A Quiet Place to Nap

Rating: 3/10 (7 April 2018)

A Quiet Place is a movie I've been looking forward to for quite some time. Not just because of the cast and director, but because the concept was so good and the first trailer really sold me on the movie. For the entire length of that trailer it's completely silent (save for the end) and I really loved that. Unfortunately, the movie is more like it's second trailer.
First of all there were good things about this movie. Emily Blunt really shines, and in a way carries the movie. She's the most competent talent in this entire movie, and honestly I don't know if I would've been able to watch the whole thing had she not been there.
I liked the way the movie was paced, how it takes place in real time for the most part. There weren't any cuts where an entire hour or more will go by, the movie just keeps going and doesn't stop. I liked that, it felt more personal. And with the tone of the movie it really did work.
The first scene was good as well, it served to introduce the conflict and the world well and really establish what this movie was going to be tonally. I also really liked the ending. Sure it was totally out of place but it was kind of campy and I liked that.
Despite liking the first scene it also completely ruined the movie. It introduces the fact that there is going to be a lot of music. The movie is full of stock horror movie ambient or otherwise music that completely ruins the tone. If the movie had been dead quiet and all we as the audience could hear was the world and actual characters I might have been closer to the edge of my seat. Every sound would actually mean something and have impact, but the constant soundtrack butting into that silence made sound much less impactful. If the movie had been from the perspective of the deaf daughter entirely that would've made for a pretty dang cool movie too.
Save for Emily Blunt, there is barely a competent actor in this movie. Krasinski clearly tries, but as the movie wears on he slowly starts to give less and less to his portrayal of a character he wrote. It's like his passion for the film was just ebbing away as he realized what he had done. The daughter is usually fine, but she never says anything and her facial expression remains the same from start to finish. The son is just awful. His facial expressions are over-exaggerated and silly looking, and serve only the pull the audience out and remind them that this is just a movie.
The movie tries to establish characters for the first third-ish, but the problem is is that there are no characters. They're just a bunch of flat, one-dimensional beings existing in an empty world. They have no personalities, save for barely visible character tropes. Krasinski is a concerned father, the daughter is a rebellious teenager, the son is a coward but only when the movie calls for it. I understand that the movie was trying to get the audience invested before the non-stop climax that takes up two-thirds of the movie, but the characters need to be people for an audience to care, and I didn't.
In fact, this whole first character bit is incredibly boring. I was constantly fighting off the urge to nod off, and I almost walked out just to wake myself up. Heck, this is probably the only movie I've genuinely considered walking out of the theater for, and it's not even the worst movie I've sat through in theaters. It's just so boring, and the biggest thing it had going for it is quashed in the first scene. Sure the climax is mostly fun, but it takes a while to really get going because of how sleepy I was.
As a whole it's pretty generic too. The directing is nothing to write home about, the scares are often cliches that anyone who's seen a horror movie before will recognize. There's a scene where the characters hear something that sounds like steel plates hitting their roof, and it turns out to be raccoons. Really? A fake-out scare? Don't we have enough of those? And the fact that it sounded like something really heavy hit the roof just shows how amateurish this movie is. It's like the director was about the introduce the monster, then halfway through the scene decided not to but just didn't fix the editing. Way to go.
The monsters bend to the will of plot convenience. They are drawn to sound and have no eyes. It's established in the movie that they are drawn to the loudest sound in a given area. So how do these monster somehow listen through loud rushing water and hear gentle breathing an entire floor below them and be drawn to that. They serve only to drive the plot, and when Krasinski wants to bend the rules he simply does. Unfortunately that's not how to set up an engaging universe, sorry.
Another thing that could easily be a nitpick was Blunt's character being pregnant. It's established early on that this whole apocalypse thing has been happening for well over a year. So what we're expected to believe is that this couple decided to attempt silent unprotected sex and succeeded? First of all, how stupid can you be, and second, how and why? Sure it was supposed to built tension for the plot, but in the grand scheme of things it just doesn't make sense.
The second trailer gives away the entire movie. Part of the reason why I think the first bit was so boring was because we'd seen it all before. The constant dialogue in my head was "and then there'll be a shot of him and then he'll do that and this'll happen and yep, I was right." Honestly you could just watch the second trailer and that's basically the whole movie. I typically try to avoid movie trailers, but when you go to see movies in theaters they're kind of hard to avoid, and I hate to use the marketing as a flaw because oftentimes that's not even something the director actually puts together, but come on. The trailers had to have been approved by someone.
Overall A Quiet Place was terrible. It was probably the most respectful theater I've ever been in (everyone was dead quiet for its entirety), but that really only made it easier to doze off. It's not that I hate John Krasinski, in fact I'm quite happy at how hard he's been trying to establish himself as an actual Hollywood presence outside of 'The Office', and it's great that he got an actual budget to work with for this movie. But he really screwed the pooch with this one. Under a more competent director, this could've been a pretty incredible movie, and who knows? Maybe one day someone else will take this concept and make something of it, but for now, we're left with this total disappointment of a film. In the end I definitely wouldn't recommend it.