals. Watching Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy continue from where the first movie ended was intriguing to say the least. It was there we learnt the alien’s second weakness: water.

A Prequel Spin-off

I honestly didn't initially like the idea of a spin-off because the first two were awesome and my reason lay in the fact that I wasn't sure where they were going to tap in to link the stories.

In all my thinking. I seemed to have forgotten that this is Hollywood, an industry that can raise Wolverine from the dead.

Anyhoo, safe to say they found the feasible link using Djimou who we saw in A Quiet Place 2. If you remember, he and some survivors had chosen to live on an island because unlike the other families, they were aware of the aliens' hydrophobia. Now, we know how they knew.

Sam

Back to the original story.

In almost every disaster movie, we find people who sincerely do not want to die. They dread the attack and do their best to survive.

This movie, however, gives us a different perspective from the lens of a terminal Sam who is dying anyway and just wants to have pizza. It's unusual to even find people like her in any apocalypse movie and so it made for a pretty interesting watch.

Seeing her walk in the opposite direction almost had me yelling at her until I remembered she was dying. How long would she even last if she made it out?

Eric

Eric, somehow, is also not a common feature of apocalyptic survivor movies. First of all, he starts off scared — to be expected, but slowly we find him getting brave, so brave he ventured out alone to get her the patch and eventually found a pizza place for her.

I was unexpectedly moved by their interactions and as they came to her late father's paino joint and I saw that ship, I heaved a sigh of relief. Somehow, they had both arrived at what would be their fateful destinations.

The “run” had me almost at the brink of tears and when he made that jump, my heart jumped with him.

Frodo

My first rule of any apocalypse movie is this: don't try to save the pet. I know this may sound cruel, but it's the truth. Think about it. Really think. How many pets have actually died in a survival movie?

The answer is none. Not a single pet dies in cases like these, be it zombie apocalypse, alien invasion, natural disasters, or man-made disaster. Pets always survive. They are never killed. Never eaten. Never caught.

Frodo sincerely had my heart racing with his shenanigans but at least he was calm and not hissing— that would have been a different issue.

Moving Forward

They shouldn't make another. John did an amazing work on the initial two and the writer on this tried his best too, presenting an alternative mindset towards death, but it's enough. Really. It doesn't need to go farther than this. But considering how well all the movies have thrived, some people may get greedy.

I couldn't help but smile at Joseph Quinn (Eric) as he faced off aliens once again. If you're unfamiliar with the actor, he played Eddie in Stranger Things 4 and just like in this one, he had to fend off aliens, at least he survived here.

It was a good watch. It was worth the time and wait and it was an impressive point of view, though I would have liked to see them more in the heat of the invasion, but it was okay nonetheless.