After threatening to rip Jeff Nichols from his swell little perch as the new David Gordon Green, it seems that John Krasinski and Platinum Dunes found another hypebeast indie director to poach for franchise work. That director was Michael Sarnoski, he who helmed the modern-day foodie classic Pig starring Nic Cage, and the film they chose him for was… A Quiet Place: Day One.
Now, we all know that horror sequels can be a mixed bag, but horror prequels basically have a dead-in-the-water track record. This one features Lupita Nyong’o on the day that the famous monsters of this filmic land dropped down on Earth — it kind of sucks to find out that they’re aliens — and it’s got lots of famous faces in it.
Preferring to generate a few days of hype over just waiting for Sunday, Paramount dropped the trailer for it on Thursday, and it looks surprisingly expensive!
Peep it:
Here’s probably the dumbest synopsis we’ve read so far this year, which assumes so much about the audience that it’s almost like Paramount’s forgetting to sell this movie to people who might not have seen the others. And let’s be real, that’s the benefit of a prequel about an event: it allows for you to change genres! This isn’t just survival horror, it’s a disaster movie, hence the even-more all-star cast (with some CW folks tossed in there), and it’s embarrassing that they’re using a tagline as a synopsis! Anyway:
“Experience the day the world went quiet.“
Let’s not pass over the fact that, had this sentence just popped up when we were editing a piece, we would have changed “quiet” to “silent,” but it’s even more frustrating that it’s just so simple to say “Lupita Nyong’o runs and fights from monsters who can hear real good” and give everyone a decent idea of what’s going on — it’s not a movie that depends on mystery! It’s a prequel! And sure, it looks good on a poster, but come on. Were the copywriters getting paid by the pen-stroke?
Anyway, if you don’t watch this, you’ll get a chance to see a 30-odd second glimpse of A Quiet Place: Day One on Super Bowl Sunday, and there’s a decent chance it’ll be the second-scariest thing at your party, beyond the hyper-crazed Swifties your friends have dragged along. Otherwise, you can check out A Quiet Place: Day One when it hits theaters on June 28.