Hacker Cinema
A Quiet Place
2018 · Film · 91 min
Directed by John Krasinski
A family is forced to live in silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound.
6 positive4 negative2 mixed5 neutralfrom 17 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
17 comments on Hacker News
Ah, so, just like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Quiet_Place
What was the genre of that film again?
I haven't seen Covenant or Romulus yet. I saw Prometheus, and it was really bad, but in a complicated way. It wasn't a completely terrible movie that you can just dismiss as garbage like Battlefield: Earth and not think about again. It was beautifully shot, and a visual feast to watch. There were some really great scenes, like the robo-surgery scene. But the characters were frequently stupid, and the script was bad because it made the characters do idiotic, incompetent things that should only be seen in a B-grade horror movie. Ridley should have known better, and should have done a better job making sure the script he was working with made sense, so I'm very disappointed with him. He didn't do this with the first "Alien" movie at all.
Then he apparently did it again with Covenant: I haven't seen this one yet, but what I've read says he didn't really learn his lesson from Prometheus, and made another great-looking movie with high production values and a poor script. So I haven't been in a hurry to see it.
Romulus seems to have good reviews so far, and a different director, so I'd like to give it a chance. I just haven't had a chance to see it yet, but it is high on my list of films to watch soon, along with the new Quiet Place movie.
Slightly OT but Dracula is not the only monster that has no chance in the modern world.
The "Quiet Place" movies make me laugh because if those creatures ever really came to Earth we'd have them under control in about 5 minutes.
Too many monsters? Rig up a battery-powered AM radio with a motion detector and a stick of dynamite. Toss 1000 of these things out in a field somewhere. Monsters go boom.
Every human now wears an electronic fob around their neck that emits a loud sound of the proper pitch to drive the monsters crazy.
We'd have those Quiet Place monsters driving Ubers for us and cleaning our bathrooms.
Chris Pratt's "short" career has more or less been Parks and Rec -> Guardians of the Galaxy -> Jurassic Park. I thought he was pretty great for the first two but the scale of jurassic world being generic trash has managed to completely undermine any interest I had in him. I'm not clear where he stands on public opinion.
I also think Office Jim being Jack Ryan is strange. But I don't think people care about the amazon shows. His news thing and production of a Quiet Place was interesting. People fucking love Office Jim if they could put him in something that was not action man.
I find it kind of hilarious to highlight keanu reeves as an actor with range, as someone who loves reeves movies good or bad. Or tom cruise for that matter. The titles that made most of the "big actors" big were not things showing range. It's shit like top gun. Actors showing range are not doing big movies because big movies mostly don't ask for range.
Young actors don't tend to have that much star power either. That comes after a career. I feel like I can't agree on your entire framework here. But I guess if we had to target actors under... 35 that people want to see I would say it's probably shifted a fair bit to women. Perhaps Margot Robbie. Anya Taylor Joy. Jenna Ortega. Emma Stone.
off picks for men: Michael B. Jordan largely for the Black community. Harry Styles perhaps.
I once endured A Quiet Place (wonderful movie) while some teenaged kids behind us spent the movie loudly making out. Of all the movies to do that in!
It's amazing how different humans can be.
Your grievances aren't a big deal to me, whereas lack of a huge screen and sound system are painful.
I used to see everything in theaters and almost never used Netflix except for their original content.
A Quiet Place was fantastic in theatres. The audience responded to it. Audience noises added to the tension, and we all felt it. People tried to be quiet.
I can't wait for theaters to be back. I just worry that they'll be bought up by the tech giants and studios for a bargain and turned into some stupid membership scheme that only plays a given studio's films. (This is my nightmare scenario, because I can't even conceive of a world without theaters. That's like a world without sports or restaurants.)
I've started going to the local drive in theater and it's actually an amazing experience. It's not the same sound system or crystal clear image, but the bigness is there and movies feel epic again. Tenet was really fun.
> Going to the theater is a social experience.
It's a social experience of frustration for me.. lol.
- "Why the hell does that person think that's acceptable?"
- "Do they have to talk?"
- "Could they eat loud plastic packages anymore?"
- "Why are little kids allowed in this movie?"
- "I guess this person isn't familiar with basic hygiene"
and so on. I'd love to watch movies on the big screen if it wasn't for the social experience i'm used to. Watching movies like A Quiet Place were especially awful.
People keep saying this, but I don't think it's particularly true, at least for me. I thought A Quiet Place was one of the dumbest movies I've seen, and that the weakness of the monsters would have been obvious once it was determined how they hunted, if not found completely incidentally through normal attempts at fighting them. It wasn't possible for me to suspend my disbelief because the movie outright uses the very thing I was saying "Seems like X would be effective on them, since they hunt using sound" about 30 seconds into the movie. Even ignoring that, A Quiet Place is about the monsters having mastery over a sense that we share.
Conversely, Bird Box is about robbing us of one of our senses. In one movie, you have to be quiet - you are robbed of a form of expression. But you can still see, you can still hear, you are attempting to hide. In the other, there is no attempt to hide, at least from the monsters or force or whatever you want to call it. You just have to deny yourself one of your most important senses to be safe.
They're both set in a post-apocalyptic world, or at least partially so, but that's hardly unique to them or something A Quiet Place invented.
I thought A Quiet Place was a bad movie with a flawed premise that prevented suspension of disbelief due to just how ridiculous the premise was, and then totally failing to subvert the ridiculousness. I saw it long before I saw Bird Box. I didn't think Bird Box was a great movie, but I did think that it was significantly more enjoyable than A Quiet Place.
I think the implication is that it was a copy of ‘A Quiet Place’ which was a great movie. If you saw ‘A Quiet Place’ first ‘Bird Box’ was not great and left you wondering what all the hype was about.
All kinds of film can fail (or be good) both at their genre, whatever it is, and at basic style and storytelling. For example, A Quiet Place maintains tension well, but it squanders its coherence and ruins a potentially great novel premise with pointless music and improbably contrived opportunities to let the characters speak.
It's seen as facile within the industry. Hence the reputation and lack of prestigious awards recognition. Easy to write, cheap to produce, and now in the digital era, the jump cut scare tricks and camera effects can be inserted by the dozen. See the trailer for Blumhouse's The Nun to get a sense.
But with the blockbuster success of films like It, Get Out, and A Quiet Place we will see something never witnessed before in cinema history: the coming of the big budget horror flick. I think The Conjuring 2 budget was upwards of $40M. And it looked terrific. The upcoming Venom and Shane Black's The Predator are no doubt deeply influenced by classic horror tropes.
But for the real deal. Still nothing compares to the classics. I finally got to screen David Cronenberg's Videodrome the other night. Holy Guacamole. They don't make anything quite like that anymore ;)
Some theaters charge a little more and have a one-warning policy before ejecting customers for talking or using cellphones. I watched A Quiet Place in such a theater and thoroughly enjoyed the experience - the high-quality surround sound was great for a movie that relies so much on sound design.
I liked previews more when they didn't spoil the entire movie. Movie theaters are okay for louder movies. I regret watching a quiet place in a theater. The loud audience did their best to ruin the experience.
I think one of the big issues with the film industry today, and one thing Netflix addresses tangentially, is that all films should not be the same price. It's strange to me that a movie like 'Avengers Infinity War' is the same price as 'Super Troopers 2' or 'A Quiet Place'.
I consider myself a movie buff and I remember in the 90's, friends and I would go to movies as something to do. We wouldn't necessarily plan to go, but movies were a reasonable price < $10, we were bored, and you'd just go, see what piqued our interest, and give it a try. Now-a-days, movies are so expensive that it's almost an event and something you have to save for like concert tickets or sports tickets. Why would you take a risk on movie X, with middling reviews, when it costs so much? That's why so many middle of the road films seem to crash and burn so much more starkly these days, because people can't afford to take a chance on a potential stinker.
I think movies should have a scale for pricing, Infinity War costs $20 to see, but Super Troopers 2 costs $10 to see. Maybe they both start at $20, but over time, the price slowly declines until it leaves theaters based on how it's performing. After all, the goal for theaters is get butts in seats so they can sell concession food anyway.
Where Netflix really stands out is their incentive is entirely different. They have one goal, to keep subscribers from unsubscribing for another month. As a result, they hope that when you're bored and you turn on Netflix, something in their library catches your eye. Netflix has replaced the 'randomly going to a theater' experience and as a result, many movies that perform poorly in the theaters can thrive on the platform. Who cares if a movie is a 30% Rotten Tomatoes candidate, when it cost you nothing at the moment to watch it, and you have nothing better going on anyway. It's not an event, it's a way to pass some time. It's the new channel surfing...
All the film makers who end up being snobby about Netflix are missing the point entirely. Not all movies are suited for the $20, monster screen experience, and you can clearly see that with many experimental films crashing and burning hard in recent years. The cinema price is so prohibitive these days that a family doesn't take any risks, they save their money for huge tent poles where the rating is virtually guaranteed. That's a losing formula for experimental films who were never going to have broad appeal and it's a shame that a segment of the film industry seems hell-bent on standing in the way of that alternative outlet. They should embrace it with open arms.
I love the theater. Working from home, it's actually possible to go see a movie at 2 or 3pm as a break in the work day. Yeah, it's expensive for what it is but I think the value it there. I view it as the tax to see something 6+ months early. $20 for a movie, popcorn, soda, and much better AV quality than I have at home. And going that early in the day means there are no crowds. I saw A Quiet Place the first Thursday afternoon it was out and there were maybe half a dozen other people in the largest theater in the multiplex.
I don't think theaters and Netflix are direct competition, and I think there will always be demand for theatrical releases, if maybe in slightly smaller establishments.
I just despise the genre of white collar/white people culture quirkiness. So bland and confusing.
Quiet Place was okay but basically a dinosaur movie in a big field.
I saw the trailer for the movie before A Quiet Place. It looks well produced but still garbage.