Welcome to this week’s edition of the Nerd Review!  Every week the Nerds give you their take on a different movie from the Nerd-o-sphere.  This week, Patrick and Dave review A Quiet Place Part II!

The Flick:  A Quiet Place Part II

What’s it About: After surviving an alien attack on their home resulting in the death of their patriarch, the remaining members of the Abbott family are forced to leave their destroyed home and face a hostile outside world.  They soon find that world has more dangers than just their alien invaders.

Metacritic Score: 71

The Nerds’ Take on A Quiet Place Part II (2020):

Dave:  A Quiet Place: Part II (AQP2) actually debuted in New York City on March 8, 2020. The world would shut down a few days later and the sequel to 2018’s standout A Quiet Place (AQP1) would have to wait for more than a year before it was finally released in theaters. Now that AQP2 has been out for a few months the question, naturally, is whether it lives up to the legacy of the original and/or whether it is a worthy sequel? That is a difficult question indeed.

The movie begins with a flashback sequence to the very first day of the alien invasion. I greatly enjoyed this part of the movie as it shows just how quickly things went from normal to completely messed up, in the most horrifying way possible, in a matter of minutes. Ironically, the movie mirrored what would be happening in real life, albeit on a much less extraterrestrial scale. The Abbotts are attending a baseball game with many others in the small town where they reside. Everyone witnesses a fiery object creating a cloud as it seems to descend to Earth. People quickly decide to exit the baseball park but within minutes are overrun by the creatures we all got to meet so well in AQP1. This is the only part of AQP2 where we get to see John Krasinski reprise his role as Lee Abbott from the first film. It is an excellent part of this movie as it truly captures the horror of the alien invasion as it unfolds quickly and mercilessly.

The rest of the movie basically picks up where we left off in AQP1. The surviving Abbotts (Evelyn, Regan, Marcus, and the newborn baby from the first movie) are still trying to survive. They are looking for other survivors and moving from place to place. They come across an abandoned steel foundry where several traps have been set up, all of them that make noise to attract the creatures. Marcus steps into a bear trap and his screams of pain attract more of the creatures. Using what they learned about the creature’s weakness to ultra-sonic feedback, Evelyn and Regan are able to kill a creature and flee into the foundry. They meet up with Emmett, who we got to meet in the opening flashback scene. They ask Emmett for help but he initially says no.

But then Marcus hears the song “Beyond the Sea” playing on the radio. Up to that point in time, they had heard nothing but static on any radio station they had tried to tune into. Emmett admits he has heard the song too for several months and tells Evelyn that it is because of where the foundry is located that he can pick up the radio signal. Regan then speculates that there must be survivors located on a nearby island. She figures if she can get there, they can use the feedback emitted from her hearing aid and broadcast it to help other survivors use it to their advantage against the creatures. Regan sneaks away in the middle of the night and Evelyn begs for Emmett to go after her. He agrees.

It is here where the movie splits into two paths and each one is fraught with some issues. Back at the foundry, Evelyn leaves her newborn child with her injured son so that she can try and get to a pharmacy and find medicine that will help Marcus. She tells Marcus to stay with the baby and she would be back as soon as possible. She is gone for a while and Marcus, inexplicably, leaves the baby unattended to explore the foundry. Naturally, he makes too much noise and attracts a creature. This leads to some dramatic tension as Marcus accidentally locks himself and the baby inside an air-tight furnace. Evelyn returns in time to confront the creature.

Meanwhile, Emmett and Regan reach an oceanside town with boats still at dock. They soon run into people at the dock who have very bad intentions for them. They attach some noise making netting to Emmett. But Emmett and Regan are able to escape and they get into a boat where, presumably, they row to the nearby island. In the course of this happening, a creature drowns and Emmett realizes the aliens cannot swim. Once they reach the island, a colony of survivors is living relatively unscathed from the aliens that have ravaged the world’s population.  Somehow though, one or possibly more of the creatures get onto a boat and the boat, somehow, ends up at the island. Chaos soon ensues as the creatures obliterate the colony. But Regan is able to get to the radio tower and is able to use the tower’s transmission to disable the creatures. Back at the foundry, Marcus receives the signal broadcast by his sister and uses the signal to enable him, Evelyn, and the baby to escape and survive. The movie ends with Regan leaving her hearing aid attached to the radio transmitter offering humanity some hope in this battle against the alien horde.

First the good. AQP2 does a very good job at recreating the tension from the first movie. It again uses silence as an effective weapon against your senses. But it is not done as smoothly this time around. In AQP1, the silence was subtle and engrossing. It was one of the things that made the movie so good. In AQP2 though, this felt forced on occasion. The silence wasn’t being used to push the narrative forward or to create a sense of dread. Instead, in a few places, it felt like it was just a gimmick being exploited. There is a lot more dialogue in AQP2 than the original. This actually detracts from what AQP1 did so well with the use of silence. On the other hand, we got to see more of the creatures in action and I greatly enjoyed that. The aliens are fascinating. They have the capability to travel across vast distances of space, but yet their entire functionality is almost exclusively based on sound. It is a lot like the way The Predator can only see in the range of thermal imaging.

I will also say that I liked the story quite a bit. Emmett finding his way back after the death of his wife and kids is a definite feel-good moment. And learning how Regan was going to use what they had discovered in AQP1 to not just their advantage, but to the benefit of humanity as a whole was all done well. They also, very subtly, gave the creatures a second weakness: Their inability to swim. It was a weakness that was not overdone and provided the basis by which it made it believable that a colony of survivors on an island could elude evisceration at the hands of the creatures. All in all, I don’t have many issues with the movie or how it ended.

Where I do have problems is an area I know Patrick had problems with as well: Stupid people and things that do not make sense. The whole part of the movie where Marcus makes the asinine decision to leave his newborn brother…. yes, newborn brother…. behind so he can explore the foundry was completely unnecessary and just dumb. It was a very poor and lazy way to create tension. It telegraphed exactly where we were going and while the resolution of the situation was OK, the creation of drama for the sake of creating drama was just not enjoyable. My wife loved AQP1 and she too thought that what Marcus did was highly stupid.

I have a similar complaint with aspects of the island. Regan and Emmett get into a decent size boat and it is not really clear how they get to the island. I read online that they rowed, although I did not notice it. That’s not the issue. What makes no sense is that one of the creatures (or possibly more) get into a boat that, presumably, they cannot operate and the boat just happens to drift across the ocean to the island and lands at the exact spot that they needed to get to in order to find and attack the colonists? Why did the creatures suddenly decide to jump into a boat at that moment, even though they had been in close proximity to the marina the whole time? And we have to assume they know they cannot swim so why would they risk their lives to pursue Regan and Emmett, if that was even their motivation in the first place. These are beings that have mastered interstellar travel after all so one would think that operating a boat is something they would have figured out by now.

The devil is in the details here. There is a lot about AQP2 that is good and I enjoyed the movie significantly more than I disliked it. But, in no way, is it as good as AQP1. AQP1 did everything so well without trying too hard to do so; AQP2 tries to hard to get everything right and it makes some big mistakes along the way. If you saw the first one, you almost have to watch this one to see what happens next, especially since the door might have been left open for a third film. Just do not expect to be as blown away the second time as you were the first.

Dave’s Rating:  3.5/5.0

Patrick:  I think this is the first time Dave and I have covered both an original film and it’s sequel as this week we cover the 2020? 2021? film A Quiet Place Part 2 (AQP2).  I was pretty excited to check this sequel out and I felt AQP1 was quite good and I was intrigued at the prospect of what happens next for the Abbot family.  While the tension of the first film is here for the sequel and it did generate some excitement for me, A Quiet Place Part 2 fails to meet the thrill standard of its predecessor.

The movie actually begins going back in time where we are greeted with a cameo from film director John Krasinski reprising his role as Lee Abbott.  The audience follows Lee as he runs errands in his small community eventually arriving at a baseball game involving his son.  Here, we are reintroduced to the rest of the Abbott clan as well as neighbor and friend Emmett, played by Cillian Murphy.  This interlude is interrupted by a comet falling to the sky and we see the initial wave of invaders that wreaked havoc in the original.  After some intense moments where we see the creatures in full force killing the locals, the film flashes to the end point of AQP1, shortly after Lee has sacrificed himself to save his daughter Regan and son Marcus.  We see the matriarch of the family Evelyn, played by Emily Blunt, gather a lidded basket and oxygen tank from their now flooded basement to place her newborn baby into while the family sets off from their destroyed home.

The Abbots travel goes relatively smoothy until they reach a suspiciously quiet clearing.  As they cross a threshold Evelyn springs a tripwire that sets of a loud rattling of bottles and cans.  As the Abbotts flee, Marcus springs a bear trap and cannot help but scream.  This of course brings the invaders,  Just as the family is about to killed by a creature, they are rescued by Emmett, who has been hiding in an abandoned building, utilizing the lower levels and a soundproof vault to hide in.  The vault cannot be fully closed, though without quickly running out of oxygen, and putting the survivors at risk.

The story then moves forward in a new direction as the Abbott family begs Emmett to allow them to stay, much to his resistance.  They also learn of a radio signal that is actively playing music.  Regan figures if she can find the source of the radio signal she could broadcast the feedback sound of her hearing aid to disable the invaders the world over.  Filled with resolve Regan figures out the source of the broadcast and sets out on her own to find it.  Evelyn, begs Emmett to follow after Regan so that she can look after Marcu’s foot.

This leads into the second half of the film which I won’t spoil in the review.  Needless to say, the action and tension pick up significantly here as the challenge of maintaining quiet once again allows for Krasinski to build tension for the audience.  We are also given glimpses into how humanity has adapted (or devolved) in this new reality.  However, AQP2’s conceit also is what hurts it.  Krasinski was brilliant in creating prolonged periods of silence in AQP1, so much so that when the noise finally comes, it is jarring and truly frightening.  This time around, the periods of silence are shorter, attacks are swifter, and it gives more of an action movie feel rather than the tight thriller that made the first movie such a strong watch.

My other big problem with this film is that it falls into an all to common trap within the thriller/horror genre.  And that is characters making poor, almost willfully ignorant decisions that create peril.  There are a pair of moments in this movie (no, I won’t spoil them) where characters make completely asinine decisions that only seem to serve as method to involve the monsters.  It’s such a stark contrast to AQP1 where the battle for survival was done with such care.  The characters were constantly mindful of where they were and what they were doing, and the danger felt organic.  AQP2 throws that prudence out the window and almost forces the issue.   I was extremely frustrated how the struggle to survive was built on the back of stupidity.  Now, that’s not to say the movie doesn’t have it’s smart thrilling moments.   The flight through the trap laden field described in the summary quickly comes to mind.  That scene works so, so well and it’s because the characters don’t go outside of their senses to encounter danger.

Ultimately what does this all mean?  To me, AQP2 is pretty good.  But I can’t help but notice that as the world expanded away from its focus on the Abbott family’s fight for survival, the movie’s premise starts to wear thin.  It appears it became increasingly difficult for Krasinski to devise sensible ways for characters to find danger and that resulting danger didn’t really fit with what had been previously established.  If the A Quiet Place grows into a franchise, writers and directors need to find a balance that keeps the scares clever without making their protagonists look like idiots.  A Quiet Place Part 2 is definitely worth a watch, but I don’t think it’ll be a film that bears a repeated viewing.

Patrick’s Rating:  2.84/5.00

Overall Nerds’ Rating for A Quiet Place Part II: 3.17/5.0