Cinema Snark: A Quiet Place needs to STFU

I've decided that based on my previous experience working at Blockbuster in high school (shut up, yes, I'm old) as well as my talent for writing that I am now a movie critic. Behold my first review of one of the worst movies that I've ever seen.

Have you ever seen a movie that makes you so mad? Not because it depicted historical injustices (although I did want to punch some Nazis after Schindler's List), but because you allowed yourself to go see it?

Welcome to my world and the morning-after regret that follows a nighttime showing of The Quiet Place.

I seriously created an account on Rotten Tomatoes just so that I could vent about the two hours of my life that I can't get back. If you took the highlight reel for Signs, then you’ve pretty much seen all you need to.

SPOILER ALERT: This absolute travesty of a film opens in an abandoned small town in Vermont (or someplace like that- wherever there’s trees, dairy farms, and white people who are into home births). From the get-go, we learn that the aliens/monsters/whatever crappy leftover CGI rejects these things are supposed to be can only hear sound as the family’s youngest child quickly becomes alien snack food. (I’m going to assume that they’re aliens because they look a lot like the aliens from Alien.)

The remaining family consists of a man that looks suspiciously like my douchebag ex-boyfriend Joe (if he had a beard out of necessity and not just as a means to attract random Scottsdale basics), so we’ll call him Joe. (That’s right, this plot was so vapid that we don’t even know the lead characters’ names.) Joe has a pregnant wife (because apparently, despite being the last remaining people on earth, there were no condoms- and hey, who wouldn’t want to have a baby in an apocalypse?), a ten-year-old (ish) son, and a 12-year-old (ish) daughter who is deaf. I’m guessing that the family’s knowledge of sign language was one of the few reasons that they survived over a year after the attack/event/lab accident/invasion/whatever.

(Seriously, the movie doesn’t even explain that.)

The movie is 99% silent, which is literally one of its only redeeming features because when the family members do talk, the dialogue more closely resembles a Hallmark movie of the week than an bargain bin M. Night Shymalan rip off.

(At least M. Night Shymalan knew to just make cameos in his film rather than star in them and bring on his boring-ass wife as well.)

We don’t what these creatures are or where they came from despite Joe’s vast collection of newspapers that were printed up in the end days before everyone else in the world died. (Or maybe Joe and his wife were so insufferable, the refugee camp didn’t let them in.)

While Joe spends absolutely no time attempting to soundproof his home, he does spend a vast amount of time tinkering with electronics trying to get his daughter’s hearing aid to work. He gives her one that she thinks is broken, but she wears it anyways around him- sort of like when my dad bought me a sweatshirt from Pat O’Brian’s in New Orleans (sorry dad).    

After suffering in silence for about 60 minutes, Joe and his son go to fish and his wife goes into labor in a matter of under an hour. Joe’s son creates a noise diversion and the baby is born. Because they don’t want their fourth child to also become an alien snack, they put it in an oxygen-rich soundproof box, which mutes the baby’s crying so the aliens can’t hear it. (I would like to propose this box be installed on all airplanes immediately- maybe oxygenate the overhead bins. United, I’m looking at you.)

So a lackluster, halfhearted alien battle ensues and long story short, it turns out that the girl’s hearing aid is at some high frequency and messes with the aliens’ hearing, throwing off their equilibrium. Or whatever. I literally just made that up because the movie doesn’t explain it.

Then, and I kid you not, the wife, who has proved absolutely useless up until this point, takes an old Remington 12-gauge pump action shotgun and blows the alien’s head off with one bullet.

Shooting the aliens! Oh. My. God. WHY DIDN’T ANYONE THINK OF THIS BEFORE!?!?

Clearly these aliens didn’t invade any red states.

Apparently, the entire nation’s military and scientific intelligence communities never thought to a) mess with their hearing, or b) I don’t know…SHOOT THEM?

Conclusion: The best part of the whole move was the previews.

Snark-0-meter: a quarter of a star because at least it was only 90 minutes long.