In 1963, the "Outer Limits" aired an episode entitled "The Zanti Misfits." Inhabitants of the planet Zanti have advanced technology that they are willing to share with humanity if Earth agrees to be a penal colony for Zanti's undesirables and criminals. They threaten Earth with total destruction if their penal ship is attacked or if their privacy is invaded. A secret location in a remote area of the California desert is prepared for the Zanti ship and monitored by a military command post. As the Zanti ship approaches, a bank robber on the run and his girlfriend unwittingly drive into the landing zone. They see the ship land and the bank robber goes to investigate. A Zanti emerges from the ship and kills him. The Zanti are revealed to be grotesque rat-sized antlike beings with malicious human-like faces. Believing that their privacy was violated, the remaining Zanti prisoners commandeer the ship, land it on the roof of the command post, and swarm inside. A brutal firefight ensues. All of the Zanti are massacred. The soldiers and airmen await the feared reprisal, but instead they receive a message of thanks from the Zanti leaders, who explain that, as they are incapable of executing members of their own species, they sent them to the planet of a race of "practiced executioners", namely, us. It made a kind of sense.
By contrast, "A Quiet Place" I and II make no sense. On Day 1, fiery objects that look like meteors rain down all over the world. Turns out they're not natural; they're spacecraft. They don't seem to slow down when they approach the ground, so you wonder how anything inside them could survive; but never mind. The next thing that happens, in what seems like an impossibly short time, is that wherever the objects have fallen, humans (and presumably other creatures) are attacked and killed by huge, spidery, powerful, seemingly invulnerable vaguely humanoid aliens who are impossibly fast and nimble. They are also blind, but they hear as acutely as bats, and seem to be as good at echolocation. So every one of the scattered remnants of the human race that survive on Earth must hide in soundproofed dwellings, and when out in the open, they must be completely silent. Are these aliens of the same species who mastered interstellar travel? They're more like animals than intelligent beings. They seem to have no language, no technology, and no purpose in life except to attack, kill and presumably eat people and animals. They have ravenous appetites. Wouldn't they have irreparably damaged the global ecosystem by indiscriminately eating every animal they can find? What do they do when they run of out food? Are these aliens like the Zanti misfits? Outcasts from their own alien race? Do they reproduce? When the main human characters stumble upon a way to confuse, disorient and even kill the aliens, why can't the aliens figure it out and take countermeasures?
The "Quiet Place" films are not unique. There have been other sci-fi films with blind aliens who "saw" with sound. Two I can think of right off are "Pitch Black" (2000), which also made no sense but for different reasons, and "The Silence" (2019, not to be confused with the Ingmar Bergman film of the same name (in Swedish, "Tystnaden") which was also released in 1963). Interesting that both the "Quiet Place" films and "The Silence" feature teenage deaf girls. This all reminds me of the film "Casablanca:" Screenwriter Howard Koch was still writing the script even as it was being filmed. He worried to director Michael Curtiz that parts of the plot weren't logical. Curtiz, who was Hungarian, replied, "Don't vorry vat's logical. I make it go so fast nobody notices."
By contrast, "A Quiet Place" I and II make no sense. On Day 1, fiery objects that look like meteors rain down all over the world. Turns out they're not natural; they're spacecraft. They don't seem to slow down when they approach the ground, so you wonder how anything inside them could survive; but never mind. The next thing that happens, in what seems like an impossibly short time, is that wherever the objects have fallen, humans (and presumably other creatures) are attacked and killed by huge, spidery, powerful, seemingly invulnerable vaguely humanoid aliens who are impossibly fast and nimble. They are also blind, but they hear as acutely as bats, and seem to be as good at echolocation. So every one of the scattered remnants of the human race that survive on Earth must hide in soundproofed dwellings, and when out in the open, they must be completely silent. Are these aliens of the same species who mastered interstellar travel? They're more like animals than intelligent beings. They seem to have no language, no technology, and no purpose in life except to attack, kill and presumably eat people and animals. They have ravenous appetites. Wouldn't they have irreparably damaged the global ecosystem by indiscriminately eating every animal they can find? What do they do when they run of out food? Are these aliens like the Zanti misfits? Outcasts from their own alien race? Do they reproduce? When the main human characters stumble upon a way to confuse, disorient and even kill the aliens, why can't the aliens figure it out and take countermeasures?
The "Quiet Place" films are not unique. There have been other sci-fi films with blind aliens who "saw" with sound. Two I can think of right off are "Pitch Black" (2000), which also made no sense but for different reasons, and "The Silence" (2019, not to be confused with the Ingmar Bergman film of the same name (in Swedish, "Tystnaden") which was also released in 1963). Interesting that both the "Quiet Place" films and "The Silence" feature teenage deaf girls. This all reminds me of the film "Casablanca:" Screenwriter Howard Koch was still writing the script even as it was being filmed. He worried to director Michael Curtiz that parts of the plot weren't logical. Curtiz, who was Hungarian, replied, "Don't vorry vat's logical. I make it go so fast nobody notices."
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