O Silêncio

After a spell goes awry, Aunt Zelda & Sabrina are forced to reenact A Quiet Place with an 80s B movie creature feature budget, comparatively speaking.

I enjoyed the acting (especially Stanley Tucci and Miranda Otto but the whole cast is worthy of interest), the photography, the general atmosphere, but I moderately appreciated the last third of the movie. Although the post-apocalyptic atmosphere consecutively to the invasion of huge bats as blind as voracious is rather successful, the atmosphere changes after the meeting with the reverend. This is definitely a key milestone: the movie becomes then surrealistic and almost laughable. This was naively developed: the group formed around the reverend depreciates the film by polluting it.

My rating before the meeting with the reverend: 6 of 10. And after: 4/5 of 10. Frustrating!

To start things off I saw A Quiet Place and rather enjoyed, It was refreshing and original. Then came a similarly themed Bird Box on Netflix and I thought that was OK and watchable, Now comes The Silence, A Quiet Place wannabe that just doesn't have the oomph or pinache of the original. It had some good moments but were too few and far between. One problem I had with both A Quiet Place and The Silence is the premise that humans are too inept and powerless to keep from becoming prey/food for the creatures. They're attracted to sound so why not set up some humongous speakers and amps in an empty stadium or city, crank it up and get all those suckers to gather there, then have an an F-22 drop a tactical nuke on them and blow them all to kingdom come. Hell, they did that to the aliens in Alien vs Predator:Requiem. They can do that in these movies too.

The machine must be fed - The Silence is an okay movie made for a mass audience, and as all those pay-channels and whatever channels need "stuff" to air, the need for an endless stream of new shows and movies is great. This simply results to that immense output of mediocre to underachieving movies/shows: quantity rules our days and not quality.

Anyway, with the same cast and the same production but a better and more careful composed script and directing, this movie could have been a really good one.

The Silence: only recommendable for the aficionado of the genre (post-apocalypse with alien/monsters), and only if you really got nothing else on the plate.

Overall this is a decent enough time killer. It's got a good cast, and some wonderful music and scenes. The problem is the story as a whole.

The "monsters" made little sense in terms of the threat the movie wanted to make them portray. Not much thought was put into them other than "we need a monster". While they might be decent as a "Pitch Black" style swarm monster on a small scale, they do not work for what the movie intended. There's just so many things wrong with them.

Add to that the incredibly bad ending, that was clearly a rush job and honestly added nothing to the movie. It was clearly a case of the writers trying to sound wise and simply failing horribly.

This is a movie you can waste a bored afternoon watching, but there's far better ones out there.