Escape from New York

From the beginning the A Quiet Place franchise has worked off one very strong concept: what if you couldn’t make any noise? An alien invasion comes, the aliens operate purely on sound, hearing everything, and now humanity has to deal with super powerful aliens that are seemingly invulnerable to damage all while losing something essential to themselves. Humans aren’t great at being quiet, we basically thrive on noise. We find silence unsettling. So suddenly we had a world presented to us that goes against our fundamental nature that is always going to feel unsettling to us. It’s quite powerful.

It certainly made for a good movie. A Quiet Place focused on a single family that has been living in this (essentially) post-apocalyptic world for a couple of years. Their fight to survive, their struggles living together, make for some very powerful drama. The film isn’t perfect, with a number of details about the life of this family that only really work if you don’t think too hard about everything. The first film really works well on vibes, on just being dumped in the middle of this world and forced to explore it from the inside. You’re dropped in, experiencing it and learning the world as you go, and it feels very real and very heady. But, again, it’s more powerful weapon is surprise, not forcing you to really think things through because it’s just one film, one slice of a moment in a larger picture.

I think that’s a primary reason why the sequel, A Quiet Place Part II, doesn’t work as well. We’re no longer in a single slice, we’re not back with the story seeing what’s next. The surprise, the mystery of the world, that sense of horror and wonder exploring it is lost the second you’re forced back into it. A Quiet Place was so successful, making $341 Mil off a tiny $17 Mil budget, that sequels were inevitable, but there was absolutely no way for any sequel to recapture that magic. And the same goes double for a prequel as well.

A Quiet Place: Day One is a prequel to everything, taking place on the very first day of the alien invasion, showing us what happens when the aliens arrive. Now, you may be sitting there going, “didn’t we already see this in A Quiet Place Part II,” and the answer is yes, we did, but that was from the perspective of the original family, the Abbotts, and it was a short vignette before the action picked back up in the “present” for our characters. A Quiet Place: Day One shows us the same timeframe from the perspective of a different character, in a different part of the U.S. it’s an interesting idea since, in theory, it allows us to view the alien apocalypse from a whole new lens. Except, while the film changes the perspective of the story, it’s starting to feel like the franchise doesn’t have all that much new to say.

The film comes to us from the perspective of Samira (Lupita Nyong'o), a cancer patient living in hospice. Sam had very little time left, maybe days or weeks, and she spends most of her time hanging out with her support cat, Frodo (played by two cats, Nico and Schnitzel), and occasionally writing very angry poetry (she was a professional poet before the cancer came). Her steady wait for death is interrupted, though, when her friend, and nurse, Reuben (Alex Wolff), convinces her to go ingo New York City for a show, to which she agrees so long as they also stop for a proper New York slice of pizza on the way back.

The show comes to an abrupt halt, though, when the aliens attack. Suddenly the van full of dying people has to try and get out of the city, a task it fails. Sam finds herself in the middle of the ruins of NYC, nowhere near the hospice facility. So she decides to head back to her old apartment in the city and then, as a dying wish for herself, find one last viable slice of pizza. But while she’s out, walking the city with her cat, she ends up meeting Eric (Joseph Quinn) and finding a friend. And it just might be possible, in this city that’s dying, in her life that’s dying, she can find a little something to bring her joy before she meets whatever end is coming.

Making Samira our perspective character is an interesting choice, and one I do respect. Because she’s dying, her adventure is colored differently than anyone else we’ve seen so far. This isn’t a fight for survival for Sam the way it is for the other characters we’ve known. Sam doesn’t really have much hope for herself since she’s got terminal cancer. Even if she were to somehow escape the city she’s only still have maybe weeks left before she dies anyway. Dying to the aliens isn’t that much different than dying of cancer. It might even be faster. So for her the journey is about getting her last few tasks done before she meets her death.

Credit where it’s due, that does make this a more personal story in certain ways. Sam isn’t like the Abbotts. She’s not trying to figure out how to keep a family going, how to see this through for another year. She cares about her cat, but if anything, this film shows that Frodo is actually pretty resilient and could take care of himself in this world of aliens if he had to. So that part of the equation is different. We can become invested in her story in its own way and be with her to celebrate the time she has left. That’s effective.

The issue with this film, though, is that it’s far less effective with all of its other beats. Because we’ve already sat through two of these films before this prequel we already know all the tricks the films have to scare us. There is only so much tension that can be garnered from yet another film where people have to be quiet lest any noise they make summons a jump-scare monster. It worked really well in the first film, less effectively in the second, and it feels like old hat now. And because this film is a prequel it can’t even reveal that much new about the aliens, or give them new tricks to perform, because that would break the established continuity for the creatures we already know.

And then there’s Eric. He follows Sam around because after nearly dying himself (from drowning) he sees her cat and latches on, finding the animal to be something like a touchstone to make him calmer. But otherwise, Eric is much like the other characters we already know from this series, another survivor trying to make it through the apocalypse so he can find a way to carry on into something like a brighter future. He doesn’t feel that interesting or special, outside of his interactions with Sam, and it feels like the only reason he’s here is to give her someone to communicate with. Well that and maybe to have someone to take care of Frodo after she’s gone.

That’s the weird thing about this story: Sam’s fate, whatever it may be, is a foregone conclusion. While the film tries to give us Eric to worry about, we’re far more interested and invested in Sam because she has a story we haven’t seen before. We know she’s going to die, the question is more how and when than why. As such, we really want to see what happens to her but we don’t care all that much about everything else around her. A Quiet Place: Day One is at its most affecting when it focuses on Sam and lets her journey play out. But whenever it falls back on the standard beats of the franchise it falters and gets stale.

I like this world that’s been crafted for the A Quiet Place franchise, and I think the first film of this series was a tense and taught sci-fi thriller. But now, three films in, the cracks are really starting to show in the formula. We’ve seen these scares, we’ve experienced this world. At this point we’re going to need something really special for the upcoming three-quel, and if that film can’t deliver, well… that just might be it for the viability of this film series.