PEDESTRIAN.TV has teamed up with Paramount Pictures Australia to bring you up to speed before A Quiet Place: Day One drops, exclusive to cinemas from June 27.
I absolutely adore disaster movies. I was introduced to my first zombie movie as a tween – Braindead by Peter Jackson, if you were wondering – and have actively sought out any monster and end-of-world apocalyptic movies since.
The latest end-of-the-world movie set in NYC looks like it’ll be a doozy. It’s a prequel in the A Quiet Place series, called A Quiet Place: Day One. It was dreamt up by John Krasinski and brought to life with the help of actors Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn. The finer plot details are under wraps, but it takes us back to the first day of the alien invasion.
The trailer shows Nyong’o’s character, Sam, strolling through the streets of NYC with her cute cat when everything changes. We finally get to see what happens when aliens with super-sonic hearing invade and the world goes quiet. Sam appears to team up with Quinn’s character, Eric, to try and escape the dangerous city.
I firmly believe the best disaster movies always take place in New York City because it’s one of the most iconic skylines in the world. It acts as a secondary character and helps add substance and depth to any story.
King Kong’s tragic demise at the top of the Empire State Building is etched in pop culture history, and seeing the island of Manhattan completely frozen over in The Day After Tomorrow was wild. NYC is also an important city for the USA, so if aliens, monsters or some freak weather accident torpedoes through, you know the entire country is in trouble.
Joseph Quinn, Lupita Nyong’o and Schnitzel the cat. (Image: Paramount Pictures Australia)
While the previous A Quiet Place films have been set in rural areas of upstate New York and smaller towns, this is the first in the franchise to tackle a more well-known location.
I reckon it’s a genius idea to set the film in New York, because much like 28 Days Later made history with an eerily quiet London, there will be a massive contrast seeing a normally-bustling NYC shut down completely.
So how will The City That Never Sleeps handle being infiltrated by aliens with sonic hearing, ready to attack anything that makes the slightest peep?
“This notion of a quiet New York is one that will arrest many,” Nyong’o told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year.
She added: “It’s an impossible thing to imagine… When you live there, you block out all the sound quite naturally. You just forget to hear the sound. I realised how hard it would be to survive in a world that required you to be silent in that particular city.”
A Quiet Place: Day One looks terrifyingly good. (Image: Paramount Pictures Australia)
How is A Quiet Place: Day One different from the previous A Quiet Place films?
Nyong’o believes that the tone of this film is completely different from the other A Quiet Place movies due to Krasinski’s vision and the new location.
“What [Krasinski] relayed to me is that he was interested in doing something new with the franchise he created, and the universe he created… but also with the genre of horror film [and] finding new ways to get into that genre and to expand it,” she told ET.
“I think that this film does that. It’s a new tone… it’s different, it’s bigger and it’s a wilder ride… because we’re in New York!”
While the previous films in the franchise have focused on family and survival, Quinn believes A Quiet Place: Day One is an “escape movie” rather than “a survival story”.
“The script is obviously set in the world that we know, but it’s very much a film about these two characters who are lost and trying to negotiate their fates,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
“There are also some wonderful other characters… but the bulk of it is Eric and Sam in their mutual acceptance of this bleak, more quiet, new reality,” he said.
I can’t wait to be on the edge of my seat once A Quiet Place: Day One hits cinemas exclusively on June 27. Tickets are on sale now.
Feature image: Paramount Pictures Australia
