A Quiet Place: *1/2
I like horror movies. But I rarely watch them.
Good horror movies make me lose sleep. It’s embarrassing but true. The night after “The Blair Witch Project,” I stayed awake in terror until dawn. The night after “Paranormal Activity,” I was 80% sure that my wife slumbering soundly next to me was a vicious demon.
I only go to see horror movies when they look really good and really interesting. Last weekend I saw “A Quiet Place.” I thought it was going to be great. I was mistaken.
Writer/director and new parent John Krasinski plays Lee Abbott: the greatest dad of all time.
The movie takes place in upstate New York after the alien apocalypse.
[Spoilers Ahead] We learn from newspaper clippings that a race of monsters landed a little more than a year ago and began killing people. These alien predators are blind and can’t smell. They hunt using their super hearing. By the time humanity understood this, however, most people were already dead.
Not the Abbott family, though. They’re doing just fine. Lee and his similarly perfect wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) have made a good life for themselves and their children. They have a farm with a full granary. They have electricity and running water. They have a color-coated alien alarm system with video monitors. And somehow they were able to do all of this in total silence.
And in his free time, amazing selfless Lee tinkers with tiny speakers trying to fashion a functional homemade hearing aid for his surly deaf daughter.
I have to give Krasinski credit. He has created a brand new genre: Extreme Awesome Perfect Parenting Porn. I do not like this new genre at all. I’m pretty sure actual parents will appreciate “A Quiet Place” more than I do.
Oh, and get this: Evelyn is pregnant and Lee is delighted about it. That is certainly consistent with the new genre of Extreme Awesome Perfect Parenting Porn. But in the context of a world where aliens will devour you if they hear any sound, it makes NO DARN SENSE.
So, the family is boring. There’s virtually no dialogue. The aliens aren’t intriguing. And the ending is a carbon copy of M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 alien movie “Signs.” “A Quiet Place” stinks.
Oh, well. At least it didn’t make me lose any sleep.
