A Quiet Place Part II
Year: 2021
Rating: PG-13
Length: 97 minutes / 1.61 hours
I’m not usually a fan of horror films, so when A Quiet Place (2018) came out, it was a unique enough concept to pique my interest. While I appreciated the original concept, which played off the audio-visual nature of movies, the cliffhanger ending left me wanting more. Fast forward three years, and I finally got to see the sequel. It was…disappointing. I think I had gotten my hopes up after the first movie wowed me with its suspense and PG-13-level horror but A Quiet Place Part II (2021) was basically just more of the same.
What’s perhaps the most frustrating thing about both these movies is that they could have easily been combined both films and still kept the run-time below three hours. With each movie being around 90 minutes long, there could have been a tighter story between the two entities if some repetitive scenes were cut out of the sequel. The fact that it’s clear they want this franchise to keep going is frustrating because the sequel’s plot felt like a beat-for-beat repeat of the first movie while introducing more questions than it answered.
I can still appreciate the sound design that goes into this kind of horror-thriller, but that’s all it really has going for it. They didn’t learn anything new about the aliens, they didn’t develop any new ways to kill them, and they ended up copying the same cliffhanger ending from Part I. I’d love to see a re-cut of both of these movies together, perhaps even in chronological order so the alien invasion flashback that started this film off would have set the stage for the combined film. In the end, I’ll still probably see Part III (2023), but there need to be some significant improvements.
More of the same without advancing the larger plot significantly, I give A Quiet Place Part II 3.0 stars out of 5.
