A Quiet Place: Day One Viewers All Have The Same Complaint
"A Quiet Place: Day One" is an unequivocal smash, with the film raking in $53 million at the domestic box office during its opening weekend and receiving mostly raves from critics and viewers on Rotten Tomatoes. But while Michael Sarnoski's film has earned high marks for expanding the story's scope from the previous "A Quiet Place" films while also putting an emotion-packed human story front and center, some audience members have lodged one major complaint: there's not enough "Day One" in "A Quiet Place: Day One."
As the prequel opens, we spend some time getting to know terminal cancer patient Samira (Lupita Nyong'o), who is living out her last days in a hospice outside New York City. When Samira accompanies some other patients into Manhattan to see a puppet show, the group and their bus are caught in the city as the alien invasion begins. Although we get a sense of the destruction and horror as human beings are picked off like bugs, cars burst into flames, and mass chaos ensues, Samira is quickly knocked out by an explosion. She awakens hours after the attack, hidden away with other survivors in the theater.
On a Reddit discussion board, some viewers were disappointed that we didn't see more of the devastation of New York. User xxx117 wrote, "I feel like they really didn't land the whole 'invasion in NY' thing ... Really wanted to see more city mayhem." U/dappuh agreed, noting, "For an apocalyptic style of event, it felt very underwhelming."
Where was the government response?
While a number of commenters on Reddit were unhappy that "A Quiet Place: Day One" did not deliver — in their opinions — enough of the invasion's initial carnage before fast-forwarding to a relatively quiet time hours later, others grumbled that there was another major element of the scenario missing from the movie: any kind of context of how the authorities were dealing with the situation.
"I went in expecting what we DIDN'T get from the other two movies: the initial government response, the emergency services response, the global media response, the first attempts on evacuations, the survivors trying to hold on and how common civilians realize what attracts them," wrote u/gakun, who also noted that world leaders would have been alerted in advance to a massive swarm of unidentified objects falling to Earth from space.
Other Reddit users also remarked on the relatively brief scenes of destruction, as well as the absence of millions of bodies in the streets following the attack. But one user, styles_P, might have hit the nail on the head when they joked, "I guess they don't have the budget for that." The reported budget for "A Quiet Place: Day One" was $67 million; not a low-cost movie by any means, but also a far cry from the $150-200 million that many other blockbusters cost. For the money, it seems that Michael Sarnoski delivered all the "Day One" he could.