"A Quiet Place II"

[Andrew NDB]

Just saw it. I liked it. Though without spoiling anything... wow... that ending really gave me whiplash. It just STOPS. It needed like a 5 minute epilogue or something there, sorely.

Also Emily Blunt barely gets to do anything in this one. She gets like the C story. It's mostly about the deaf kid's adventures.

[IMJ]

Interesting. I really liked the first one - still looking forward to this one.

Remember a recent horror flick "Light's Out"? That's another modern horror flick that was pretty good. I honestly thought that would get a franchise, but after the first one - nothing.

Hopefully A Quiet Place can keep it going.

[Andrew NDB]

Never caught Lights Out. That's the one with the bad guy from Avatar, right?

[CyberCubed]

Just watched this now that it's streaming, I'm a bit disappointed because so much focus was on the kids. I thought Emily Blunt was going to be like Ripley in Aliens 2 where she'd become an action heroine against the aliens. Instead she barely did anything outside of one scene and spent most of the rest on the run or holding her baby and hiding.

Adding the other new male lead to the cast was pointless because he just felt like a stand-in for Jim from the last movie. And yeah, the movie just abruptly ends out of nowhere, I had no idea that was going to be the end since there was still 10 minutes left after...but it was all credits.

Really...strange movie if I have to say. The first one was an interesting sci-fi take on aliens who attack through sound and felt one-and-done, this felt like a "kids become the heroes" type of movie. I guess it was misleading marketing making Emily Blunt look like she'd be an action hero?

[The Deadman]

Ill probably marathon both at some point this weekend.

[IMJ]

The second one was entertaining on concept (the concept and the whole premise is cool), but the story was awful. Cillian Murphy played a surprisingly great character, but it's another instance where they couldn't crack a solid story and crapped out a sequel where everything that transpires is essentially because one or two people go off on their own and do dumb $#!(.

Whereas the first one was a great endeavor, I think people will look back at this one as just another underwhelming sequel that doesn't do much.

[AquaParade]

Ten minutes in and I'm a tad annoyed because everyone in town is acting in unison and behaving as if they know exactly what is going on or what they're up against. Almost as if it's a sequel instead of a prequel.

[Andrew NDB]

My biggest problem was with the rape gang/cannibals. I get that it's PG-13 so they couldn't really serve either side (are they a rape gang? are they cannibals? are they both? we don't know)... but the whole lot of them never even paid off. I thought for sure at least some of them would end up following the main cast to the island and then we'd get a "the people are worse than the aliens" and then maybe the aliens could even show up to kill them and "save the day"... but there ended up being absolutely no point to their involvement. It's like they needed another couple of drafts to figure out what they wanted to do with this story.

I don't hold this as a gripe but just a personal thing... I was hoping to see other kinds of aliens. Or their equivalent of a queen, as much as that might be a trope by this point. Some Starship Troopers-like variety of alien types would have been something new.

[IMJ]

My biggest problem was with the rape gang/cannibals. I get that it's PG-13 so they couldn't really serve either side (are they a rape gang? are they cannibals? are they both? we don't know)... but the whole lot of them never even paid off. I thought for sure at least some of them would end up following the main cast to the island and then we'd get a "the people are worse than the aliens" and then maybe the aliens could even show up to kill them and "save the day"... but there ended up being absolutely no point to their involvement. It's like they needed another couple of drafts to figure out what they wanted to do with this story.

I don't hold this as a gripe but just a personal thing... I was hoping to see other kinds of aliens. Or their equivalent of a queen, as much as that might be a trope by this point. Some Starship Troopers-like variety of alien types would have been something new.

The franchise has sort of crossed that "survival Horror" genre and over to Sci-Fi. There's an intersection of both there, but yeah.

The second flick was definitely weak though. They put no effort into constructing a story-branching narrative as much as "put these people in whatever situation it takes to pump out a sequel".