A Quiet Place (2018)

 

A Quiet Place is a masterful film in so many ways. It truly deserved more Oscar attention than it received (a sole nomination for its amazing sound design), but popular opinion ensures that the film will be remembered long after the memories of award-show glory have gone. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where sound-sensitive monsters from another planet have attacked Earth and killed almost everyone, the film chooses not to focus upon that story directly, but instead it shows us how a family isolated on a farm has adjusted to this new and frightening reality. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski (who also directed), married in real life, play a couple whose primary goal seems to be the protection of their three young children. Everyone has to keep silent as much as possible, communicating when necessary via American Sign Language or waiting until their speech might be drowned out by a louder, more natural sound like a waterfall. The family has learned to be pretty much self-sufficient, but the dangers of their world appear early in the film. It’s a bold move on the part of the filmmakers to kill off the youngest (at the time) child near the start of the narrative, but it does quickly cement for us as viewers the very real dangers everyone must now deal with. Every little incident becomes a potential threat, so footsteps have to be carefully mapped and even the corn shifting in a silo could possibly lead to someone’s death. The monsters themselves are, oddly enough, incredibly loud, and the method for getting rid of them turns out to be a genius move. Blunt gives the best performance in the film, but everyone here is astonishingly good. Without the words that actors can use in most performances to convey emotion, everyone has to use their facial expressions more. The casting of Millicent Simmonds, an actress with hearing loss, as daughter Regan was an inspired choice, and her talent really influenced the performances of the others. A Quiet Place is not a silent film – it even has a musical score at times – but it does know how to use silence so effectively.

Oscar Nomination: Best Achievement in Sound Editing

First Man (2018)

 

First Man is a film biography of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon. That event only receives about 15-20 minutes at the end of the film and is, frankly, rather anticlimactic since viewers already know what happened. Instead, the film is primarily about Armstrong’s life prior to that historical event, particularly the many failures, setbacks, and frustrations that the space mission encountered throughout the 1960s. It also presents his home life, especially the tensions between him and his wife Janet. Armstrong is played by Ryan Gosling, no stranger to working with director Damien Chazelle, having worked with him on La La Land the year before. Here Gosling portrays the famed astronaut as a man who is reluctant to address his emotions directly. Throughout the course of the film, Armstrong loses his young daughter to a brain tumor and several of his fellow Gemini and Apollo astronauts, but he cries in private and keeps his feelings to himself in public. It gets so bad that his wife, played by Claire Foy, forces him to sit down and tell his two young sons that he might not return from his trip to the moon. The fear of death is always present, and Foy is particularly effective at conveying that emotion. The astronauts’ wives could hear what was happening at Mission Control through speakers, and Janet gets furious when hers gets silenced when the Gemini 8 mission goes badly. The pacing of the film is rather off-putting, alternating as it does between the more action-oriented scenes with NASA and the space missions and the quieter moments at home. And the shaking camera can be annoying at times, but the cinematography for the space flights does a great job of reflecting the frenetic pace and excitement and danger of those trips. What happened with Apollo 11—the first walk on the moon and the glitches that happened on the journey—is faithfully reproduced, a fitting tribute to the difficulties that the astronauts like Armstrong faced. First Man doesn’t necessarily illuminate the space program a great deal, and it doesn’t fully explain why Armstrong was who he was or why he made the choices that he made, but it is visually and, incredibly, auditorily stunning in its recreation of what it was like to be in a space module.

Oscar Win: Best Achievement in Visual Effects

Oscar Nominations: Best Achievement in Sound Editing, Best Achievement in Sound Mixing, and Best Achievement in Production Design