A Quiet Place was one of the biggest hits of 2018, so it was not a surprise when John Krasinski decided to make a sequel. It was a little disheartening, because A Quiet Place is such a perfect, self-contained story, but in the blockbuster era of Hollywood, nothing is allowed to stand alone, so here we are with A Quiet Place Part II. The first trailer dropped on New Year’s Day, and it looks promising. Like if this has to be a franchise, at least it looks like Krasinski (who is the sole credited writer this time around) found something worth exploring.
I’m not enamored with the sequence that is a flashback to the start of the alien invasion. I get it, with all the noise and screaming and cars versus the later quieter parts. But one of the best parts of A Quiet Place is that it just left “what happened” to a few background headline clippings painting a loose picture of invasion. The film didn’t bother with explaining every little detail, it just made the world believable so that all we needed to know was that something invaded and basically ended society. It was enough. But, when you make a franchise, the almost unavoidable instinct is to explain everything from the first movie, so here we go back to Day 0 to get a look at society ending.
But then it cuts to the “present” and Emily Blunt leading her family, minus Dad, to a hopefully safer location, and then Cillian Murphy shows up and hell is other people. A Quiet Place II looks like it’s headed into “what is worth saving anyway” territory, which is something The Walking Dead explored in its early, good seasons, but that is always fertile story ground. Especially as so much of A Quiet Place is grounded in family dynamics, it will be interesting to see what Krasinski does with these characters now that they are a fractured family and must find a new dynamic. Positioning Murphy as a more cynical survivor who doesn’t believe in saving people is a decent setup, too, and I will put money on him being a secret villain who tries to kill everyone at some point. Plus he’s got fantastic crazy eyes, so the casting is good. Even being meh on the Day 0 stuff, this is a solid first look at A Quiet Place Part II, which promises to, if nothing else, stress us all out very much.
