A Quiet Place 2 gives a much clearer picture of the origins of the blind monsters terrorizing an apocalyptic Earth, building on the subtle information Lee had acquired in the basement from A Quiet Place. A Quiet Place 2 is the anticipated sequel to John Krasinski’s critically acclaimed horror movie A Quiet Place, expanding on the story of the Abbott family from where they left off in the previous film. The family survived so long partially due to their prior habitual use of sign language, a tactic the new film shows not all survivors have learned still.
The monsters have a similar appearance to those in the Alien franchise, which isn’t surprising considering Krasinski has quoted Alien as one of his inspirations for the film. Right off the bat, A Quiet Place explains that the monsters are blind and attracted to sound, and are quick to brutally attack their victims once any noise is detected. Certain weaknesses learned in the first two films are that running water distracts the monsters’ hearing, hearing aids projecting a high-frequency pitch through contact with radios, speakers, or microphones debilitate them, and they are unable to swim. They are also quite difficult to kill, typically only dying when their faces/brains are destroyed by bullets, axes, poles, etc. A Quiet Place 2 also added that the monsters cannot be killed by fire, but will die if blasted in an explosion.
The villain in any first horror movie is almost always a mysterious figure, typically intriguing audiences enough to warrant an origin story. Thankfully for A Quiet Place and its great ending, the sequel was able to include most of the monsters' origins in its short opening sequence in which Krasinski depicts the first moments when the monsters attack his New England town. A few clues to the monsters were hinted at in the first film, but A Quiet Place 2 gives much more information on what they are and how they arrived on Earth.
The monsters in A Quiet Place have a curious appearance that's similar to the creatures in Alien or the Demogorgons in Stranger Things, but doesn't exactly indicating what species or type of creation they fall under. A Quiet Place 2 confirms early on that the monsters are in fact aliens, and are later referred to as such. The idea is hinted at in the A Quiet Place's newspaper clippings that Lee (Krasinski) has of meteors crashing down on Earth, but nothing specifically indicated that the meteor was the vehicle through which the monsters were transported.
The alien nature of the monsters is confirmed in A Quiet Place 2 in the flashback scene to day 1 of the apocalypse where Lee is walking through the store seen earlier in A Quiet Place. The store’s TV is broadcasting news about a mysterious giant meteor crashing in a foreign country, though the New England town reacts as if it were just a comet coming down in a faraway country that won’t affect them. Minutes later, Lee and Emmett’s (Cillian Murphy) sons’ baseball game is interrupted when everyone sees a meteor coming down their way. The town begins to disperse from the unknown meteor about to crash, turning into a frenzy when alien creatures begin attacking and killing the citizens.
Whichever alternate planet the aliens come from, it likely doesn’t have water - or at least water deep enough to drown in. One of the monsters' most significant weaknesses that A Quiet Place 2 introduces is their inability to swim. When Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and Emmett are attacked, the only way they escape being killed is that they dive into the water, taking a risk to swim away from the chaos and discovering that the monster that jumps in after them immediately drowns. Since the monsters have no ability to swim and have not adapted to this skill, it’s likely the planet they come from doesn’t feature bodies of water.
The most obvious clue from the first A Quiet Place that the monsters are aliens is the newspaper clipping of a meteor dropping in Mexico, suggesting that the creatures came from another planet and are neither a science experiment gone wrong nor a manifestation from Earth. There’s also a small newspaper clipping from A Quiet Place with the headline “Alien Invasion,” but it seems more like a guess than an actual confirmation of the species. Another clue in A Quiet Place is the young son’s obsession with rocket ships and escaping the chaos through space. These subtle clues indicate an introduction or solution to the issue connected to alternate worlds and space travel.
One fault with many sequels is that when they are required to include more information about the past or the origins of a situation, they tend to adjust certain details for the narrative to fit more cleanly with their new exploration. A Quiet Place 2 does this in a few ways that don’t entirely make sense to the aliens’ origins hinted at in the first film. For example, the newspaper clipping Lee has posted in the basement indicates that the first known meteor carrying the aliens crashed in Mexico. If the meteor had crashed in Mexico, it wouldn’t be as visible as it was for this coastal New England town in A Quiet Place 2. In fact, the aliens come so quickly after the meteor hits that it isn't possible that the same meteor in A Quiet Place 2 had crashed in Mexico.
Another plot hole with the aliens arriving on Earth is that the meteor they were carried on was enormous. More immediate destruction would have been caused by the meteor’s impact, debris, and explosion radius than by the aliens themselves. If the meteor was that close to them in A Quiet Place 2, it’s nearly impossible that they wouldn’t have felt some of its impact, especially since the aliens began to attack so quickly after its initial sighting.
A Quiet Place subtly mentions multiple crashes on Lee’s whiteboard, which reads cities and timestamps like “Bogota: 19:52, Moscow 19:54, and Boston: 19:58.” This creates another plot hole because there’s no way that newspapers would have been able to widely circulate a meteor crashing in Mexico or Singapore with no mention of alien creatures before the meteor in New England hit. In A Quiet Place 2, Americans have no knowledge of the aliens or a meteor until they see the live newscast on TV and the meteor itself coming down, so a newspaper story about an international crash wouldn't have had time to be printed and circulated before the ensuing chaos.
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June 01, 2021 at 05:15AM
