Review: A Quiet Place: Day One Makes for a Diminishing Return

Fans of the "Quiet Place" franchise will get a reasonable ration of what they presumably crave in the story's third installment. Which is to say they'll see herds of rampant space aliens scampering up the sides of buildings and dropping from the sky and generally tearing around like the world's biggest mutant basketball team in a hard-fought fourth quarter. There's also other stuff -- in fact, the movie is mostly other stuff -- but it's talky and sorrowful. There's a cat too -- quite a lot of cat, actually.

"A Quiet Place: Day One" is a prequel, not a sequel to the last picture, "A Quiet Place Part II." This means we don't get to see what happened after the end of that movie, when Regan Abbott, the spunky, deaf girl whose family was under attack by rampaging creatures, put a metal rod through one of their disgusting heads. What became of her? And what happened to the other surviving humans we had learned were scattered about and waiting to be found? You will not learn the answers to these questions in this movie, which brings back only one subsidiary character (Djimon Hounsou's refugee leader) from the previous film. And the departure of writer-director John Krasinski, the costar and founder of the series, has left a creative hole in the picture (much like the absence of Emily Blunt, who played Regan's mom, has robbed the film of personality).

Stepping in as director and cowriter this time out is Michael Sarnoski, whose last film was the warmly eccentric Nicolas Cage item "Pig." Sarnoski is a talented filmmaker -- the furious battle in a flooded subway tunnel that he stages here is pretty spectacular. But unlike Krasinski, he doesn't seem to be an all-in sci-fi enthusiast. So where the last movie kicked off with a tremendous alien-invasion action sequence, this one begins in a hospice for terminal cancer patients in upstate New York. There we meet a woman named Samira (Lupita Nyong'o), who is awaiting the end of her life with her cat, Frodo. (Yes, Sam and Frodo.) A nurse at the facility (played by Alex Wolff, also of "Pig") invites her to join him on a trip into Manhattan to see a movie, and Sam -- who's jonesing for a pizza -- agrees to go. (This silly pizza fixation propels her through the rest of the picture.) Naturally, she takes Frodo with her, for reasons that will become irritatingly clear.

So far, the movie is pretty slow -- an alien onslaught livens things up for a bit, but its excitement subsides with the arrival of a mild-mannered, young lawyer named Eric (Joseph Quinn), who's seeking refuge amid the alien chaos and wants Sam's help. Maybe Frodo's too. Unfortunately, Quinn is too bland a presence to add much to the movie: There's no romantic subplot for him to be a part of, because he's too much of a wuss to be of any interest to the fiercely self-reliant Sam, who of course has no need of male protection. (Even the prospective end of the world won't put an end to contemporary gender sniping, apparently.)

Although most of this dithering is tiresome in a movie already so deliberate, director Sarnoski does keep the story shuffling along. But it feels like he's trying to convert the picture into a love story, when the nature of the characters won't allow it. And while the creature action is energetically staged, the creatures themselves are by now too familiar to terrorize us anymore. And the whole project is compromised by a basic contradiction in the movie's title: How can this be "Day One" of the alien onslaught? We already saw Day One in the aforementioned opening of the last film. And still-vivid memories of it are unlikely to be dispelled by anything in this one.

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