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A Quiet Place: Part II
Horror / English / 2021
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I randomly found myself in the mood to watch a horror movie. Also I've been blissfully unaware that A Quiet Place got a sequel, let alone a prequel soon to release, and is apparently one of the highest rated horror franchises on iMDb?
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Usually, before I watch a sequel, I tend to read up on my review of the previous movie to put myself in the headspace I was in immediately following that movie.
In this case I decided not to do that because A Quiet Place isn't a bad concept for a movie, but I do not have fond memories of the original, largely because the Apocalypse Mom thing just irritates me so much.
For this movie, I decided to put that whole trope aside because what's done is done, it technically still occurred in the chronology of this movie, but it's offscreen and now we're just left to dwell in the aftermath.
I would say overall my attitude towards Part II is definitely better than the first movie, I feel like there were fewer obvious things to complain about and apart from presenting an expanded "Day One" flashback opening, it quickly enough settles in the somewhat slow-burn that almost too quickly turns into all-out chaos.
On the positive side of things, Cillian Murphy gets retconned into a family friend that Apocalypse Mom and kids run into. They play around with the idea that he's become cold-hearted person and will turn them away, but thankfully they spare us that drama and he manages to play New Dad essentially. I'm not normally a big fan of Murphy, maybe because I'm sick of seeing his face in every Nolan movie, but he was okay in this.
There was one scene where it seemed like his character was resigned to dying, but also thankfully he managed to badass his way out of the situation and the trademark Father Figure character didn't have to die a second movie in a row.
Having said that, certain characters just seem to have plot armor. Even though Deaf Girl is at a distinct disadvantage compared to everyone else, she is also basically the main character and the contrast of her disability with these monsters' superpowers really does remove a lot of suspense from the scenes she's in.
I would easily admit that the CG is pretty solid in this, far more so than Furiosa, depressingly. The monsters are portrayed as so absurdly fast that for most of the time they're onscreen, they're barely rendered so almost never stand out as CG. There is I think one shot near the end of the movie where you get a close-up of a dead monster that does look pretty artificial, but it's hardly worth fussing over.
The story mostly works on it's own, but at least in the first third of the movie it does like to dwell on the characters and events of the previous movie just enough that you'd be missing some details if you hadn't seen it the first time. The cut from the flashback to the present is also super abrupt and it clearly expects you to remember the ending of the previous movie.
I feel like this movie tries to retread a bit more post-apocalypse cliches, particularly with regard to the whole "humanity is not worth saving anymore" trope, but at least it manages to subvert that a bit by following up that whole scene with eventually discovering island of peaceful humans happily coexisting without any monsters.
That scene also bothers me because it just felt lazy. Virtually no dialog is exchanged between Daddy Murphy, Deaf Girl, and the sudden new faction of humans with non-specific ill-intent. They just kinda glare at each other a bit before shit hits the fan, so there's absolutely nothing new here narratively, just the bare minimum of "It's the post-apocalype, time to play the THERE'S MORE THAN MONSTERS TO WORRY ABOUT BEYOND THE SAND TRAIL" bullshit, which I read just prior to watching this.
Now that I'm less fixated on stupid decisions made by the main characters and we see more of the monsters' patterns of behavior, the logic of the world once again starts to raise some questions.
WHAT is the point of killing humans? At no point whatsoever are the monsters portrayed to be eating humans, so there's zero case to make that they are hunting humans. This is reinforced by the fact that the monsters CONSISTENTLY move to attack humans making noises, rather than stopping at their kill and eating it. So when introduced into a crowd, the expected behavior is that the monster will move to strike everyone until nobody is making any noise.
I have to specify "nobody" because the monsters rarely seem to attack noisy objects, despite numerous non-human sources of noise throughout the world. Which doesn't make any sense either because the monsters are almost never attracted to human noises, they're attracted to noises made by something humans are interacting with.
Another thing I don't understand is why the hearing aid is a sonic weapon. It's awful nice to have an anti-monster device attached to your head, but why does it work? Surely you can't just crank up a hearing aid to an absurd volume, so is it a frequency they hate? If that's the case then why would the humans ever need to blow their eardrums out as they seem to every time they create audio feedback?
Yet ANOTHER thing that didn't make any sense is that Daddy Murphy takes Deaf Girl's hearing aid while she's sleeping in one scene and she has an emotional breakdown over it. Why did he do that? Especially if he was just going to return it when she woke up? It's usefulness against the monsters isn't even established to him prior to this scene.
What's even more baffling is that when he falls into the water later on, he manages to steal back the hearing aid and keep it in his mouth until he can reveal later that he managed to save it... only he doesn't return it then and there, he holds onto it for literally no reason at all, even as he and Deaf Girl are sneaking onto the island where the humans could be ENEMIES... and then even after she's introduced to them and they're getting along, he just still has this ****ing hearing aid for seemingly no other reason than for it to be a prop for him to show off to Black Guy.
Black Guy also dies in the most telegraphed way you'd expect in a horror movie. Dude manages to flee inside a building from one of the monsters and instantly goes "But what about my family!?" goes all wide-eyed starts backing up towards the opening behind him and shock and awe, he dies. It's so predictable that they're about to kill someone off when the randomly just loses all sense of self-preservation out of nowhere.
Definitely the most disappointing part of the whole movie is the ending. The whole movie essentially has the cast split up early and frequently and then get into different situations where they need to be quiet to avoid the monsters. There's two separate scenes involving the Mom at base and Murphy and Deaf Girl on the island where they're both trying to survive and eventually manage to kill the minimum of one monster that's after them... but then it cuts to credits.
That seems like such a hasty cut to credits. Bear in mind that there are potentially two tragic dilemmas facing both parties now; 1.) is that the Islanders may now be hostile to Murphy and Deaf Girl because they brought the first monster to their island in over a year and it resulted in numerous deaths. 2.) The island is supposedly 2 days away from base, which is ostensibly far less habitable now due to monsters breaking into it and water flooding in.
Murphy and Deaf Girl will have been gone for at least 4 days by the time they return, and Mom has already burned through 1 of the 2 oxygen tanks she just picked up and has been relying on to keep the baby quiet in a box.
Overall, the movie wasn't terrible, and the things I could grip about weren't really big gripes. Just a pretty standard horror movie with decent effects and a few wicked rampage scenes.
Final Verdict: [Okay]
A Quiet Place: Part II
Horror / English / 2021
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I randomly found myself in the mood to watch a horror movie. Also I've been blissfully unaware that A Quiet Place got a sequel, let alone a prequel soon to release, and is apparently one of the highest rated horror franchises on iMDb?
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Usually, before I watch a sequel, I tend to read up on my review of the previous movie to put myself in the headspace I was in immediately following that movie.
In this case I decided not to do that because A Quiet Place isn't a bad concept for a movie, but I do not have fond memories of the original, largely because the Apocalypse Mom thing just irritates me so much.
For this movie, I decided to put that whole trope aside because what's done is done, it technically still occurred in the chronology of this movie, but it's offscreen and now we're just left to dwell in the aftermath.
I would say overall my attitude towards Part II is definitely better than the first movie, I feel like there were fewer obvious things to complain about and apart from presenting an expanded "Day One" flashback opening, it quickly enough settles in the somewhat slow-burn that almost too quickly turns into all-out chaos.
On the positive side of things, Cillian Murphy gets retconned into a family friend that Apocalypse Mom and kids run into. They play around with the idea that he's become cold-hearted person and will turn them away, but thankfully they spare us that drama and he manages to play New Dad essentially. I'm not normally a big fan of Murphy, maybe because I'm sick of seeing his face in every Nolan movie, but he was okay in this.
There was one scene where it seemed like his character was resigned to dying, but also thankfully he managed to badass his way out of the situation and the trademark Father Figure character didn't have to die a second movie in a row.
Having said that, certain characters just seem to have plot armor. Even though Deaf Girl is at a distinct disadvantage compared to everyone else, she is also basically the main character and the contrast of her disability with these monsters' superpowers really does remove a lot of suspense from the scenes she's in.
I would easily admit that the CG is pretty solid in this, far more so than Furiosa, depressingly. The monsters are portrayed as so absurdly fast that for most of the time they're onscreen, they're barely rendered so almost never stand out as CG. There is I think one shot near the end of the movie where you get a close-up of a dead monster that does look pretty artificial, but it's hardly worth fussing over.
The story mostly works on it's own, but at least in the first third of the movie it does like to dwell on the characters and events of the previous movie just enough that you'd be missing some details if you hadn't seen it the first time. The cut from the flashback to the present is also super abrupt and it clearly expects you to remember the ending of the previous movie.
I feel like this movie tries to retread a bit more post-apocalypse cliches, particularly with regard to the whole "humanity is not worth saving anymore" trope, but at least it manages to subvert that a bit by following up that whole scene with eventually discovering island of peaceful humans happily coexisting without any monsters.
That scene also bothers me because it just felt lazy. Virtually no dialog is exchanged between Daddy Murphy, Deaf Girl, and the sudden new faction of humans with non-specific ill-intent. They just kinda glare at each other a bit before shit hits the fan, so there's absolutely nothing new here narratively, just the bare minimum of "It's the post-apocalype, time to play the THERE'S MORE THAN MONSTERS TO WORRY ABOUT BEYOND THE SAND TRAIL" bullshit, which I read just prior to watching this.
Now that I'm less fixated on stupid decisions made by the main characters and we see more of the monsters' patterns of behavior, the logic of the world once again starts to raise some questions.
WHAT is the point of killing humans? At no point whatsoever are the monsters portrayed to be eating humans, so there's zero case to make that they are hunting humans. This is reinforced by the fact that the monsters CONSISTENTLY move to attack humans making noises, rather than stopping at their kill and eating it. So when introduced into a crowd, the expected behavior is that the monster will move to strike everyone until nobody is making any noise.
I have to specify "nobody" because the monsters rarely seem to attack noisy objects, despite numerous non-human sources of noise throughout the world. Which doesn't make any sense either because the monsters are almost never attracted to human noises, they're attracted to noises made by something humans are interacting with.
Another thing I don't understand is why the hearing aid is a sonic weapon. It's awful nice to have an anti-monster device attached to your head, but why does it work? Surely you can't just crank up a hearing aid to an absurd volume, so is it a frequency they hate? If that's the case then why would the humans ever need to blow their eardrums out as they seem to every time they create audio feedback?
Yet ANOTHER thing that didn't make any sense is that Daddy Murphy takes Deaf Girl's hearing aid while she's sleeping in one scene and she has an emotional breakdown over it. Why did he do that? Especially if he was just going to return it when she woke up? It's usefulness against the monsters isn't even established to him prior to this scene.
What's even more baffling is that when he falls into the water later on, he manages to steal back the hearing aid and keep it in his mouth until he can reveal later that he managed to save it... only he doesn't return it then and there, he holds onto it for literally no reason at all, even as he and Deaf Girl are sneaking onto the island where the humans could be ENEMIES... and then even after she's introduced to them and they're getting along, he just still has this ****ing hearing aid for seemingly no other reason than for it to be a prop for him to show off to Black Guy.
Black Guy also dies in the most telegraphed way you'd expect in a horror movie. Dude manages to flee inside a building from one of the monsters and instantly goes "But what about my family!?" goes all wide-eyed starts backing up towards the opening behind him and shock and awe, he dies. It's so predictable that they're about to kill someone off when the randomly just loses all sense of self-preservation out of nowhere.
Definitely the most disappointing part of the whole movie is the ending. The whole movie essentially has the cast split up early and frequently and then get into different situations where they need to be quiet to avoid the monsters. There's two separate scenes involving the Mom at base and Murphy and Deaf Girl on the island where they're both trying to survive and eventually manage to kill the minimum of one monster that's after them... but then it cuts to credits.
That seems like such a hasty cut to credits. Bear in mind that there are potentially two tragic dilemmas facing both parties now; 1.) is that the Islanders may now be hostile to Murphy and Deaf Girl because they brought the first monster to their island in over a year and it resulted in numerous deaths. 2.) The island is supposedly 2 days away from base, which is ostensibly far less habitable now due to monsters breaking into it and water flooding in.
Murphy and Deaf Girl will have been gone for at least 4 days by the time they return, and Mom has already burned through 1 of the 2 oxygen tanks she just picked up and has been relying on to keep the baby quiet in a box.
Overall, the movie wasn't terrible, and the things I could grip about weren't really big gripes. Just a pretty standard horror movie with decent effects and a few wicked rampage scenes.
Final Verdict: [Okay]