So, it turns out that Peter Watts had less tolerance than I did for the plot holes in A Quiet Place:
[Spoilers follow, especially if you click on that link to go to the original post.]
I really wanted to like this one.
I did, too, at first. The layered, multidimensional, never-quite-silence of the movie’s soundscape grabs you from the first scene. The sight of the Abbott Family creeping through the aftermath of whatever wiped out the rest of us effectively builds suspense and curiosity. [Spoiler omitted]
Five minutes in— wholesome ‘Murrican nuclear family focus notwithstanding— you knew this was no Spielberg movie.
But the further we got into “A Quiet Place” the less goddamned sense it made. [...]
[Lengthy list of inconsistencies snipped...]
Quite a few of the points Watts makes occurred to me, and arise from the way the film enters the story months after the aliens arrived. There’s the odd allusion in an old newspaper headline here and there to difficulties encountered when the humans tried to shoot their enemies’ spaceships down and suchlike, but it seems unlikely that the entire world’s armed forces would have given up so easily.
If the individual aliens were as physically vulnerable to fire from shotguns as they seemed to be, wouldn’t someone have noticed this when some suicidal patriot took a potshot at the enemy on the ground? Even if the aliens generally didn’t open up their soft, squishy heads to enemy fire that often, it’s hard to believe that some unlucky bastard with a death wish and a sub-machine gun wouldn’t have explored their options at some point along the way. Unless the aliens accepted humanity’s surrender when they were still in the sky and only emerged from their ships once the human race had agreed to bugger off into the woods and stay far enough away from their conquerors to resist the temptation to loose off a potshot now and again...
Of course the real answer is that the film chose to open the story after the fighting was over so they didn’t have to present us with a plausible scenario for how the aliens ended up yomping around in the woods without any protective armour. For the duration of the film their cunning plan mostly worked, but ten minutes afterwards I’d be pretty surprised if most of the audience weren’t thinking Wait, but... about the entire experience.