So what happened at the end? The implication is that the cochlear implant type device amplified over the speaker, along with the approximately five shotgun shells have saved the day.
But has it? The sound only showed signs of temporarily debilitating the monsters and there are gajillions of them coming. I think they are dead meat.
Thought?
I thought we only saw the other two coming through the field at the end?
What do you mean “other two”? I thought that they were all over the planet.
There are three in the area.
It seems that although they be “all over the planet”, it’s not a dense population. Besides they only have to clear the area where they live.
Makes you wonder: after invading the planet and defeating Earth’s armies, which seemed to go smoothly enough, what was the aliens’ plan exactly? Were they just looking to turn it into a quiet vacation spot?
Was that established in the movie? I got the impression that they were like bears. You could kill them all, but only with concerted effort. If there were only three, it would seem to have been easy for humanity have survived.
The creatures are armored, making them invincible.
However the sound using the cochlear implant causes them to disable their armor, which makes weapons effective against them.
There were only 3 monsters in the area, and 1 had just been killed. The other 2 were coming.
I ‘think’ I read that they will discuss that in a sequel, not sure.
But one theory I’ve heard is that it was just a meteor that had a bunch of monster eggs in it that hit the earth and caused the invasion. There was no planned invasion, it was just terrible luck.
I like to think they were an invasive species, like European rats on a pacific island. Either that, or a manufactured weapon designed to respond to that one particular frequency so they could be rounded up when they’d served their purpose.
I noticed those things as well. Seemed like when the implant was active nearby it caused them to open up and expose their inner membranes and that made them vulnerable to being shot.
I think the father’s notes in the basement said something like “3 known in area?” Considering how quick they were to attack any sound it seems like there’d have to be more around. Besides which, even if they kill the other two, some of the ones that are further away will expand their range and these folks will be back where they started.
Better hope that cochlear implant keeps working. The guy who knew how to make them is now dead.
I couldn’t help thinking, as I watched the film, “You know, between all my coughing while awake, and snoring while asleep, I wouldn’t last 15 minutes in this world.”
Well, I saw this film today. Let me just say, I found it to be a beautiful looking cinematic work. Like Hereditary, I thought I detected almost a Wes Anderson influence, which sounds ridiculous in the context of a horror movie, but if you look at the color palette, costume choices, and general aesthetic, I think a case can be made that Anderson’s visuals have now trickled down into other genres. Either that or the director arrived at the whole “L.L. Bean Catalog circa 1981” aesthetic independently of Moonrise Kingdom and the like. I don’t know. Anyway, that was my visual impression of the movie: positive.
As for the story, I thought it blew.
I’m tired of seeing these arthropod-like monsters. We saw them in Starship Troopers, in The Mist, in Cloverfield, in Half-Life, in Stranger Things, countless other films, shows, and games…hey fellas, exoskeletons and weird flappy things on the monsters are getting just a bit played out, aren’t they? How about drawing from the enormous canon of folklore and mythology from all the interesting cultures around the world, to design a new and interesting kind of monster that stands apart from the crowd?
If all it takes to kill the monster is a loud high-frequency noise and a blast from a garden-variety fowling piece…am I supposed to believe that these aliens conquered the planet to the point where every newspaper is printing stories about them, and in that time frame, nobody in the military or government with advanced scientific degrees, training in sonic warfare, spectacularly powerful artillery and aircraft that are the cumulative result of decades of meticulous study and training in military doctrine and science, was able to come up with that same principle? It took a basement tinkerer in Bumfuck, Whereverthefuck, to develop this extremely sophisticated technique?
Horsehockey.
But the movie was cool all the same. In a way.
This was my main complaint. It took me about a minute to figure out that the monsters strength was its weakness. Felt like lazy writing, but I enjoyed the movie all the same.
I don’t think it was just any high-frequency sound that disabled the critters. Since they’re blind, presumably they navigate their environment by echolocation. I think the cochlear implant took the specific sound from the creatures and amplified it. creating false echoes and overwhelming their ability to sense the environment.
As to whether it was only this one basement tinkerer who discovered it, maybe there were others but they had no way to communicate their discovery to the family in the movie. And even the father wasn’t working to find a way to defeat the creatures, but was trying to make something for his daughter to hear. That it wound up working as it did was a happy accident.
I did think it odd that the aliens seemed impervious to all physical weapons. The family only has a shotgun, but one assumes that before the vents of the movie they must have encountered some military forces with much more devastating hardware. What happened when they showed up at an Army post with artillery and explosives?
I do have two lingering questions. In an early scene, dad lights a signal fire and there are two more visible. At the end, there’s just the one, but I couldn’t tell if the others were supposed to be gone, presumably dead, or if the clouds were just too low to see them at the time. And there’s an early scene where dad tells his daughter that she can’t come down to his basement, and that she knows why. Why? It’s where he has his radios and is working on the implants for her, but I didn’t see anything there that he’d have reason to keep secret from her.
If I was one of the writers for this movie, I would writer-wank this away by saying that the creatures we saw were only one variety of the aliens who invaded - perhaps their least-powerful and lowest-ranking members. Maybe the creatures we saw in the film are juveniles or some other lesser variant, perhaps assigned to patrol the most remote areas of the country, and the larger and more powerful creatures were the ones that destroyed the military and took over the world.
I never got the impression that the creatures were deliberate invaders, organized, or even intelligent. They’re basically interstellar honey badgers.
My writer-wank would be that these critters are extremely fast interstellar honey badgers; too tough to bring down with small arms, too quick to hit with artillery or explosives, and with claws that can cut their way out of any trap that they’re lured into (like the corn silo).
I recently read the book it was based on, and that version of the creatures made more sense. Instead of just a few large, powerful predators, the book had millions of small, fast flying lizard-like critters. Sure, individually they were easy to kill, but they bred ridiculously fast, and swarmed any source of noise… and then laid their eggs in anything they killed.
I think we might overestimate the capabilities of the military. The military is very effective at things it’s designed to combat, but who knows if it could handle this. It depends on how dispersed the creatures are and how quickly they attack important infrastructure. Air superiority seems like a major advantage, but how long can you keep an airport running against these things?
And even hardened troops probably lose their nerve when being attacked by actual monsters that appear invulnerable.
I think that the other fires were really gone. We see one set of neighbors die during the film. I think they might have been one of the fires. It’s not totally clear how big the area is that the creatures patrol, but since we see several things that draw them nearer to the main characters, maybe that proximity results in more encounters for the other neighbors as well?
My understanding for why she couldn’t come into the basement is that there’s lots of stuff in and around it that makes noise, and since she can’t hear the noise it might be making, she wouldn’t realize she’s started a homing beacon. If someone else accidentally bumps a table and turns on the amplifier, they can turn it off and hunker down and maybe escape. I don’t believe there were any electronics elsewhere.
The number of 3 in the area was established in that it was written on the whiteboard and that it’s consistent with what we saw. At the end, after they kill one, there are two more coming on the video screens. There are clearly more somewhere, but presumably out of hearing range.