Hollywood Elsewhere disapproves of the Quiet Place creature design. A large brown praying mantis with a human-skull head with moving parts that pop in and out. I didn’t believe it. All I saw was yet another competitive CG creation, built by designers who are looking to create a cooler-looking monster than the one they all saw in the last big monster film.
You know what would be cool for a change? Non-CG Tom Savini-styled monsters. All makeup, nothing digital, played by actors in makeup and no deep-register gurgling. The monsters in Cowboys & Aliens made that same damn gurgly sound.
Imagine if the Quiet Place monsters were seven-foot-tall bipeds who were bald and howled like cats and sucked the blood out of humans for nutrition — if, in short, they looked, sounded and acted like James Arness in The Thing. Absurdly primitive, of course, but at least it would be different and even wowser in the midst of today’s creature-design dictatorship.
Spoilerish if you live at the bottom of a cave: In the Quiet Place world of alien domination and global decimation, what is the ONE THING ABOVE ALL that a heterosexual couple DOESN’T want to do? In a world in which the slightest sound will trigger instant savage death, what is the ONE THING that a heterosexual couple must NEVER, EVER DO, no matter what?
That’s right — they don’t want to get pregnant. Because there’s no keeping babies quiet, and so the aliens will immediately pounce and kill the baby within hours of its birth along with mom, dad and everyone else.
So the movie starts and right away we’re acquainted with a married couple (John Krasinki, Emily Blunt) with two kids (Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe). The parents are devastated, naturally, after losing their youngest child to aliens in the opening sequence. So what happens a few months later? Blunt gets pregnant.
Yes, the family creates a basement-level soundproof room with a mattress across the top hatch, but in a world in which the slightest, faintest sound triggers an alien attack, are you telling me that basement room is going to completely muffle the 24/7 cries of an infant? No way.
