On June 28, 2024, the American film A Quiet Place. Day One. The authors themselves define its genre as horror and science fiction. It’s about the invasion of Earth by aggressive alien creatures who can’t see anything, but can hear everything incredibly well.
A Quiet Place movie sequence
This is the third film in the A Quiet Place franchise. The first film was released in 2018 and became very popular. It tells the story of a family trying to survive somewhere in the forest. At that time, humanity was almost completely destroyed by spider-like alien creatures that fell to Earth with a meteorite.
The alien predators were completely blind, but they had extremely good hearing, so the main rule was not to make loud noises. This idea, along with the intense plot, captivated the audience so much that they wanted a second part, which was released in 2020 and was a direct sequel to the first film.
And four years later, the producers released A Quiet Place. Day One. The film is essentially a prequel to the first two and tells directly about the events of the alien invasion. The characters in it are completely different. The plot revolves around a young woman, Sam (played by Lupita Nyong’o), who has an incurable disease. She travels to New York to get away from her sad thoughts. At that very moment, a meteorite falls on the city and aliens appear, killing people around them in clouds of dust.
Sam loses consciousness and wakes up in a room where people have hidden from the monsters. This begins her journey through a monster-filled city with her cat and a random man named Eric.
What’s wrong with this movie
Actually, that’s where the good things about the movie end, because overall it doesn’t make a very good impression. Maybe as a horror movie it can scare someone, but overall it’s just boring. We are very slowly introduced to Sam’s story, perhaps trying to show that she has nothing to lose.
Then suddenly there is an explosion and monsters appear. The fact that they fell from outer space and why we need to be quiet is not mentioned anywhere. Obviously, the authors believed that the audience should know this anyway. It has also remained unclear since the first films how the creatures, which are not really spiders at all because they have only four limbs, survived the meteorite fall. After all, at the epicenter of this event, the conditions would have to be quite comparable to a nuclear explosion. In the first films, this was not really revealed, so one might think that alien eggs or larvae were brought to Earth with it. However, in Day One, we are clearly shown adult aliens attacking helpless people immediately after the explosion.
In general, the concept of “one must be silent,” which was a highlight of previous films, begins to play against the narrative in Day One. Theoretically, the audience should have a lot to explain and reflect on, but there is a minimum of dialogues in the film, and therefore it is not clear why we see what is happening on the screen.
For three quarters of the movie, the main character Sam just walks through the city. Not to evacuate with everyone else, but first to her house to get some medicine, and then to a pizza place. Because her general mood is exactly that: to eat something tasty and die. Why she doesn’t go with the rest of the refugees to a place where she can get medicine and food is not explained.
If the authors wanted to evoke sympathy for a terminally ill person who was at the center of the events, they did it in the most clumsy way possible. Because the separate pieces of the story about the pizza, the pianist father, and the notebook with poems do not create a coherent picture of the hero to whom we should empathize.
Can humans be destroyed by blind aliens?
The main idea of the film — blind but extremely dangerous space monsters — deserves special attention. At first glance, this idea is quite scientific. There are indeed plenty of predators in nature that rely on hearing. Take bats, for example, which are able to catch a butterfly in flight by ear alone.
However, the filmmakers forgot that the most active creatures not only listen, but also create sound vibrations themselves. And it is by their echoes that they are guided in the first place.
Without this, it remains unclear how the aliens in the movie would realize that they are facing a glass door of a building or some other obstacle. If we assume that they do emit ultrasonic pulses and orient themselves by their echoes, then their main feature becomes meaningless. It is simply impossible to remain invisible to them at a distance of less than a meter, as shown in the movie.
The aliens would “see” people even when they are not moving, because those creatures that use echolocation when hunting have it specially “sharpened” to distinguish the bodies of living beings from the general background.
In addition, there is an interesting scene in the movie where aliens from a distance of several tens or even hundreds of meters react to the sound of a book falling on the asphalt. But for some reason, they don’t hear the human heartbeat and breathing even when they are standing close to it.
On the other hand, in the Earth’s atmosphere, sound has certain disadvantages over light. Both are vibrations, but light has a higher frequency. Therefore, they are less sensitive to diffraction, and it is much easier to detect small details at a distance with their help.
Instead, it is much easier to make a “radar blip” for someone who uses sound than for someone who sees electromagnetic radiation. It is much easier to hide the sound of hundreds of soldiers’ footsteps behind the roar of tank engines than it is to prevent the enemy from seeing them by blinding them with searchlights.
This brings us to the main question that some viewers had while watching the previous parts: why the army failed to deal with them. Because “spiders” have an advantage over humans only in complete darkness. In daylight, the shooters would have to see them from a distance where the aliens cannot hear them.
If the landing of these creatures had taken place in reality, the military would have first formed a ring around the city, and then started to shrink it, letting civilians pass behind them and shooting the aliens with machine guns and cannons. This would have easily blocked even their advantage in mobility.
But none of this is in the movie. The civilians are simply abandoned and they are walking towards the evacuation point on their own. All this is ridiculous and unrealistic. The scientific truthfulness of the movie is sacrificed to irrational fear.
So, if you like horror movies, you might want to watch A Quiet Place. Day One may be worth watching. But as a science fiction story about an alien invasion, the movie does not deserve to be seen at all.
