Finally! I, for one, am so relieved I won’t have to see the trailer for A Quiet Place Part II anymore – I must have seen it around 50 times I reckon; it sure felt like 50.
I think A Quiet Place Part II was the first big movie to be displaced in the COVID shuffle. I rewatched A Quiet Place… back in the day, last year, when I thought this movie was just around the corner, and I still had my gripes about it. See, I don’t love A Quiet Place like most people do, not just for the ‘why aren’t people living near waterfalls if the creatures don’t attack water?’ reason – yes that, but the movie also seems convenient as to when it portrays the monsters rampaging to kill and posturing for suspense. It just took me out of it; the monsters can’t see or smell, so the monsters are either incredibly dangerous because they surge any noise they hear, or become completely disorientated as soon as any noise stops. They can’t really ‘hunt’, and I think the danger they present comes through the idea that any noise can attract them to your location, and you can even be killed indirectly if they hear something else, like a bird for instance. We see the little son get snatched in the opening sequence, and it’s awesome, but because it’s attacking the electronic sound of a plastic toy rocket, I don’t think it’s clear that the monsters can decipher the differences between a human noise and any noise – John Krasinski’s falling axe or John Krasinski’s human yell, among others – and in some scenes, I thought the monsters were smarter or dumber than they should be. But of course, I like the sound design of A Quiet Place, including the way it incorporates the daughter’s naturally silent world, and I’m hoping for a good sequel.
With their farm home destroyed, the surviving trio of the Abbott family (plus baby) head towards a fire signal to find more people. They meet Emmett (Cillian Murphy); a man they once knew in their home town before the monsters’ invasion. Quickly, Regan (Millicent Simmons) believes she has a way to disrupt the monsters on a grand scale, which involves hooking up her blessed cochlear implant to a radio signal a few days walk away. Her brother Marcus (Noah Jupe) is reluctant to engage in any behaviour so risky, and believes they should stay together, threatening to tattle to Mum, Evelyn (Emily Blunt). But Regan has her mind made up and will go into the big wide world alone if she has to. John Krasinski returns to direct his real-life wife, and his faux family.
I think these gripes I have with the first A Quiet Place are quickly put to bed when I see how the monsters move, rampaging through groups of people on a grand scale. Another personal grumble I had with the first movie is that I prefer to see the threat in camera, especially if the protagonists have ready seen it; although I know it’s tradition in suspenseful monster movies to drip the reveal slowly – Alien, Jaws. But with the groundwork already laid, this sequel is freed up to focus on the task of presenting the monsters as spectacularly as possible, and I believe the movie is better for it; a bigger budget probably helps incorporate more CGI creepy crawlers into the movie too. We get multiple close-ups of the monster’s head, and full-scale monsters over our character’s shoulders and I was wide-eyed, soaking it in every time. I joke about seeing the trailer so many times and yet still, I’ve got to admit, watching that creature climb out of the front of the bus while Evelyn reverses away within the context of the movie is still intense, in an absolutely frantic and awesome opening sequence. I still love how these movies are able to handover character perspectives too, and I think it’s just one element of Krasinski’s direction that is crisper in this sequel overall; not that his direction wasn’t already of a high quality. I probably didn’t appreciate the dual tension these movies manage as much as I should have in the first one; how much we want our characters to escape scary situations, but also not make a single sound in doing so – Regan climbs through that studio window in A Quiet Place Part II and it’s like, ‘Regan, don’t knock over the magazine, don’t displace the coffee cup, don’t drop the pen’ and I’m right there, twisting and turning in my seat. Though, I do think the sound threshold was lessened in this movie, allowing the movie to be less rigid in the importance of our characters not making any sound; another choice I think was necessarily freeing and fully support.
I felt a little sorry for Jupe’s character, recalling Stymie’s sentiment from The Little Rascals, because man, Marcus was ‘screwin’ up left and right’. When Marcus pleads for his Mum not to leave him behind, I worried, and wondered if the movie was going to unravel the character development established in the first movie that had already been so sophisticatedly harkened back to in the opening stanza – Evelyn coaching Marcus to breathe through his little league, and Regan opting to spend more time with her father. In A Quiet Place, Marcus is challenged to be less afraid, and Regan yearns to be acknowledged, eventually finding her own maturity. Regan definitely flourishes in A Quiet Place Part II, picking up right where she left off, and I just wonder if the movie’s main reason for including that scene between Marcus and Evelyn was to give them more screen time, when it’s certainly Regan who is advancing the story. I’m sure there were other ways for the monster to burst through the group’s hidey-hole, cornering Marcus and the baby, without Marcus first having to come out of the safe space in his own mental desperation too – there was a pipe dripping water atop the outside concrete, and I thought that was going to lead a monster to find them. In any case, it’s a small critique onto the movie, considering it allows the two children to shine in the final moments anyway, which I thought was really lovely, eclipsing the ending of the original too.
Cillian Murphy doesn’t have all that much to do but I thought he was terrific; hitting the high acting standard set by the returning three. Since I really like this movie, it’s going to be great to be on the right side of popularity for once. A Quiet Place Part II builds upon the success of the first movie magnificently, and will forge its way into conversations for the best movie of the year.
4.5
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