I decided to see what all the hype was about and check out A Quiet Place, a movie about a family trying to survive a world where creatures hunt by sound.
I enjoyed the fact that you actually saw the monsters. They weren’t these blurry objects that moved around and you might catch a glimpse of an arm. Or all you ever “saw” of the creatures were thumps and hissing noises.
The creatures looked pretty awesome. They definitely looked like something out of a nightmare. My problem with them was they had the typical long, thin, blade-like arms and legs that seem to be trending in the monster world. They also had the retractable/opening face and the teeth looked they were too big for their mouth. But I loved how they moved like wild animals; and when they moved slowly in order to sneak or hunt, it just added to the creep-factor.
Even though there were many stereotypical horror movie moments, such as the monster in the room with the baby, there is one thing that made this movie stand out: the people weren’t complete idiots. They still did stupid things, but reasonably stupid given the situation, for the most part (minus the mother not taking care of the exposed nail and the daughter having temper tantrums while killer monsters are attacking).
I did find it a bit hard to shallow that the mother wasn’t more concerned for the daughter once the creatures attacked the home. But at the same time, she was about to have a baby.
Another feature that made A Quiet Place different from other movies was the jump-scares. Normally, you can tell something scary is about to happen because it’ll get quiet or the music will change; but when the movie is already quiet, you can’t tell if it’s normal quiet or jump-scare quiet. I found myself jumping at things I normally wouldn’t have.
And since the movie was quiet, I could hear the noises from around the theater and from outside it. So any time someone would shift in their seat or someone in the lobby would say something, I’d jump about ten feet.
My last main problem with the movie was them taking so long to figure out the monsters’ weakness. I thought that this weakness would have been exploited pretty early on. But, I figured that by the time people learned the creatures hunted by sound, the monsters had become too much of a problem for armies and such to get coordinated.
All in all, the movie was a great horror movie. It had lots of scares, some spooky looking villains, and even a bit of hope for survival. The characters seemed smart but not so much that the plot never happened. I felt like the characters had a chance to survive but not so much that I felt like it wasn’t tense.
I’d give A Quiet Place a 4.7/5.
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