The Fault In Our Star-ship Troopers
By Jonas Schwartz-Owen
Finally, the spend-your-last-day-on-Earth-to-the-fullest love story/alien bug mash-up for which audiences have been clamoring. A Quiet Place, Day One, a prequel to the hit John Krakowski films, hands the reins to Michael Sarnoski. While the action scenes seem like retread War of the Worlds, there are tiny magical moments that illustrate Sarnoski’s talents.
Sam (Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o) is dying of cancer in a hospice center across the bay from Manhattan. She has lost hope and will, and only wants to relive a memory from her childhood with a slice of pizza in Harlem. She reluctantly agrees to join fellow patients to the city so she can indulge in this final slice. Vicious creatures who look like giant crickets with xenomorph mouths land on earth and quickly demolish civilization. Sam, her cat Frodo, and the hospice nurse (Alex Wolff) wind up hiding in a theater under attack. As she journeys up to Harlem for that pizza, she picks up a dazed, shellshocked Eric (Joseph Quinn), who tags along, as they escape monsters at every turn.
Sarnoski made the exhilarating Pig in 2021 starring Nicolas Cage in one of his best performances. Both films follow a simple genre plotline but find layers in the unlikely relationships. The invasion sequences have been done before and shot/edited better by other directors, but choosing a protagonist ready to die but invested in a trivial but momentous (to her) journey elevates the through-line. The marionette performance, the charming scene at the jazz bar, the rapport Sam has with both Eric and Reuben, the nurse, go beyond the one-dimensional relationships in many action films. Though Sarnoski leaves out the central Abbott family of the first two films, he ties Day One to the sequel by reintroducing Henri (Djimon Hounsou) in New York, before he escaped to the island where Emily Blunt’s character finds him later.
The script has a few quizzical short-hands. We’ve sadly seen governments in chaos before in the real world, and information does not flow quickly. Yet, in the movie, the government manages to decipher and disseminate that the aliens can’t swim, and the fact that noise draws them to attack, within an hour. That’s a lot of details to get to the panicked public under attack and makes you wonder if the Director of Defense watched the first two films as a primer when the monsters begin raining down in the major cities.
Nyong'o plays all of the emotional beats so you warm to her even though she has essentially given up on fighting to live. The character starts as despondent and though her impending death still doesn’t worry her, she’s more at peace and heroic than miserable. Quinn, who won over Stranger Things audiences as the misunderstood rocker, Eddie, has an endearing persona and builds great chemistry. Their scene in the Harlem Jazz Club is celebratory.
A Quiet Place, Day One, may have not proven its necessity to exist -- the information it adds to the saga is meager -- yet, Michael Sarnoski is a special director, who’s reminiscent of the RKO ‘40s legendary producer Val Lewton. It’s never the title nor the plot line that invests the audience in his films, but his reflection of the human condition in even the most insane circumstances. It would have been more interesting to see what he could have done if all the extraneous action scenes were stripped away.
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