Nice idea, but not too satisfying, unfortunately

Rating: 7/10 (28 August 2018)

If John Krasinski's "A Quiet Place" has any impact on you, it will probably be to make you realise how much noise you make all the time, given that the trick here is a dystopian Earth invaded by aliens that are blind, but with a very acute sense of hearing.
That's an interesting (but NOT breathtaking or awe-inspiring) after-watch conclusion for a watcher to draw, from a film that builds on such a sound biological idea with reasonably good sci-fi credentials, yet doesn't seem able to engage us too much with it.
The fact that the piece is (inevitably) somewhat free of dialogue is part of that - and I suppose it's sociologically worth finding out that - left with so little to say - our four key characters played by Emily Blunt, John Krasinski himself, Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe come over as bland and not even especially sympathetic.
But then if I want sociological discoveries I'll read a textbook...
Lovers of dystopian sci fi will know that the setup of the dystopia can be critical to our "enjoyment". Here we don't know much about what happened (we start on day 89, I believe), and we maybe don't feel too convinced about a world that still supplies its (few?) survivors with a measure of hi-tech, food, shelter and even a kind of normal life ... except that you can't make any noise at all (except when you sometimes can a little bit, as we see in later bits of the film). Protection from aliens presumably does not involve closing doors (as they might squeak), so the residence of our Abbott family seems ludicrously underdefended by the standards of any dystopia you can think of. And somehow that still fails to ring true
And since the aliens can be killed in various ways, the might of the world's armed forces might not really have been so readily overwhelmed, don't we think?
I do.
At moments, there are clever ideas here, while at times the need to not make any noise when people would naturally make a lot verges on the sadistic. But "A Quiet Place" is not too scary, not quite as subtle as it believes, and ultimately not too impressive, where it really, really ought to be, given its quite strong idea. A pity.