Stupid movie

While I was waiting for it to get dark so I could run my disappointing experiment, I walked down to the local theater to see A Quiet Place: Day One.

My short summary: my god, this was a stupid movie.

Here’s the premise: a meteor shower drops a swarm of alien animals on Manhattan, which proceed to run wild and kill everyone. That’s not much of plot, I know, but the monsters are really, really stupid. They’re big and vicious and fast, but they don’t have eyes, and not even the dimmest sense of sight — people shine flashlights on their faces and they don’t respond. But make a noise, and these gnarly sensors open up on their head and they bolt towards the source. That’s the different feature of these monsters: they can’t see you, but you better not make a sound or they’ll kill you.

The problem is that they’re not particularly good at hearing. They don’t have echolocation or anything particularly sensitive, they just respond to ordinary, human-perceptible noises. Drop a book, they’re on you. Shout, and they attack. Walk quietly on the debris-covered streets, they don’t notice you. They’re not bats, that have a highly evolved sensory ability, they’re more like psychopathic grade school teachers with claws and teeth that will murder you if you don’t keep quiet during study hall.

And then, their response is stupid. They charge blindly at any source of sound and attack it. A car alarm goes off — a stratagem used more than once by the protagonists — and monsters will run from blocks away to jump on the car and flail at it. This behavior and their extremely crude sensory capacity raises many unanswered questions.

How did these pathetic brutes evolve? What kind of environment did they come from? One where all kinds of radiation was blocked or limited, so deep underground or an opaque atmosphere? They could hear, but that’s it, and they relied on obvious sound cues to find prey…not able to detect stealthy movement, but their prey need to make a loud squeak to be noticed.

And what kind of hunting/prey capture strategy is that, to blindly run at any sound, especially in a cluttered, dangerous environment like the ruins of New York? There should be dead, wrecked aliens impaled on fence posts and razor wire and traffic signs and spiky debris everywhere. Also, one fortified bunker, a couple of .30 cal machine guns, and you would have endless waves of monsters throwing themselves against the racket and getting shredded by the defenders.

They arrived in a meteor shower that did the initial destruction, exploding and smashing and punching holes in buildings. Why weren’t they deafened by all that noise? Wasn’t this a terrible delivery method for dropping off creatures that respond to noise?

Why? Why have an alien invasion that involved dumping a lot of stupid, cripplingly limited animals on a city? Who is doing this, because these were not intelligent aliens, who could make even idiotic space ships that exploded during landing?

There was also some pathos-filled story involving Lupita Nyong’o, a random stranger who was following her around, and an imperturbable cat, but I was so annoyed by the stupidity of the premise that I couldn’t care. Hey, Hollywood: next time you want to put out a science fiction/horror movie, the first step is to get writers who can assemble a coherent, intelligent premise. You spent $70 million on this sloppy trash, the writers working before you spend millions on expensive acting talent and sets and special effects are the cheapest part of the process, so get that bit right before the budget explodes.