2 Quiet 2 Place. (Spoilers)

So we’re talking about A Quiet Place 2, the sequel to 2018’s A Quiet Place. I’ve had some time ruminate on the original and watch the sequel and I have to say one thing about this series; Those kids are going to need some serious therapy when they become teenagers to help deal with the contempt that’s going to build up definitely toward mom and likely also toward dad. But they’re probably not going to get it because it’s the apocalypse, leading to a future where they are cult leaders who kidnap kids under the guise of keeping them safe from their stupid parents.

Don’t ask me how I know this.

A Quiet Place II takes place not too long after the events of the first movie and shows that humans are still utterly stupid. The Abbott family is traveling as a family once again because they are stupid, when mom makes a dumb mistake that once again puts the family in unnecessary danger. In this case she gets her bag caught on a loud metal fence and rather than have one of the kids help quietly slide it off, just keeps tugging until it rips off and she trips a trap set by some other person. After telling the family to make a run for it, Marcus (Noah Jupe) gets caught in a bear trap and screams his ass off until a monster arrives.

Also the baby cries. You’d think that in an apocalyptic event where most of humanity is wiped out, that the survivors would have developed a sense of survival by now, or at the very least would be mostly people with a sense of survival already built in. But nah. Regan (Millicent Simmonds) is the only one who has developed a survival instinct and even she makes really stupid mistakes for the sake of tension like going out with a gun that necessitates the use of two hands but then getting herself into a situation where she only has one hand available to pump the shotgun.

Cillian Murphy is in this movie as Emmett, a reclusive survivor who finds himself an unwilling protector of the Abbott family destined to die to save these idiots. In the meantime since the first movie, Evelyn has been dealing with the baby situation by putting young…baby…I don’t think the baby gets a name. Knowing Evelyn it’s probably something biblical like Elijah. The family says grace at dinner while living in a world where saying grace will definitely kill you. Elijah has been dealt with by destroying his brain via a steady dosage of shut up gas that Evelyn manages to keep finding. I know it’s for the movie but I don’t think pumping multiple tanks of anesthetic into an infant on a regular basis can be healthy.

I actually thought they were going to accidentally gas the baby to death at one point during the film, but I guess John Krasinski isn’t willing to go that dark.

There’s a big revelation in this film about how the monsters are not able to swim and that leads the Abbott family to an island where survivors are surviving and also being really, really stupid. I’m not sure how big the island is, but I’m pretty sure you’d want to establish some kind of awareness of your surroundings. Specifically you’d kinda want to have people able to see incoming threats, not just from the monsters that might wash ashore, but from marauding gangs of pirates that would no doubt form up after the world ends. Also the people on the island are morons and immediately panic and start screaming and running around so they can be massacred.

Once again, this movie has great acting and fantastic cinematography, and its use of silence can keep the audience on the edge of their seat during the bigger sequences. It does reinforce how utterly idiotic the the premise of the series is, but you’ll notice I’m not calling it unrealistic. And I say that because I completely believe that if a race of mostly invincible creatures with one major weakness landed on Earth, that humanity would still screw it up and lose the fight out of sheer idiocy and incompetence. The only thing this movie is missing is a scene where a dude with a bullhorn screams about how the aliens are a lie from the deep state, but I guess all those people died during the first weeks of the invasion.

There’s a bit of hope to all of this; according to some information I found on the Google, over 730 million people live on islands that were very likely completely unaffected by the alien invasion. When you consider the spread of humanity in non-city areas, I’m willing to bet that the survival rate is actually higher than we’d think. That’s not including places like Alaska where people probably have no clue what’s going on because the aliens aren’t screwing around in areas cold enough to freeze their nuts off in a flash.

We still don’t know if the Death Angels can reproduce on Earth, or what their survival looks like in extreme climates. The Walking Dead had a whole beat about the zombies freezing in the winter, I’d like to see a spinoff of A Quiet Place where the citizens in Churchill, Manitoba find a group of frozen Death Angels near the town in the dead of winter and have to figure out a way to kill them or isolate them before the summer comes and they thaw out.

Rating: B-