Change Your Image
jchidsey-67586
Reviews
A Quiet Place (2018)
Very Enjoyable!
The premise of this film was very unique in the fact that the characters involved in the movie were forced to live life in constant fear of making noise in the high possibility that seemingly unstoppable, unknown creatures would kill them. In fact, the driving force of the movie was silence in general; almost making it an actual character in its own right.
The movie also focuses on the characters and their interactions with each other throughout this dangerous post-apocalyptic world of theirs. They had to change their daily routines like walking barefoot everywhere, and using sand to muffle their movements as they move throughout the environments around them. And since they are unable to speak, the actors rely primarily on facial expressions and body posture to tell their stories, and I feel that they greatly succeeded in this.
Some aspects of the film did seem to be unexplained like how they were able to provide electricity for themselves (whether or not they used a generator or not, and if so, was it being stored in a sound proof area?), how the creatures were able to get to the characters within a minute of making a noise (they lived in a large wooded area with miles of foliage around them, but the creatures would always be within a few hundred yards of them to get their so quickly), and where the creatures came from. The last one I did not mind at all though however since it was left for audience speculation and it forced the movie to focus on the characters instead of the creatures.
One thing I would hear from people coming out from the theaters was, "why didn't they just sound proof the entire home or have shelters made for that purpose?" Where that would be beneficial, having creatures of that caliber where they can hear noises from football field lengths away, any amount of loud sound could attract them to that position and put the people working on the project in immediate danger. The film worked on that idea well where they were able to create a sound proof room, but it took them a while of painstaking cautiousness and care so they would be safe from danger.
The biggest thing I enjoyed though was the films expert usage of suspense. Good horror/thriller films will use suspense to build tension in an audience member and give a release of that tension in the form of a scare. But this film would demonstrate scenes where tension would be built, but then nothing, or barely anything, would happen. But then soon afterword there would be an immediate action that would occur, and the movie used this technique infrequently. This made it more difficult to tell when something would happen, and it ensured there was not a traditional formula being used.
Overall, A Quiet Place was a lot of fun to watch and the entire time throughout I and everyone around me would be very tense to the point where you could hear the slightest cough or whisper from a few rows away.
Zashchitniki (2017)
A bit disappointing.
When I first saw the trailer to this film I was admittedly looking forward to seeing it. After watching through it however, I noticed the abundance of plot holes, underdeveloped characters, and lazy script writing. The film overall felt like it may have been rushed towards completion due to the pacing issues present throughout, and how some of the CGI and digital compositing seemed to suffer more through the end of the film.
The characters themselves do not show much progression, and basically stay the same the entire way through, making them seem very two dimensional. And in the end, they were trying to use the tired cinematic formula of how "friendship saves the day" but the characters barely spent much time together. And the times they did show them in the same room it was just a messy exchange of one-liners and odd exchanges. Not to mention I could not have cared less about their back stories (Temirkhan loosing his brother was directly his own fault and should not have been angry at August for his own stupidity, and Arsus feeling like he was loosing his humanity every time he turned into his bear form yet he continued to do so, without showing him ever loosing his so called consciousness).
Overall, I did not hate the movie. I felt there was a lot of unexplained situations that could have easily been explained (how Kseniya lost her memory, or why the general betrayed his country). The action in the film was pretty entertaining and the way their powers worked seemed pretty interesting and mostly original. The film had a lot of potential but it was sad to see it presented how it was.