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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:I read an interesting take that the movie really does a good job of trading on some of a parents worst fears. Namely removing the safety net of a child( and the father) learning from their mistakes. I mean the actor that played the son does a great job portraying someone terrified of the world and everything in it, which makes the hunting scenes all the more powerful. Right, but we should be more specific here. Since the opening scene is rather explicitly a dream sequence, it‘s important to examine the logic it establishes. And this logic is that the family is walking in single-file along the train tracks, when a ‘freight train’ leaps from the forest and smacks the kid. In other words, we have a simple train accident with the geography reversed, so that the family becomes (views themselves as) the deadly machine. The kid was merely playing on the tracks, distracted by his new toy - but the fantasy is that the toy caused the train to appear and... attack him? (This is why the kid is ‘dumb enough’ to light up the toy in spite of all the warnings, as it happens.) So threat in all subsequent scenes is not actually ‘monsters attracted to sound’, but carelessness, and the film consequently functions as a feature-length version of the cabin scene in Final Destination 1 - the scene where a paranoid Alex tries to ‘cheat death’ by isolating himself in a meticulously-padded house, moving with incredible care so that nothing can ever hurt him. The point of the silence in this film, for the characters, is actually just the carefulness itself - the formality that turns the dinner into something like a Japanese tea ceremony. It’s a prolonged ritual of mourning, which raises the question of why there are even monsters. Anyways, the fact that the opening scene is Reagan’s dream accounts for the fact that everyone is silent and speaking in sign language. And this also accounts for the impact of the toy’s sound: she never actually heard this noise, of course, but it’s a noise that’s nonetheless ‘in her head’ - that only she can hear. That’s why we get a brief flashback to the shuttle when Reagan’s implant first malfunctions. It’s linking the sound of the toy to the feedback noise, so that her trauma becomes a source of empowerment and so-on. We get that “swing away” moment where the kid’s stupid last words are reinterpreted as some kind of prophetic statement. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Apr 11, 2018 |
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Apr 11, 2018 19:35
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Capri Sun Tzu posted:The settings are superficially similar, rural area + aliens, but thats where the similarity ends imo Nah, it’s Signs minus Shyamalan’s fun idiosyncrasies (or, frankly, his superior direction). You have all the same religious analogy, the not-really-apocalyptic setting, and the final confrontation against a humanoid alien that’s a metaphor for grief is staged in pretty much the same way. The self-consciously ‘Spilebergian’ touch of never showing the creatures clearly until the end is much closer to Shyamalan’s style than, say, what JJ Abrams did with Super 8.
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Apr 11, 2018 21:39
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bessantj posted:Man, I ruined this for myself. I started wondering how do they generate electricity? and if the creatures get that flowing water is nothing to attack can they train the creatures by setting up a constant noise somewhere? and the way the creatures reacted to noise seemed inconsistent and I became nit-picky. Wish I could go back and give it another chance as it has been getting such good reviews. I did think the acting was very good, Millicent Simmonds especially did superbly. Well the answer again is that it’s a fantasy film about evil spirits that haunt a grieving family. If they have electricity, it should be trivially easy to set up some wifi and give everybody a cellphone for texting. They don’t do this because the ritualistic behaviour serves as a sort of prayer that keeps the spirits at bay.
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Apr 11, 2018 23:48
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Quiet Place is actually part of the Reign Of Fire multiverse.
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Apr 12, 2018 03:34
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bushisms.txt posted:What are the others? I can’t think of too many other fantasy movies that are as cavalier about the premise being like “this world is exactly like ours except death angels (or dragons) have inexplicably appeared and started systematically killing people”. You do get a very similar approach to creature design - using sci-fi stylings to ‘legitimize’ goofy mythical creatures - in The Cave and Hallow, though.
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Apr 12, 2018 05:02
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It’s actually pretty important to ask what kind of apocalypse this is. Since the dead kid plot is so bog standard, the most/only interesting part of the film is the repeated emphasis on this being a financial apocalypse. Dude’s trying to maintain his own medical stuff, mom’s sewing replacement pieces for the monopoly board, doing laundry by hand because the machine doesn’t work anymore, etc. Poverty is a more plausible monster than the Death Angels.
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Apr 12, 2018 14:56
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Wandle Cax posted:One of the reasons this film is so good is the way it efficiently establishes its rules and doesn't over explain what's happening. So of course it will attract the dumbest of nitpicks that are missing the point entirely. How these people are able to enjoy any film is beyond me The issue is that the film does not establish the actually-important rules, like that the hypersensitivity of the angels is ‘just’ a metaphor for the father’s rage issues - e.g. the jump-scare when he forcibly grabs the daughter when she tries to tiptoe into his man-cave. Why is she forbidden to enter? The only explanation is that he cherishes his computers more than anything else; they provide him an escape and without them he would just give up. The list of crossed-off radio frequencies is a countdown to when he loses it completely. One of the main images of the film is of the son begging for forgiveness after a minor infraction. There’s a logic of “I can’t play too loud because even the tiniest noise pains my father.” And of course that means consequences for him as well. (The monsters act blindly and put up an armoured shell, but they’re really weak on the inside, get it?) The ending makes no sense at all unless you’re following the metaphor of how the father picks up an axe and allows his demons to overtake him, and then his wife has to shoot this killer in the face.
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Apr 15, 2018 17:49
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Capri Sun Tzu posted:Just because its a monster movie doesnt insulate it from criticism but I think you have to get on board with IT'S SOUND! to talk about the other merits (or lack of merits) the movie has. The main issue is that there's not really much reason for the movie to use silence as a plot device, when the actual narrative is about an uneasy coexistence with these capricious aliens that are largely benign but prone to explosive outbursts of violence. The silence gimmick gives the creatures clear rules that they must follow, when it would be more sensible to have the creatures go into rage for no apparent reason. Like the characters have no idea exactly what will trigger them. The Monsters films do a very good job with this. When you encounter a bear in the woods, you're encountering an otherness - you don't know exactly how it's going to react. What is the bear thinking? What is it like to be a bear? The death angels, on the other hand, act as simple mechanisms. They can't even differentiate between a heartbeat and TV static. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Apr 16, 2018 |
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Apr 16, 2018 17:45
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Sir Kodiak posted:You've misidentified the anxieties of the L.L.Bean set. The preppy work-at-home engineer isn't afraid of the unknowable other. He's terrified that the rules of the system he lives in have become so strict and unforgiving that he can barely afford to exhale. I was talking about the financial subtext before, but that's represented by the cutting-off of communication - the increasing distance from the neighbors, the inability to reach a hospital, etc. (See the struggle to acquire prescription drugs for their child in the opening scene.) The creatures are 'just' rage-monster byproducts. One actually-good version of A Quiet Place is 28 Weeks Later.
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Apr 16, 2018 18:22
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Sir Kodiak posted:Nah, that ignores too many details of the creatures. They're part of the mechanism that enforces the protagonists' quiet lifestyle. Make too many waves and you end up with angry black creatures with big ears vandalizing your house and terrorizing your wife and kids. There’s little or nothing evocative of the cops/feds. As the title implies, the family’s isolation is largely self-imposed: they’ve sequestered themselves in a quiet place because the outside world is ‘simply too much for them’. (The Shyamalan film this most resembles, after Signs, is The Village.) This is where we get into the ideological critique of the film. Remember, the imagery at the end is that the overbearing/abusive father sheds his humanity, transforms into the monster, and is then eliminated. This is why the characters are suddenly quite happy shortly after dad got murked. Quiet Place is a basic therapeutic narrative where the characters overcome their trauma - eliminating their demons, returning to normalcy, etc. And, as K.Waste noted earlier, this is also specifically presented as an Aliens-style conflict between the female characters and Patriarchy. The film is ideologically liberal. And there is nothing anticapitalist in its logic. Quite the opposite: the financial apocalypse stems from the father’s personal failings. They’re trapped in poverty because of his oversensitivity, his inability to survive in the real world. He couldn’t overcome his issues, couldn’t provide for his family, and the remaining characters can thrive now that they’re free of his influence.
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Apr 19, 2018 05:49
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Max22 posted:he drops the axe though Right; the metaphor is that dad is split between his human side and his monstrous side. The human side surrenders to the monster. Jim, the human, is characterized throughout as a standup guy - “it’s not dad’s fault; it’s just that his demons are making him do things.” This is how the film, even up to the end, reconciles Jim’s final declaration of love for his family with the whole prior runtime of everyone walking on eggshells around him, living under a vague spectre of violence that culminates in the threat of axe-murder. Put it in the Parker Bros. Cinematic Universe: Don’t Wake Daddy.
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Apr 19, 2018 22:15
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Unoriginal Name posted:The movie opens with a monster erupting at the sound of a child's toy, a toy that Daddy took away because it was too loud. Exactly: as mentioned earlier, the opening scene is Rachel’s dream in which her memory of the past is coloured by her present conditions. If we were to see the scene ‘objectively’, it would just be a kid at the drugstore pestering his dad for a new toy. But minor events like Jim being annoyed by his loud kid are now, retroactively, loaded with import. Why does the brother in the memory talk of escaping? Of course, in the logic of the dream, he’s talking about ‘demons’. But we know by the end that he’s conspiring with his sister to escape this home.
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Apr 20, 2018 01:54
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Max22 posted:This was made with Michael Bay’s money, if there’s a hidden subtext it probably isn’t “the patriarch protecting his good American nuclear family from foreign invaders is secretly evil” That’s a very obvious misreading of both the film and these posts. The father is not ‘secretly evil’ but merely bad in a banal way. And there is no invasion in the film. The creatures don’t come from anywhere; they simply are there. They have no motivation. They‘ve allegedly spent nearly two years leaping through cornfields nonstop. They don’t eat, don’t reproduce, and can’t die. They never evolved. This is not a science fiction movie. It’s a fantasy movie. And the question with any fantasy movie is whose fantasy we’re talking about.
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Apr 20, 2018 08:34
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Even an apple falling off a tree and hitting the ground is loud enough to scare the poo poo out of someone who isn't used to it. This is important to stress that the film does not depict 500 days of apocalypse; the entire thing takes place over the course of the two days following a dream. So the answer to the question of how they silently harvested food is that they didn’t. It shows that the film isn’t conducive to being read as science fiction; it’s easy to imagine a true science-fiction film about noise pollution - fictionalized, in an inverted sort of way, as a silence pollution. Why not creatures that block or cancel out sound waves, generating a literal aura of silence?
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Apr 28, 2018 01:08
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The creatures look as they do because dad spends half the day staring at an illustration of a dissected human head.
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May 7, 2018 15:58
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