A Quiet Place Part 2
100 words or less:
The second Quiet place is an entertaining thrill ride that will go from giving you a jump scare of a bird flyin past a character’s face to the terror of seeing a killer alien quietly approaching the main character in an out of focus, crawl. The overall movie is excellent and a great way to get your fitness tracking watch to thing you are doing cardio, however in my opinion it suffers from a slightly disappointing ending that seems to be leading us to what will inevitably be a third quiet place movie, (not that I am complaining about that)
Full review:
The first Quiet place movie came out of nowhere from John Krasinski and blew me out of the water. All I could picture going into that movie was the goofy guy from The Office trying to make a horror movie and dang did he crush it, so the follow up to that had much higher expectations. The opening Scene of the movie taking place on day one of the invasion is beautifully shot and absolutely terrifying. from the moment you see the fire streaming across the sky to the quiet moments in the bar trying to avoid making noise it is an excellent thrill ride contained in a 15 minute scene. Starting off strong and with one of my favorite scenes in the whole movie.
Then we jump to moments after the first film ended. One alien dead but more out there and plenty of terror left in store. One of the greatest concepts that I love for this movie (and the first one by extension) is that the jump scares that take place are never that of the alien jumping out from behind a curtain, but are instead false alarms. You know a scare is coming and you think it will be an alien but they subvert the expectation and throw a curveball. this then leads to a false sense of security for you and the characters. “The scare already happened so nothing else bad will happen to us” you’ll think as the camera goes to showing a close up of the main character with a blurry background. then what happens to slowly crawl into the blur? Aliens. Fantastic and something I would prefer to the traditional spooky thing jumping out from the shadows of most horror movies (because I am a total wuss and have nightmares about those scares).
As a Cilian Murphy fan, his inclusion is fantastic in this movie. His character’s arc and motivations are somewhat selfish but, like most characters in most movies, he grows and changes through the movie. He is just a fantastic actor and I will enjoy anything he is in.
Emily Blunt is a fantastic lead in this as well and her character (despite questionable decisions in getting pregnant when there are aliens with super hearing that kill anything that makes noise) is a badass. While there are many questionable decisions made in the movie I like to wave that off as “horror movie decision making” just like the Geico commercial, when you’re in a horror movie, you make poor decisions. It is all just to progress the story and keep a sense of danger in every move the characters make.
I don’t claim to be a horror movie buff by any means, but This movie definitely keeps you tense throughout. My fitbit hit 115 bpm at one point because I was stressing, and in my opinion that makes this movie a success, despit the slight sequel baity ending.
Overall, if you want an entertaining thriller where you never feel the main cast is safe from the ever looming and super creepy alien threat, and you are okay with a bit of gore, this is the movie for you.
7/10 Somewhere Beyond the Sea.
