Plenty of Stupid to go around

Rating: 2/10 (31 May 2018)

In the not too distant future, the Earth is overrun by an killer race of, super-hearing, armored .... preying-mantis-crossed-with-spiderman-venom-things. This is the story of one family's "fight to survive". The movie is very much a Drama first with a little bit of horror and very little sci-fi thrown in. There is a lot of time spent on the "tensions" within the family regarding a loss early on. There is almost no back-story as to how the world was overrun by these creatures (Aliens? Chimeras? Man-made?)
The Good: The acting is decent, the score, cinematography, and FX work are all well done - there is certainly nothing to complain about here. Pacing is pretty slow - a lot of time is spent trying to make the audience feel uncomfortable (too much time IMO). The movie feels a lot like an M. Night Shyamalan piece.
The Meh: I tried really hard to piece together some kind of chain of events combined with extenuating circumstances to make sense of the characters mindset and actions - but failed. A lot of the situations in the film are just stupid (like the nail in the tread of the stairs ...WTF?) The story, overall pretty much sucks. No doubt, it had a lot of potential - and could have been really engaging .... but as happens when story takes a back seat to propaganda .... they pooched it. If you don't like movies with stupid characters in them - you know - the kind where they don't do what is obvious - or anything that makes sense - then you probably will have the same issues with this that I did. The mode of the characters seems to be "Let's just wait around until we're all eventually picked off" (In movies like this, I have zero empathy for the characters and end up rooting for the monsters). The super-hearing creatures had some characteristics that could obviously be exploited against them (blind, no sense of smell, no apparent echo-location, etc) yet the electronics-wizard dad couldn't come up with a simple booby trap? I came up with a half-dozen traps to try while watching the movie ..... and HE had over 400 days to think about it. I mean, a super-sensitive hearing creature ... and nobody in the world had tried sonic weapons? REALLY?
The Bad: Like pretty much everything coming out of Hollywood these days, A Quiet Place has a huge serving of Feminist propaganda rolled into it (this is probably what killed most of the potential of the story). That's right, the father is a total Beta who spends most of his time looking like a lost puppy - and proves to be completely ineffective at protecting his family. The only thing he manages to do is impregnate his wife and subsequently "fall on his own sword." The son in the movie is a pathetic wuss - the "ideal" feminized male actually. His deaf sister is twice the "man" he is. Then, there's the mother: she hits a Feminist home-run! Fifteen minutes after birthing a child on her own, she is up and running - turns into a monster-killer on a mission and manages to do what her husband couldn't (figures out how to kill the monsters). SO believable!
My advice: If you feel you need to watch it, wait for the dollar theater. Why would you *pay* to be propagandized? This is yet one more movie where potential is sacrificed on the altar of Misandrist/PC/Feminist/SJW propaganda. 2 out of 10 Stars for the technical aspects.