Featured Blu-ray and DVD Review: A Quiet Place
July 23, 2018
A Quiet Place - Buy from Amazon: DVD, Blu-ray Combo Pack, or 4K Ultra HD Combo Pack
A Quiet Place was expected to be a box office hit, but very few people thought it would be this big a hit. It pulled in over $300 million on a budget of just $17 million. It had a very interesting hook, but is that all it had? Does it do something with the hook?
This is a hard movie to write a plot summary for, because it’s got a hook that we learn about in a tragic prologue and then the plot is in full gear, complete with spoilers. This makes it difficult to talk about. There’s the setup: In the very near future, the Earth is invaded by aliens and quickly defeated. The movie starts 89 days into the invasion and there’s nothing left of civilization. The aliens are incredibly fast and have hypersensitive hearing. So if you make a noise, you’re dead. So throughout the entire movie, there’s almost no dialogue and very little sound.
The film focuses on one family, the Abbotts. Evelyn, a doctor, and Lee, an engineer, as well as their three kids, Regan, Marcus, and Beau. The family has been able to survive for two main reasons. Firstly, having a doctor and an engineer as parents helps. Secondly, Regan has congenital deafness and the family knew sign language as a result and can communicate silently.
The prologue takes up the first 10 minutes of the movie and I’m not sure I can say much beyond that.
I’m of two minds when it comes to A Quiet Place. On the one hand, it is one of the most tense horror films I’ve ever seen and is rightfully considered a horror masterpiece by many. In this regard, I was hooked right from the beginning. Part of this is due to the fantastic script, but the acting is also top-notch. I’m not surprised someone like Emily Blunt was able to carry such an important role. She’s been acting for more than a decade and has picked up over half a dozen major Awards Season nominations. Millicent Simmonds is more of a surprise, as she’s only in her mid-teens and this is just her second role. She got some Awards Season buzz for Wonderstruck, but she better get a lot more buzz here. (On the downside, A Quiet Place is the wrong genre and it opened way too early in the year to be a serious contender.) Furthermore, if John Krasinski wants to continue directing, he can pick any script he wants. Apparently he was never a fan of horror movies, but that might actually have been an asset, as he brought a fresh approach to the genre.
On the other hand, there’s the ending. One of my pet peeves is when smart people do stupid things in order to move the plot forward. For example, in Interstellar, the planet near the super massive black hole that was dealing with massive time dilation due to their proximity to the black hole. One hour on the planet equals 7 hours back on the space ship or on Earth. Given the serious nature of the mission, and the very real time limit, there’s no way rational people would have gone to that planet. The risk is too much and a delay of several hours on the planet would have resulted in total mission failure. Likewise, and this is a major spoiler, in this movie, the Abbot family learns that the aliens are really sensitive to high frequency sounds. This makes sense, but my question is, how did no one figure this out before? Right now, the American military has sonic weapons, so why weren’t they deployed against these aliens? It’s the first thing I would do, after learning they had hypersensitive hearing and we know from newspaper clippings that was one of the first things we learned about them.
However, this discussion reminds me of Jaws. The ending of Jaws doesn’t work. It is possible for a scuba tank to explode, but only under extremely specific circumstance, which doesn’t include what we saw in the movie. When Steven Spielberg was told by a technical consultant that it wouldn’t happen in real life, Spielberg responded that it didn’t matter. If they had grabbed the attention of the audience, they would play along with the ending. And if they didn’t grab the audience by the ending, nothing they did at that point would change that. So while I watched A Quiet Place the first time, I was hooked and the ending didn’t bother me. It was only after I was writing up my thoughts for this review that the problem came to me. I then started watching the film another time, just to see if this was a serious issue, but I was immediately hooked again. The script is so good and the talent on both sides of the camera so engaging that the logical issues I had with the movie didn’t matter. Even the ending still held up, despite my logical problems with it. This isn’t always the case, so this is a strong selling point.
... Also, “pumping” a pump shotgun just ejects an unfired shell. That trope is so common, complaining about it is pointless.
The only extras are a trio of making of / behind-the-scene featurettes. Creating the Quiet is a 15-minute making of featurette that starts with the script, which was a very unusual script. The Sound of Darkness is a 12-minute featurette that focuses on the sound editing. A Reason for Silence is a 8 minute featurette on the visual effects, specifically the design of the alien. That’s not a lot of extras for a first-run release, especially one that was as big a hit as this one was.
A Quiet Place is an amazing movie that does something truly unique in a genre that’s plagued with copy-cat films. The extras on the DVD, Blu-ray Combo Pack, or 4K Ultra HD Combo Pack are not great compared to its box office numbers, but it is still worth picking up.
Video on Demand
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The Movie
The Extras
The Verdict
Filed under: Video Review, A Quiet Place, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Steven Spielberg, Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds, Cade Woodward