Another Double Review!: Love, Simon and A Quiet Place

I love school vacation week. Two more movies today with Love, Simon and A Quiet Place. They were surprisingly similar, with only a 14 minute difference in their run-times.

Love, Simon (2018)

Love, Simon was one of those movies that made me reflect on myself, which I am usually not fond of, but it worked this time. It was a technically sound movie with exceptional emotional peaks and valleys. It makes you feel everything that Simon goes through and creates an incredibly relatable character, even if you have not or will not experience anything like what he went through. The beginning and end brought joy (and tears for those with souls in the audience). The conflict brought appropriate rage and sadness to anyone with empathy. And Tony Hale brought groans with largely out of place ridiculous scenes. The story was accessible to anyone who is or was a teenager, experiencing the inherently selfish need to be accepted while accepting and not accepting others. It was a fairly real depiction of the conflicts of personalities that exist in any suburban high school and it makes the audience just as uncomfortable as high school did. I had trouble relating to any of the teens, even though I empathized with Simon, but I strongly identified with Simon's father, played by Josh Duhamel. He struggled with his son coming out because he was afraid that he has said something wrong in the past and made Simon's life harder. I wrestled with that same exact dilemma when my best friend came out to me, and the scene between Simon and his father hit me pretty hard. What was nice is that everything wrapped up neatly, which made my introspection easier to handle. Overall, Love, Simon was well acted, very well written, and a nice movie. I give Love, Simon 12 out of 16 times around a Ferris wheel.

A Quiet Place (2018)

A Quiet Place made me feel every emotion that Love, Simon did not make me feel. It was the tensest theater-going experience I have ever had. The silence of the movie transferred to the audience, which was delightful. A girl was talking for the first two minutes and her boyfriend said "Shut up. If you were in this movie, you would already be dead." and she was quiet for the remainder of the film. Nobody was even on their phones. I am still tense while typing this review and hearing the volume of my keystrokes. Blunt and Krasinski were believable as a married couple (pause for effect) and the child actors were all great. The limited need for effects by letting angles and sound do the work of the monsters was definitely better than over-saturating the movie with CGI, like many modern monster movies. This movie was about family and adaptation. It started fast then settled into an edgy pace and ended with a bang. I was a big fan of everything except the last 15 seconds, which was very out of place. It didn't match the tone of the movie nor the natures of the characters, but it barely detracted from the movie. I give A Quiet Place 18000 out of the 20000 hertz that an average human can hear.

SPOILER WARNING: Do not read until you have seen A Quiet Place. Or read it. It's a free country.

The one problem that I had with A Quiet Place was the weakness of the aliens/monsters. How had nobody else discovered that their strength could also be a weakness. The government would have almost immediately discovered that overloading their superior hearing would have had great effect, not nearly a year and a half after their arrival. But it is inconsequential and would have made the movie suck, so I will let this issue slide.