A Quiet Place - Day One

Frodo, Bag In!

A Quiet Place - Day One
Directed by Michael Sarnoski
USA 2024
Paramount
UK cinema cut.

Warning: This one has all the those quiet spoilers.

Yeah, okay. This is surprisingly good.

I say surprisingly because A Quiet Place - Day One doesn’t include any of the main characters from the first two films and neither does John Krasinski, who played the father/husband in the original, write and direct here (although he does share a production credit). There is one character common with the second movie but... yeah, I’ll get to the problem that causes in a minute.

So this one is a prequel, starting in the same hours as the opening flashback on the second movie (reviewed by me here). And running over the course of a couple of days (so, trade description act people... it's not just Day One!). 

Lupita Nyong'o plays Samira, a young poet who is dying from some kind of disease, who has to wear pain patches to keep herself comfortable. She has a cat named Frodo, which she jokingly refers to as a ‘service cat’ (and who spends the entire film either running around by itself, on Samira’s lead or sometimes, in her ‘I Love NY’ bag). When the hospice Samira is staying at pays a visit to a New York theatre, as the show is finishing, the sound sensitive, blind aliens set up in the first film land and destroy New York City.

A new survivor acquaintance of Lupita, Eric, played by Joseph Quinn wants to get off to the docks somehow (all the bridges have been bombed to contain the creatures, who you’ll remember from the second installment, can’t swim) where evacuations are taking place. Samira just wants to get pizza and so Eric accompanies her. Also in the movie is the same character who was played by Djimon Hounsou towards the end of the second movie.

Now there are mostly positive things to be said about this movie and, as I’d heard, it’s a pretty intense piece which doesn’t let the original (reviewed here) or the sequel down in any way. And, if anything, there’s even less plot and character development in this one than the other two parts. In fact, this one is truly a full-on example of the survival horror/sci-fi genre at its purest, in that it’s mostly just about following the characters as they try to stay alive. It’s also excruciatingly suspenseful and, even in the last half an hour or so, manages to get fairly moving as the film plays out.

There are, however, a couple of problems with it and I’ll get into those in just a second but, congratulations for a film which deliberately (one assumes) sets up a cliché but then manages to never play the obvious card that comes with it. And that’s the cat. In the first movie you had the fear that the newborn baby wouldn’t stay silent. In this one, the air of suspense is built around Frodo the cat. I was, and I’m sure this is the case for all audiences, expecting the cat to let out a ‘yowl’ at least once, to inadvertently notify the giant bug aliens where the humans are. And to the credit of the writers here... it never hits that expected point. I mean, sure, the cat often goes off by itself and gets people into trouble when they are pursuing him but, they never once play the seemingly inevitable miaow moment with the feline companion. Which is refreshing.

That leaves two problems of very early telegraphing which, alas, can’t be overlooked. One is the problem of having Djimon Hounsou in this... which is even given away in the trailer and therefore gives you some idea of how the film will end. Since his character can’t be killed because he’s alive in the second movie (for most of his screen time in that film), you kinda know this film is going to end up with him and whoever is with him surviving to be able to find the island retreat he has set up in the second one. And, yup, sure enough...

The other problem is the character of Samira. By her own  admission she’s not getting any better and is expecting to die at some point soon. So this would trigger most audiences into realising she’s going to deliberately sacrifice herself to save someone else by the end of the film. Because why have that character survive if she’s toast anyway? And, yeah, sure enough...

But, is has to be said, these two big spoilers that are implied to the audience very early on don’t really hurt the film any. And, as I indicated at the start of this review, A Quiet Place - Day One is a pretty good movie with some nicely put together set pieces that worked pretty well with this audience member (even though the audience on a Saturday at my local cinema for this one was limited to just four people... so I don’t know what happened there). So if fairly well put together survival horror with a science fiction bent is your thing, then this one is definitely up your street. 

The 355

Mission Inevitable

The 355
USA/China 2022
Directed by Simon Kinberg
Universal Pictures

Warning: Spoilers.

Well, they’ve been promising a female version of The Expendables, in terms of a powerhouse female action movie for some time now but never came through and so it was inevitable that something would pop up to fill that void and, this year’s attempt at that vacancy so far is The 355. Originally it was shot in a different form with some slightly changed characters as a TV pilot for a series that was never picked up (and I assume the pilot was never shown?). But now it’s a big budget movie and it’s got a stellar cast of credible looking, very smart actresses to take on the roles of the five main heroines of the movie...

There’s US secret agent lady Mace, played by the always brilliant Jessica Chastain. Her former opponent (from the early parts of the movie), German agent Marie, played by the wonderful Diane Kruger. There’s Mace’s friend in British intelligence, cyber expert Khadijah, played in a wonderfully British upper middle class way by Lupita Nyong'o. There’s ‘getting caught up in something she doesn’t belong in’ Spanish psychiatrist Graciela, played by the legendary Penélope Cruz and, finally, there’s ‘is she an enemy or is she an ally?’ agent Lin, played by Bingbing Fan.

So, five powerhouse actresses who, for the most part, seem a little wasted in likeable roles, to be honest, in a fairly entertaining... if unsurprising... film. Yeah, about that...

While I enjoyed the movie just fine, it’s very formulaic... like a lot of stuff coming out of Hollywood these days. It doesn’t matter, in a way, that the actresses are all so good in their roles because, frankly, there are two elements here which hamstring the movie quite badly.

One is the script.

One character played by Sebastian Stan, Mace’s partner, gets killed off very early in the movie. It happens off screen and a body is not shown. So, yeah, if you believe that character’s just left the movie, well... you’ve not seen many movies. Secondly, because Mace’s boss tells her that he’d died... if you go with your gut and assume the former character is not dead, you’ll know how credible an ally her boss is so, again, when he’s killed by ‘enemy presence’ Lin, it also kind of points to her really being one of the ‘good gals’ all along. So, unfortunately, it’s a film which has ‘reveals’ that unravel very quickly before they’re even declared, as each is set up like a little row of Matryoshka dolls unmasking the whole plot development before the movie has even properly started. So in terms of surprises... nothing to see here folks, move along.

The other thing that disappoints is that it feels like it’s an 18 rated movie that’s been gutted like a fish to bring it down to an age rating where kids can go and see it. Take just the fight scene elements, for example... they’re filmed in a vicious, brutal, hard hitting manner but you never really see any hard hitting gore or, for example, bullet shots to the head or body squibs etc... nor any stabbing highlighted. It’s like a 1970s Marvel comic in that respect and... I’ve got nothing against that for sure, I like that stuff... but this feels like the wrong venue to be playing those kind of ‘softening games’ considering the cold war backdrop of a group of rogue agents trying to obtain a hard drive which would mean the end of everything, if in the wrong hands, very quickly. The film is trying to be a cold war, secret agent movie but it feels like it keeps pulling its punches. My guess is, it was filmed as something with a higher rating and then cut down by the studio to reduce the likelihood of actually getting that rating. The same with the lack of nudity and intimacy in the one sex scene too... the tone felt off. Now, I may be wrong in what’s happened at final cut here but, heck, that’s what it feels like and that element of it didn’t do the film any favours, in my estimation.

But, regardless, the film does have the five lead actresses as it’s ace in the hole. All of them look like they could do what they are doing and it lends the movie an air of credibility it may have found tough achieving with some lesser artists in the roles. The cinematography and editing is also nicely done. Nothing too interesting in terms of shot design but I did like the subtle shifts in the colour palette between certain sections of the film, at it least subtle but most gorgeous when the girls turn up in Morocco and everything turns into whites with washed out yellows, browns and oranges. Nice stuff. And the editing didn’t get in the way of things really... just softened it a little due to, what I suspect, were deliberate omissions to that all important final cut. You certainly knew where you were in a fire fight though and it brings a certain clarity to the combat scenes where, again, a lot of modern Hollywood movies just bring confusion.

More confusing are such unanswered questions such as, how can Khadijah set the girls up with special spy equipment half way through the movie when they have no resources and are all on the run? Or, how can Khadijah’s boyfriend know it’s her calling him on the phone when we’ve already seen her smash up her phone so it can’t be traced earlier in the movie, so she surely wouldn’t have the same number?

So, all said and done, The 355 is an entertaining action movie and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes those things, with the caveat that the audience will see everything coming long before it actually is revealed in the story. There’s a nicely sinister and ruthless villain portrayed rather well by Jason Flemyng who is kinda wasted and thrown away at the end so, yeah, that doesn’t really help the movie either but he turns in a strong performance here, so there’s that. All in all, a nice looking film but, if you really want to see an absolutely amazing female action movie, then maybe you should steer yourself towards last year’s excellent Gunpowder Milkshake (reviewed here), which is far more innovative, surprising and much more interesting than this one. But, The 355 is an okay action movie and better than many cranked out these days, for sure.