Curious Thoughts on A Quiet Place
We watched A Quiet Place the other night. Overall, it was very good and the premise of silence adds to the building suspense. The more we saw of the monsters/aliens, the more I started to wonder about the evolution and biology of these beings. I'm not going to spoil the movie per se, but get pretty close to it. I always love a movie which kills off unsuspecting characters to make the threat seem more real. Even if they did quite heavily foreshadow the first death.
Curiosities
We know they respond to sound, move fast, can climb, are strong enough to rip through metal. We know they can't see visually nor smell. And they have very few vocalizations.
Somehow, as primitive as they are, they made it from outer space somewhere to Earth. Ok, we'll just take that at face value. Maybe someone dropped them off to clean up first.
For blind animals, they can sure navigate buildings and forests quite well. They don't seem to echolocate like bats or dolphins, so they can't actively "see" their surroundings. They don't seem to run into anything, even at full speed, when running towards a sound. They seem incredibly accurate at swiping at something and then chomping on it. Even if that something stopped making noise before arriving, or getting within proximity of an attack. They seem to be focused on mammal sounds only, with exceptions convenient to the plot.
The sound of crickets in the night, the wind in the corn fields, the waterfalls, other normal sounds of nature don't set them off after the source of the sounds. The fire on top of the silo, as raging as it is, doesn't attract attention.
Questions
It seems the military in this version of the world was incompetent. Why not just setup a series of loudspeakers near volcanos? Or, over C4 bombs? Or we're not supposed to think about the obvious attack discovered by the deaf girl in the movie? If the monsters are super sensitive to sound, wouldn't SUPER LOUD blaring noise drive them crazy/paralyze them? Are we to believe printing presses made no noise and the operators and people in news orgs weren't attacked right away? So many questions.
The more I think about the biology of the monsters, the less likely these things would survive on any world similar to ours. Bats and blind mole rats are more believable than these monsters. How do they get so big if they eat so little? How do they not attack each other when they make noise? How do they survive extreme heat, cold, deserts, tropical rain forests? Do elephants, rhinos, tigers, brown bears, etc not pose a threat to them?
I realize they exist as a plot device and we're not supposed to overthink it. However, I can't help myself.