A Quiet Place II was released in the UK a few months ago and I really liked it. But while a tense film and excellent study of family and humanity, didn’t manage to improve upon its predecessor. It is full of great moments but by the film’s end the plot had really not progressed any further past the ending of the previous film.
But one scene that has really stuck in my mind was the opening!
John Krasinski joked in an Q&A with Edgar Wright that he wrote the opening scene because he worried killing himself off in the first film wasn’t a good career move for an actor. But when tied together with the first Quiet Place, the opening scene manages to be in my mind, the most powerful and thought provoking sequence in the two part franchise.
Spoilers Ahead…
The opening of the sequel would find itself very at home in the opening of the first film, taking place on Day One of the alien invasion that has created the silent dystopia in which the world now lives. But A Quiet Place One is almost entirely self-contained in the post-apocalyptic world, there is no talk of a previous life and it is up to the audience to remember what they’ve lost, this is increasingly hard to do though as the plot becomes entirely focused on the family’s survival.
A Quiet Place 2 however chooses to acknowledge this area of the family’s life. We follow a father on his way to his son’s baseball game, he lives in an idyllic small town in America and is enjoying what would be a very pleasant Saturday. Although the camera makes sure to gut punch the audience with a painful reminder of the toy rocket ship that caused so much pain in the family.
The arrival of the aliens underplays itself, not with an Independence Day or Cloverfield style chaos descending on the town, but a slow build of tension and unease among the people as they leave the baseball game, looking for their families and not sure what is happening or what they should do. Even though the audience is aware that most of these people won’t make it and life won’t return to normal, we all quietly root for them.
Eventually chaos does ensue, but because of the build it feels earned and we have experienced a world that we know and love being slowly taken from us. It serves as a reminder of everything the family had lost in the first film and all that they had to adapt to. Which is the real horror of the scene.
It also serves to make the discovery of an island colony where people are free to talk, sing and live a relatively normal life, all the more meaningful.
While the first film was a survival film, the second is much more a film about the humanity of the family, as shown in the character arcs of the children and the expressed desire to one day return to a normal life. Even though with the little progress made throughout films, it does make the audience wonder if that will ever happen.
T H E N A I V E F I L M M A K E R 