A Quiet Place: Day One

The apocalyptic horror franchise goes retrograde, with Lupita Nyong'o as a sickly New Yorker trying to survive the first few days after the invasion of those hyper-hearing aliens.

Every successful film franchise reaches this stage. The original creators are done with it, but some studio suits think they can milk another movie or two out of it. A new cast and crew are brought in, people are given executive producer credits and checks, and they wind the whole thing up again hoping audiences won’t know notice the difference.

The premise of “A Quiet Place: Day One” is pretty straightforward. The original 2018 film showed us a world where most people had been killed by an invasion of spider-like aliens who are blind but have hyper-sensitive hearing. John Krasinski starred, directed and co-wrote, with real-life wife Emily Blunt co-starring as leaders of a family surviving in silence.

Blunt took over the lead in the 2020 sequel, with a brief flashback to the beginning when the aliens first arrived. This new movie is essentially that same bit expanded out to full feature length.

Lupita Nyong'o takes over center stage as Sam, a woman living in New York City when the big uglies fall out of the sky. The film, directed and written by Michael Sarnoski (“Pig”), follows her for the first two or three days of the catastrophe. Along the way she unwillingly joins forces with Eric, a trembling young Englishman played by Joseph Quinn.

Oh, and one more thing: Sam is dying.

Not from the aliens. She lives at the Little Firs Hospice Center somewhere just outside Manhattan, battling terminal cancer of an unidentified sort. She shambles about the place in a patient gown and knit cap, giving sullen attitude to the nurse (Alex Wolff) and writing insulting poetry about the other residents. She wears a fentanyl patch for pain, and if you know anything about those, they’re generally not given to people expected to get better.

Her seeming only friend is her cat, Frodo, whom she keeps on a leash and takes everywhere. Frodo is an amazing movie cat who does things no real cat would ever do, like hanging around with the humans while they’re being hunted by skittering chitinous monsters. The kind of animals that actually do are called dogs.

The movie plays out as a series of chases, as Sam and Eric try to flee the city without making too much noise and getting crunched. Sam for some reason is also very focused on getting pizza from Patsy’s Pizzeria in Harlem. She figures they’re never going to make pizza again, and she wants the last slice.

There’s a very cool and creepy extended flight through the subway system, which has become wrecked and partially submerged in water. This is where Eric first emerged, and it seems to have unmanned him completely, and he often freezes up and starts making sputtering noises.

A real crap companion to have around, by any measure.

Sarnoski throws us a few bones with tidbits of new info about the mysterious aliens. We get to stare right down into the maw of one, getting a gorgeous view of their hearing organs and the strange finger-like appendages around their jaws. Seeing them in groups ranging across the Big Apple, we can detect a distinctly herd-like mentality to their instincts.

There’s also a part where we see some gooey egg-like things, so we learn how the aliens produce. Or eat. Possibly both. It’s pretty confusing. I kept waiting for Ripley to pop out and start calling everyone ‘bitch.’

The military soon blasts out the bridges leading to Manhattan, trapping both humans and aliens, though aren’t there already aliens that have landed everywhere else? Kinda like we saw in the other two movies? And how come they seem to operate at a brute instinct level but were smart enough to master space travel before humans did?

These sorts of piddling questions are not bothered with.

I am glad nobody goes around barefoot in this movie, which never really made sense from the other flicks. You can walk equally quietly in soft-soled shoes, and then you don’t have all the plot-convenient stubbings and impalements right when they’re being chased. Though you do lose the foot-fetish demo.

Nyong'o, who was damn terrific in “Us” — should’ve gotten an Oscar nomination — has a quietly commanding presence as Sam. She’s someone who was at the end of her rope already, so the alien apocalypse actually gives her a reason to try to climb back up some.

The relationship with Eric is awkward and weird, and I kept waiting for him to go away. That’s what Sam does with some other vulnerable folks she encounters early on, and we figure that’s her way. Good-hearted, but a loner.

Djimon Hounsou has a small role as a dad who keeps turning up in the same places as Sam, and I kept wanting him and Sam to become the main focus, rather than the drippy Brit. Eric also wears a tie throughout this entire ordeal, and I found myself annoyed at that for reasons I can’t explain.

And of course we always have to keep in mind that Sam is going to be dead anyway. She seems to have accepted it, and I guess the idea is the ordeal gives her a reason to live, if for a little longer.

It does kind of make for drearily predictable storytelling. I won’t spoil it, but take a character like Sam in a movie, someone who knows they’re going to die and is put in a situation where many others could also perish. Take a moment, right now, and think about what sort of things a person like that would do.

…

OK, got it? Sam does all of the things you just thought of.

The secret to good sequels is you’ve got to give us something more than we got from the previous movies. “A Quiet Place: Day One” just hits the rewind button to stuff we’ve already seen or envisioned, a retrograde playback.