A QUIET PLACE Day One Ending Explained | Full Movie Breakdown, Part 3 Sequel & Review

Welcome to the Heavy Spoilers show, I’m your host Paul and in this video, we’re breaking down A Quiet Place Day One.

The brand new prequel has just been released and it tells the ground-level story of the alien invasion. Taking place in New York City…it’s a perspective we’ve not seen in the franchise before.

Throughout this video, we’re gonna break it all down and talk about where we leave things at the end. We’ll also be going over the news of Part 3, so make sure you stick around until the end. From here on out it’s heavy spoilers ahead so check out here if you haven’t seen the movie.

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With that out the way, thank you for clicking this, now let’s get into A Quiet Place Day One.

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE BREAKDOWN

Ok, so whereas both Part 1 and 2 took place in rural America, here we’re in a modern-day metropolis. This allows us to see things from Day One though we have watched that in the franchise before.

Part 2 opened with us seeing things from the beginning but here it’s expanded beyond just a prologue.

Following a terminally ill cancer patient named Sam, she’s living out her final few days at a hospice. Writing poems about how shit life is, she’s resigned herself to death. Sam’s already said goodbye to the city and has pretty much closed the door on the past.

However, a spark of light comes when her nurse invites her to go and see a show in the city. Sam demands that they get pizza after it and throughout the film, we learn why this is so important to her. It turns out that one of her happiest childhood memories is something that she used to do regularly with her dad. A much-loved piano player, he’d take her out to a show and then they’d go for pizza at a restaurant called Patsy’s.

Sam wants to relive this one final time and this pretty much becomes the driving force of the movie. I’d describe Day One as basically an art house film that’s about a cancer patient seeing the beauty in life and the place they lived and loved at.

The only thing is, this is set to the backdrop of the aliens arriving on earth which is where it all really hits the fan.

Now, when they drop in, there are clear metaphors for 9/11 with the characters wandering through clouds of ash that litter the landscape. I think the movie as a whole is about the resilience of the human spirit and about people seeing what it is that means the most to them.

To me it’s basically one of those things where it’s like, if you had one day left on earth, what would you do?

That to me explains why Sam does what she does and we follow her as she goes back to get some pizza.

I think people will probably have some issues with the believability of this and how much some of the characters put themselves in danger to make sure she can do it. This includes Erik who she meets around the midpoint of the movie. A lawyer over from Britain…bloody love the guy…he’s basically a lost cat just like her little one Frodo. Following her because he has nowhere else to go, the pair make their way across the city.

There are some minor references to the prior films with running water and fire masking sounds and we also have location points like the radio station stuff in Part 1.

Medicine plays a part and we also have boats offering sanctuary.

Now, Djimon Hounsou pops up early on in the movie and he of course showed up in Part 2. He has to kill someone in order to protect his son and he ends up making it on a boat to escape the city. Unfortunately, we don’t really get much more beyond that and the actor appears more as a cameo.

I was hoping we’d get a focus on him and him protecting his son with him having to go to more and more extremes to make sure he was safe. It did feel like they were setting that up but unfortunately, it felt missing from the movie.

What does get a lot of focus to make up for it though is Sam’s life and I actually think the message here is a really human one.

The pair eventually make it to Patsy’s but they find it destroyed. However, they go to a bar and sit on stage next to the piano. Erik ends up sneaking off and getting pizza from somewhere else and he writes Patsy’s on the box. I think this highlights it’s about making the most of what you have and it definitely brings a smile to Sam’s face.

ANALYSIS OF A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE

This entire thing has been a trip down memory lane and it’s actually highlighted by a book that we see in the movie. At one point, Sam crouches behind a cart and sniffs a book and on a trolley, we see Happiness Falls.

Top-level analysis of it but this is about the disappearance of a man and we follow his family as they try and track him down. As they go through it they learn more about him and it’s an eye-opening look at the depths of a person. There’s also things to do with cognition, strength, and people being more than they appear which I think can be applied to the film.

In the end, the pair see boats in the river with them blasting out horns. Sam hands over Frodo and tells Erik to make a run for it. Smashing up car windows, this sets off alarms and it gives Erik the chance to narrowly escape.

Finding a note saying to look after her cat gives Erik a new lease on life and purpose whereas in the past he was lost.

We cut to Sam sitting at Patsy’s looking at a photo of her and her father. Blasting Feeling Good by Nina Simone, we see the creatures close in as she sees the positives in life and looks back on hers feeling good. It’s an opposite to her poem at the start about feeling shit and thematically builds off a lot of symbolism in the prior films.

Radios and playing things were of course staples of the ending of the last two movies. There though it was about defeating the creatures whereas here it has a deeper meaning to it. In the end, Sam saves someone else and embraces the life she led. It’s quite a poignant way to close things out with teases for where we’re going being left on the boat. We know what happens with Henri on the island but there are still other directions they could go.

Now as for A Quiet Place Part 3, Emily Blunt revealed all the way back in 2021 that A Quiet Place Part 3 was in production. Obviously, the pandemic hit us and it put a major spanner in the works. So everything across the board got pushed back with it being delayed a number of years. Now due to it being announced in 2021, a lot of people have assumed that they changed plans and instead went with the spin-off. However, it has been announced that they’re separate films and Part 3 is still gonna come.

Part 3 was officially announced in February 2022 with its release date being pencilled in for 2025. They have said it’s delayed indefinitely and at the moment I’m not 100% sure if it’s gonna hit that but hopefully, we get some clarity over the weekend.

Just to clarify if you’re watching this in the future, this is dropping the Friday it comes out.

Djimon Hounsou appears in both Part 2 and Day One with him dying in the former. However, his connection to this could mean that those on the island end up going out to unite with some of the cast. New York is of course a hub of the invasion and it could be the first city humanity takes back. New York is also filled with several massive radio stations…so like…maybe they could blast the signal across the planet.

Is that how it works…does it work like that?

Sure, I guess.

But either way, I do think for Part 3 that we’ll see some connective tissue. It has been said it’s the final part of the trilogy and thus it’s gonna bring things to a close.

Now as for my thoughts on the movie, A Quiet Place has a special place in my heart. That first movie hit when I was just starting off the channel and it pretty much blew up and got us a lot of views. John Krasinski even talked about our theories in an interview with my mate Bamalam and it was a big part of getting some eyes on the channel. Then Part 2 was the film I had tickets for and was just about to go to before everything got locked down. It got delayed and delayed and delayed and it kept playing in my mind cos that was like…the thing I was gonna see that I’d end up seeing when everything lifted.

I remember being sat in that theatre finally seeing it being like, I can’t believe this is actually happening.

When my twins were born we also did some content in advance that would drop when I was gonna be spending a couple of days in the hospital. I chose to break down both Part 1 and 2 to go out when I was there, so yeah, as a franchise it’s been there for some milestones. Now though I was really hyped for the movie, it’s obviously a new setting, time frame, and different sort of story. The first two films were family-focused whereas from the trailers this seemed more like survivors coming together.

As with all of the movies, this is a very human story with it actually surprising me at how much it focused on character building. Tonally though this is very action-heavy whereas those first two films were more focused on the characters without the constant monsters.

That first one especially, you’re basically just watching a family living in the world and in the back of your mind you’re aware the threat’s there. However, they’re mainly just doing laundry, having meals and communicating through sign language with the odd creature run-in to keep you on your toes.

Day One is way more about keeping you on the edge of your seat and for the most part, it really succeeds. I think tonally a good comparison would be the first two Alien movies. Alien is more of a horror movie whereas Aliens is more of an action film.

I think tonally that’s the same sort of thing here with it being way more about the spectacles in the big city.

Now I feel like when you exchange horror for action that you lose a lot of the intensity. That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have those moments but they didn’t feel as impactful to me. For example, that first movie, I remember watching it and it was dead silent in the cinema. You could hear a pin drop and the silence on screen made it feel like you were almost part of the movie.

Here though, a lot of that’s gone and you’re kinda just seeing more action-heavy stuff.

Now where my criticisms come in is that I think for some people it might just feel like more of the same even though the setting, time and characters are new. That first film felt really fresh in its concept whereas now we’re three movies into it and I wouldn’t say it necessarily does a lot of things that we have seen in other monster movies.

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE REVIEW

I also think pacing-wise you kind of have issues with story focus. There’s a lot of attention given to the cat and going to get pizzas. Should’ve called in Pizza Parker cos it’s Pizza time.

This might bore some people because I think a lot might think it’s low stakes when you know, you’re going to a big movie, you expect big things. I think that’s gonna be where a lot of people might get bored and yeah, it’s all gonna depend on your interest in the characters.

Now on top of that, I think that they don’t really explore the creatures or even hint at things in an interesting way that I think would’ve helped out the story. When you’re three movies into an alien franchise like this you expect there to at least be some new information given about what it is they are. That first film had a tease of military posters and reports from the ground. I thought that in this film we’d be fleshing out things like that but on the whole, it’s pretty barebones.

There’s no real discussion or answers given to exactly what these things are and at this point, they feel more just like obstacles. There also isn’t much of a plot here to completely hook you and it can get pretty repetitive. A lot of it is just characters making their way through a hazardous environment and then they have to navigate around either one alien or a handful. They then rest up and make their way to the next spot where it’s the same thing again.

Now I think what lifts the movie are the human performances with both actors here giving a lot of emotion. There’s some really good parts such as the bit at the bar and them screaming in the apartment as the rain blocks the sound. Beyond that though I don’t think there’s anything here to make this a must-watch and to me you could completely skip this and probably be fine just jumping into Part 3.

It’s definitely not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination and as far as craft goes it’s really well made. It shows NY in a beautiful light and I love how we take time out to just get long shots of things in the city. Stuff like the chessboard, the rain falling on ladders and traffic lights, it all kinda thematically ties into that idea of hearing the city at the end. However, there’s not really anything that to me at least gets into the meat and expands the franchise beyond what we’ve already been served so far. So yeah, it’s difficult to recommend as there’s nothing that I can say it doesn’t succeed at. If this was the first movie I think I’d be a lot happier with it but it’s just not pushing the envelope enough to really make me wanna tell everyone to go and see it.

It’ll be interesting to see what word of mouth is like and though it’s a solid entry it’s definitely the weakest. I don’t think people will enjoy it as much as the first two but yeah let me know below what you think.

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