Okay, so my wife and I watched A QUIET PLACE on Netflix night. The movie had me holding my breath for almost an hour and a half. Creating a situation where the actors weren’t allowed to speak really ratcheted the tension up. In fact, the couple of scenes where the actors DID speak kind of diluted it for me.
Okay, so I don’t want to spoil anything – but let me give you a quick rundown. There’s a family living in a house in the woods. There are monsters that will come and eat you until you’re dead, only they can’t see or smell you, they just track by any sounds that you make. So this family has learned to go barefoot and sneaky and make trails covered with sand because is great for sneaking on. There are other families out there, but everybody is way too busy with trying to be sneaky and quiet and trying to stay alive to be bothered with getting together.
That’s about the size of the whole movie. If you want to know more go watch the freaking thing, in a dark living room and try and keep a lid on your conversation. You’ll enjoy it better that way.
Trust me.
Now, I always like to take a peek over at IMDB.com after I have watched a movie, just to see what other folks have to say in their reviews.
I was a little surprised to see how split the opinions were on this movie. At least half of the reviewers felt the movie was dull and boring and did not make sense.
They kept asking questions like –
“Why didn’t they live by the river, where they could talk all they wanted to?”
Shit, I don’t know, maybe because their house wasn’t actually built BESIDE a river, and they were way too busy trying to stay alive and uneaten to bother building a brand new house.
I mean, have you ever tried to QUIETLY hammer a nail into a two by four?
“Where did the monsters come from?”
Shit, I don’t know, from Mars? From under the ground? Global warming? From out of Donald Trump’s ass? Who the hell cares? They are freaking monsters, doing monstery things like eating people and such. Go and Google “scary freaking monsters that eat you dead if you talk out loud or even get a bad case of repeating farts” if you really feel that you have to know where they came from.
“How can a shotgun kill a monster when the army couldn’t do it?”
Shit, I don’t know. Maybe the original attack happened fast enough to kill a whole bunch of the monsters and even more of the army. Maybe the US government was still shutdown and the army couldn’t get their asses together fast enough to do something about it. I definitely know that the government most likely fell pretty quickly. Most politicians that I have ever met couldn’t stop talking if it were a matter of life and death.
I mean, just stop and picture it. A bunch of those monsters are descending upon the House of Parliament and the Senate stands up and says something stupid like “Can’t we negotiate with you instinct-driven, giant-ear-listening, man-woman-and-raccoon eating monsters?” right before the monsters have themselves a political all-the-hot-air-and meat-you-can-eat buffet.
“Where were they getting their electricity from?”
All right, so I freaking wondered a bit about that myself. I mean, they had computers and security monitors and everything was running fine. I know that it wasn’t a generator, because generators generally make a shit-ton of noise when you run them. I suppose it might have been batteries or maybe they had the Energizer Bunny strapped to an energy-sucking slab in the basement. I mean, shit, everybody has got an energy-sucking slab in their house, don’t they?
I know that I do.
I call it a couch.
But sure, so I wondered about that but I told myself to just turn my brain the hell off for a while and just enjoy the freaking movie. I mean, I didn’t stop and wonder why Lon Chaney turned into a werewolf when the moon came up. I didn’t wonder if lightning bolts could REALLY reanimated stitched-up corpses when old Doc Frankenstein made himself a monster. Hell, I didn’t even stop and wonder why he needed to stitch things together instead of just starting out with a freshly-killed body. Maybe he just wanted to brush up on his cross-stitching.
It is a freaking horror movie.
It isn’t a documentary.
Do you hear David Attenborough or Morgan Freeman saying something along the lines of “Now the giant freaking triple-jointed man-eating big ear monster came crashing out of the fucking woods and ate all of senators in existence – including the Washington Senators who were by now calling themselves the Minnesota Twins which didn’t fool the big ear monsters one little bit because, come on, you don’t really think that giant man-woman-and-children eating monsters can READ, do you?
Just stop thinking so hard, will you?
Turn off your freaking brain and let it wash over you.
I enjoyed the hell out of A QUIET PLACE.
That’s all I’ll say.
I watch monster movies to get the hell away from reality. If I wanted reality I’d watch the news – which makes even LESS sense than any giant freaking big ear monster movie you care to mention.
Yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
YOURS IN STORYTELLING... 