A Quiet Place - Part II Movie Review: Sometimes Silence isn’t Golden

Do you ever have those moments where the first time you watch a movie years ago, you proclaim it to be competent, admirable and thrilling, but as the years continue you listen to the criticisms for said movie and then you give it a rewatch and the more you highlight the flaws of it, the less you like it? Well, that is exactly what happened when I watched “A Quiet Place”. After experiencing the film at SXSW 2018, I thought it was a very unique, tense and enjoyable horror flick that brought something fulfilling and a bit innovative to genre with the miscues of dodgy CGI and cheap jump-scares. But after putting much thought into the film years later with additional criticisms towards the film such as the plot sacrificing logic by relying on characters to put themselves in more peril than they would be and inconsistencies in the film’s script and rules established for the antagonistic aliens that detect anything from the sound of a ticking clock to the sound of explosive flatulence, I finally conceded and concluded that the first Quiet Place while well acted and directed, is a deeply overrated and severely flawed film, and I wish that wasn’t the case. It’s by no means a cataclysmic disaster as embarrassing as Lilly Singh’s late night shows, but it certainly isn’t a peerless horror masterpiece that would make Hitchcock deuce his britches.

Now a concept like this can work in a tight, cohesive script. Heck, this idea of blind monsters attacking a group of people worked in 2005 by the director who ruined Hellboy with one of the greatest horror films ever made. The problem mostly with A Quiet Place is that it was a movie that had the simple and interesting premise, but it was ruined by illogical plot devices and contrarian world-building and rules, especially when it came to the main antagonists. With Paramount’s prospect of constructing a sequel three years after I would be nigh impossible to improve upon and replicate the critical and financial success of the overhyped first movie. But like I said before, for every first installment, there could be room for improvement in a sequel to fix the faults A Quiet Place 1 left some audience members and critics perplexed. And guess what? It's written and directed by Jim from The Office, John Krasinski who also directed the first movie. Maybe he’ll tweak issues that were presented in the original and offer us something gratifying and coherent without resulting to contrivances. Surely he wouldn’t dare to create another subpar horror disappointment in a second go-around.

But after waiting a whole COVID year long delay and having finally viewed the continuation as shown in cineplexes nationwide when it should’ve been released in 2020…you aren’t going to like this folks and I wish I was fabricating it all, but A Quiet Place: Part II might actually be weaker than its predecessor. Guaranteed this film has equally the same amount of positives as the first film, but ironically enough, it suffers from the same negatives as the original as well, except the results are much more detrimental and the execution couldn’t be more contrived. Allow me to explain my two cents as to why.

Part II picks us directly right where the original horror film ended, after the family’s big revelation that high frequency sound thanks to Regan’s cochlear implant can incapacitate the alien because the impetus for this follow-up was characters making unwise decisions and the script having sporadic rules for its creators and world-building. After the Abbotts survive the oncoming onslaught of Stevie Wonder Aliens, they gather whatever equipment they need, from ammunition to amplifiers and proceed into the quiet wastelands to look for other outposts that could inhabit other survivors thriving in the post-apocalypse. Accidentally triggering a loud sound in a train yard that lured one of the Helen Keller aliens, they are fortunately rescued by a lonesome survivor named Emmett, who brings them into his bunker. During their night’s stay, the Abbotts hear a song from the radio, possibly signifying that others who endured the otherworldly onslaught are still alive. Postulating that the song is coming from a radio tower in an isolated island nearby, Regan believes that she can attach her hearing implant’s frequency to the radio microphone to help humanity defend itself and gain the upper hand against the creatures. Tagging along with Emmett, Regan sets off to accomplish this goal to save those who are worth saving.

I want to first start out complimentary before I continue on, so let’s get to it. If there is an element that has remained consistent in both the first film and its follow-up in terms of quality, it has always been squarely towards the acting from both the leading and supporting cast. Much like the original, Emily Blunt delivers a beautifully dramatic performance as Evelyn Abbott. Despite her character given not much to do and getting sidelined by another main star through the majority of the film, her line-delivery is simply perfect and she does sufficiently with whatever material she received. Noah Jupe is solid in the movie as well as Marcus, and while he knows how to deliver lines and perform acceptably, the script however instead of evolving his character into a much more responsible son who learned from his father, decides unfortunately to regress his character into a plot device who needlessly puts himself and his family members for the sake of peril, and I’ll explain in the latter half of this video.

But whereas Blunt alongside her actual husband John Krasinski were the headlined stars of A Quiet Place 1, it’s Mellicent Simmons this time who has the spotlight in this sequel as Evelyn’s daughter, Regan. Even while she is a deaf actress, her facial expressions, and the techniques she projects while doing sign language and conveying emotion is laudable. Not to mention that I’ve noticed improvement from the previous film particularly in her speech. Whereas in the first movie, she’s mute and uses her hands to communicate and express. In this continuation, she’s developing her voice to where you can hear her pronounciating certain words to other people. I don’t know if something she’s been practicing to do in real life for her role, but if that is the case then, good for her. However, when the praise stops is that Regan is also one out of many characters in this movie that also is susceptible of wearing a peculiar mechanic called plot armor and I’ll get to that portion of criticism against the film momentarily.

A welcome addition in the cast of this sequel would have to be Cillian Murphy as Emmett, a broken, disheveled, socially distant man who live through a world of distrust, danger and without hope believing the world as it is now is beyond saving from both the savage hordes of monsters and the remaining survivors who still roam. After losing loved ones such as his wife and another family member, he isolates himself from the outside world given his traumatic experiences, and isn’t until he escalates to grow a friendly bond with Regan in that makes him believes in the hope of rescuing and trusting other people. His development and character arc with Regan combined with Cillian Murphy’s emotionally terrific performance makes this character easily the most empathetic and interesting character in the entire film.

Now I think Mr. Krasinski, while he does an outstanding job directing actors in terms of line-delivery, temporarily in certain instances, he does just fine for a couple of his set-pieces. While there is an undeniable abundance of plot armor, the opening sequences of the Aliens coming down to Earth and attacking the townsfolk is quite an adequately directed opening for a horror universe like this. The film opens with the family going to Marcus’ baseball game, and the film not only gives us a vivid perspective of what life was like before Day 1 of the invasion, but it also does an impressive job of showcasing of the Abbotts interacting with each other and introducing characters we’ve never known from the first installment before their transformation 474 days later. Especially when hell breaks loose when the aliens barge into Upstate New York, the direction showing the dread of innocent people as this is the first time they have ever faced something as horrific as interstellar quadrupedal predators, how loud noise became a huge and what characters need to do to protect themselves from the threat is storyboarded, shot and executed commendably in such a fairly exceptional scene.

The cinematography is superb, capturing the eerie, devastating aesthetic of the aftermath of abandoned streets, murky docks, rundown highways, bridges, and even train stations in disarray, and the for what its worth the slow pans and steady shots also work when scenes of tension are in effect. And finally Marco Beltrami returns as well to conceive another atmospheric and haunting score as orchestrated in the original film.

Now, it’s time to get to the downsides of this movie. I have reiterated the argument that one of the fundamentally broken problems applying to A Quiet Place in general, is the fact that for a second consecutive time, the rules and world building have been meddled with as a well to either establish an emotional theme, project a contrived horror sequence or to have characters gain plot armor that removes any sort of stakes in the film. My highlights for these world building mistakes are as follows:

For example, in the first movie, it is established that being barefoot—while risky to your feet—was a much safer way to drown out the level of noise that you produce that would attract or alert the aliens more so than wearing shoes. Well, much to my dismay, it actually turns out that Emmett walking around boots makes him coincidentally and fortunately safe from any predators. So anytime he walks causing gravel from the bottom of his boots to cause noise, he comes off sneakier than Sam Fischer in a public library.

Because of this retcon, this either means that Emmett is a total numbskull who’s lucky that he isn’t sliced to pieces like ham on Thanksgiving, or the Abbotts’s method of using sand and bare feet to walk on them is rendered absolutely meaningless. I totally understand that different survivors handle the post-apocalypse in multitudinous methods that they believe personally is beneficial to them, but there is such as thing called consistency within your film’s rules. If you’re going to convey techniques that have been taught and given to the audience, then you must stick with it otherwise you are making things up as you go along.

Sometimes, it’s not just with the rules of how to survive; it also has to do with other survivors as well. There is a scene where Emmett and Regan make their way to the dock that lets them to the island that has the radio tower, and come across a lost little girl. Turns out that the duo are cornered and captured by a colony of dock people or what I presume, cannibals. Here’s a query: How have these feral lunatics survived for 474 days, not to mention living in the docks while maintaining sizable numbers in their group? And if they are in fact cannibals, what is the point of having them in a post-apocalypse where you die by an advanced aliens species that hear any loud sound that you make? Hell, how would they even kill their victims without resulting to noise and everybody dying? If any victim were surrounded by an animalistic coterie of homeless-looking psychopaths in a dock, or in any other place, he or she can or accidentally use noise against them to lure the Ray Charles aliens.

In terms of delivering scares, sometimes the scenes of tension are created because of contrived and ridiculous choices certain characters make just so they can get themselves in more peril than before or plot armor to help our heroes avoid. And this is actually one of the biggest problems with movies in terms of the writing nowadays. When it comes to A Quiet Place Part II, especially with other films as of late, it sacrifices logical consistency and coherent execution with its rules and worldbuildng in favor of a horrifying moment or emotionally resonate one.

In the first movie, while Marcus and Regan are on the silo, Regan is very doubtful that Lee would rescue them both, but Marcus remains optimistic and advises Regan to stay put so the father can rescue them. In the sequel, he’s given explicit instructions by his mother to stay with the newborn baby until she gets back with more oxygen tanks for the child’s bed (which by the way, this entire subplot was predicated on the astonishingly absurd decision in the original of Evelyn giving birth to a child in an environment where sound is fatal). But what does he do in these circumstances in A Quiet Place 2? He gets out of the bunker like a moron and decides to wonder around the warehouse, with an injured foot mind you (because he got his foot clamped on a bear trap) and worry for his mother, only to get shocked by something and fall on a bunch of objects causing another part of the climax to happen. Instances where characters do incredibly ludicrous things that go against what the character has learned to get themselves in more danger than before is why both plots of 1 and 2 were heavily criticized by its detractors and make adamant case as to why they don’t hold up.

Not to mention the absurd moments of plot armor that totally shatter any kind of dread or suspense for the characters. From Regan doing something incredibly dumb and risky like going by herself alone to find the radio station with too much equipment like speakers including her implant, her backpack, and her mother’s shotgun, only to be hunted by an alien on a demolished train, and just when hope seems to be lost, she is saved by a huge Deus ex Machina, to one of the biggest ones, and…listen to this. When Emmett realizes that an Alien conveniently lands on the uninhabited island with a large colony of survivors living their day to day life (which by the way, there was no way that Alien would stay on that vessel for the entire trip), we cut to families having fun playing outside, and a guy whose collecting water from a well. Emmett is yelling at everyone to get back inside, but by that moment, it was too late and the islanders were ambushed by a lonely alien, and Emmett isn’t dead. Yes, there a man grabbing a canister from a well that caused noise, however, the fact that Emmett screamed and sounded an alarm, he should’ve been among the first to be killed, especially since it has been made clear in the first film that shouting gets you slaughtered whether it was for an act of suicide or a moment of sacrifice (Lee and the Old Man in Part 1]. But I guess the alien’s selective hearing is really more tied to the plot.

In terms of horror, the film returns to your basic fair of jump-scares with your obligatory loud and abrupt audio/music cues to jolt the audience with shock. And is it executed quite competently? Sometimes… there is also scenes that are staged in such an obvious display that not only can you see the death of a random survivor coming, but the execution of how it happens is poorly handled. In this scene Emmett, Regan and another individual run away from the aliens chasing them. They go through a garage door and this unnamed survivor forgets to close the door all the way down and he is standing right next to it acting paranoid that his family is about to be torn to shreds. And before you can scream “holy crap, an alien spontaneously attacked him with another easy jump scare”, well, that’s exactly what happens. Why was this individual just standing there instead of continuing to hide with Emmett and Regan when he knew full well that the alien that just chased them in his car not 30 seconds ago is still after them? I understand that he’s worried for his son who is still hiding in the closet, but sometimes it’s best to finish massive priority than to act out of character and set yourself as alien fodder for the next inevitable jump-scare.

Finally, I have two things to say about the aliens in the film. First of all, despite the budget of this movie being $60 million, the visual effects for the aliens is still prancing in the uncanny valley. The creature themselves, even in A Quiet Place 1, from a compositing standpoint sometimes they appear believable and visible in certain frames due to the quality of the design of the armored scales, flesh, their teeth and their movement in the setting, but at other points its presence and any amount of fear and tension is eradicated by the weak polishing and compositing of the monster, even in scenes towards the climax or in scenes shot in the middle of the daytime.

But you want to know the worst thing about the Saul of Tarsus aliens? Aside from their incredibly selective hearing in which they attack only when the plot requires them to kill survivors (the same creatures who we thought can’t hear loud sounds behind more deafening constant noises in the first Quiet Place can hear a silo door opening while in front of a constant sound of a water falling) but not a person’s heavy breathing in two scenes before) When you figure out a huge significant weakness to the Aliens, and for the sake of people anticipating this movie, I won’t spoil it for them, but in all seriousness, their crucial weakness is the dumbest thing in this entire movie. It is so astronomically baffling that it fundamentally destroys the entire threat of the aliens, it also breaks the whole premise and makes it much easier to defeat them. It also opens up far more issues not just for how the aliens inhabit our world, but it continues to establish how calamitous the world building is and affects the decisions the survivors and military we see and hear from the film made.

If there are two words that would be an accurate descriptor for A Quiet Place: Part II it would have to be: wasted potential. For a film that aims to answer questions from the original, it also doesn’t do an immensely good effort into fixing those problems and ends up conjuring more problems, sacrificing logic for theme or emotion and recycling the same mishaps prior but much worse than before. I know that there are plenty of people who are going to disagree and I have no doubt in my that this video will be very contentious for those who loved the film. When I make videos like this, it’s not to dog pile on popular movies for the sake of being controversial, I do it because with a movie like this, there is potential behind something that could’ve been something revolutionary or innovative in the genre. The intention and the heart can be seen on display from Kransinski, but the final product overall is a crushingly pitiable disappointment in every respect.

A third film is inevitable to happen, now all we must do is wait to see if it will redeem this franchise or if it’s ‘strike three’ and it goes out with a whimper.

RATING: 2/5