I feel like I should start out this review by saying I was a big fan of the 2 previous A Quiet Place movies. You can read my reviews here and here. They did a great job establishing atmosphere and creating compelling characters I could breathe with for the moment. However, they are not movies that bode well when examined under a critical eye. The aliens and their sound issues don’t make much sense especially with how distracted they would be by nature, animals, and everything else. Humans would actually fall pretty low on the sound levels when it comes to their daily normal interactions and talking.
It is for these reasons I was actually looking forward to a prequel for the films in A Quiet Place: Day One. My hope was they might help explain more about these aliens and how they came to figure out that sound was their trigger. I was particularly intrigued when they had a quality actress like Lupita Nyong’o on board and Michael Sarnoski writing and directing who was the man behind the compelling film Pig from a few years ago.
Unfortunately those expectations were ill-founded because A Quiet Place: Day One proved to be another disappointment from 2024. Not only is it a rinse and repeat of the previous 2 films except in New York City but it literally provides none of the backstory the title promises. Everyone immediately knows to be quiet and it is blasted from a helicopter in the sky. So Nyong’o’ s character Sam has to make it to the water in order to be saved because the creatures can’t swim. That’s it. That’s the story. That’s all the insight we gain. Everyone immediately knows how to handle the creatures and that they can’t swim or tolerate sound. I was left gobsmacked thinking ‘why does this movie need to exist?’ It does nothing different than the previous 2 and I can just watch those if I need an A Quiet Place fix.
Nyong’o is good and does what she can with the material and Joseph Quinn is fine but one can’t help but wonder why the aliens aren’t distracted by the noise from all the rats and birds in New York City? I would think they would be making plenty compared to the relatively small noise from a human. The whole thing is really quiet stupid when you think about it but the truth is I shouldn’t be thinking about it because the movie should do something compelling to keep my mind from wandering. It shouldn’t be the same movie we’ve already gotten twice before! I guess the cat is great.
Unfortunately A Quiet Place: Day One is a day you can skip.
Frown Worthy