This week it came out that Columbia Pictures registered the title “28 Years Later Part II: The Bone Temple.” This will be the follow-up to next June’s “28 Years Later”. That new title does bring up an interesting thing though. Studios seem so afraid to call the first part of a multi-film story “Part 1”. It happened with Dune, and it is happening right now with Wicked. By leaving that off the title, you leave the audience with the expectation the story will be wrapped up in one go if they don’t know ahead of time that the story is about to be paused. I always know about these types of scenarios, and most of you reading this would know about them, but there are a lot who don’t. I remember talking to people who didn’t like that Dune: Part 1 was basically half a story, and they didn’t know that going in. The studios don’t do this most likely because they think people would stay home and wait for Part 2 to come out, then watch both at the same time. This is probably true, but that would be a failure on the marketing team to not convince people to turn out for the first part of a story. The other troupe studios can use for a franchise is to wind back the clock and give us a prequel. We get one of those this week. Sometimes it can be Phantom Menace, and other times it could be Godfather Part 2. Where will A Quiet Place’s version land on that scale? On to the reviews!
The universe of the Quiet Place series is very much not a pleasant one. However, it had to start somewhere. We saw a little of this at the beginning of Part 2, but we really get into it in Day One. Rather than focusing again on the Abbott family again, our main character is terminally ill Sam, played by Nyong’o. She, along with her cat Frodo, are eventually joined by Quinn’s Eric, a shellshocked law student from Kent. These two travel through the beginning of an apocalypse, and their goal is part of why this one just doesn’t measure up to the Parts 1 & 2. I won’t spoil that here, but surely there could have been a better objective to draw the characters through the plot. Another part of this that I thought made it a little worse is we see a lot more of the aliens in this. Perhaps too much. Part of what made the first two entries great is that for every sound, the tension was there. Maybe an alien will hear it and show up, or maybe not. In Day One, nearly every sound not masked by thunder or water draws an alien. So, with every sound breaking the silence, you just sit there waiting for the attack. While this tension is what makes the movie work, there was an older couple in my theater who just couldn’t shut up during the movie, and it ruined the tension for me. Don’t be like those people when you see it. Pretend the aliens will attack you if you make a noise.
As I was watching this, I thought of the movie Ezra. I did think this was a little better, but there were some pretty big comparisons. To start with, our main protagonist is not a great person. Lily Gladstone’s Jax is a drug dealer with additional legal issues. Her sister has disappeared, leaving her to watch over her niece. Jax is deemed unfit to watch over her due to her past, and that leads us to comparison #2. Jax “kidnaps” her niece and goes on a road trip. This causes the rest of the family to call for an Amber Alert. The niece does something towards the end of the movie that was highly questionable, and I don’t know why it was even part of the story. Unlike in Ezra, it isn’t hard to imagine what awful things are coming for Jax after the credits roll. While this could be looked at as leaving the story open, I viewed it as an incomplete story that could have been fixed with another 15 minutes. Still, I thought the background story of the missing sister really helped the story move along, and made the movie passable.
Oh boy. Lanthimos films at their best are awkward, strange affairs. This collection of three stories certainly falls in line with that. However, this one really tested my patience. What is interesting about this one is that our cast (Stone Plemons, Dafoe, Qualley, Chau, Alwyn, Athie) Arecibo all three stories, but they play different characters in each part. Of the three parts, I thought the second one (R.M.F. is Flying) was the best one. It was also the only one I thought could have been expanded into its own film. The first part (The Death of R.M.F. felt like a short story that was expanded as much as it could, and the third part (R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich) was really a waste of time. It was also the section of the film where I really felt the almost 3 hour runtime. This experiment of a film by Yorgos didn’t really work for me, but I will be there when his next film is released next fall.
Next week is an easy week to guess. The Despicable Me franchise just prints money and with Inside Out on its 4th week next week, the family movie audience is primed to swarm the new family movie, especially if it’s good. The one thing to watch though for DM4 is if it will have the legs that IO2 has. You know what is better than winning one weekend? Winning a second.
- Despicable Me 4
- A Quiet Place: Day One
- Inside Out 2
- Bad Boys: Ride or Die
- Kind of Kindness
I am leaving the city for two weeks and heading to the country, so I’ll be seeing movies in the smaller theaters up there. It is Horizon with my Dad on Friday. Hopefully I don’t fall asleep. Before that, on Wednesday, I share my Top/Bottom 10 for the first half of the year. See you then.
Mitten Film Nerd 
Leave a comment