A Quiet Place Part II (2020)

Day 1

Lee Abbot (John Krasinski) drives down the street and walks into a local market in his small town.  The owner is staring at the TV, watching something smoking.  When Lee asks about it, the man says there was an explosion.  Continuing about his day, Lee grabs some fruit and then makes his way to a baseball field where his son, Marcus, is playing.  Among the spectators is Emmett (Cillian Murphy) with his son.  There is also Evelyn Abbot (Emily Blunt), Regan Abbot (Millicent Simmonds), and Beau Abbot.  During the game, a fireball is seen coming down from the sky in the distance.  The game breaks up and everyone leaves.  And then the first monster descends on the town.

Day 474

With her newborn in her arms, Emily gets Regan and Marcus to collect what they can from the farm before setting out.  Regan uses her father's map to find another survivor.  Perhaps they can find shelter with someone else.  To their surprise, they find Emmett.  He is alone, his wife and son both having died.  He'd rather Emily move on but circumstances are dire.  Regan is determined to make use of the newly-discovered feedback sound that practically disables the monsters.

The movie is an amazingly good prequel/sequel.  The story is tight and well-told.  Events are setup so that the audience can enjoy the eventual payoff.  The tension is kept high.  Very impressive.  If you liked the first one, you will definitely like this one.

My big qualm about this movie and its predecessor is the fact that these things were able win so easily.  I'll accept that their hide is thick and might protect against shotguns or small arms but a .50 caliber gun would cut them in half.  And now it turns out they can't swim.  The Navy should be sitting just off the coast making a racket to attract them and wipe them out.

Mary Poppins Returns (2018)

Finally saw this film and I was most let down.  The movie - set 25 years after the original - opens with a pair of lawyers posting an eviction notice on the door of the Banks' home.  Michael (Ben Whishaw) had taken out a loan after his wife died and has absent-mindedly failed to make payments for the last three months.  Though willing to pay the three month due, it is too late for that.  He must pay off the entire loan.  Not a problem, he has shares in the bank from his father.  But he has misplaced them.  When finally discovered, he had used the share certificate to draw a sketch because he must have been short on paper.  Only by happenstance does his youngest son save the sketch - not to frame or save as a family keepsake - to cut in pieces to patch an old kite.  Michael is a pathetic, incompetent man-child, a hopeless buffoon.  I disliked him from start to finish.  To make matters worse, Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) declares that she will stay until the door opens.  Which door is that?  The door that allows Michael to view the world as he did in childhood.  Helpless widower with three children retreats into childhood.

 

Then we have Michael's older sister, Jane (Emily Mortimer).  She is a spinster who spends her time picketing for workers' rights, a throw back to her mother's suffragette marches in the original film.  It is unclear how she earns a living or why, at this late date, she should be romantically attracted to Jack the lamplighter (Lin-Manuel Miranda).  She acts like some teenaged girl with her first crush around Jack.  Jane is in her mid-thirties and should have had much better options than Jack that she clearly skipped.

 

All the dazzling musical numbers, the return of Dick Van Dyke, and talents of Miranda and Blunt  can't overcome these underlying facts.  Michael is a failure and will continue to be a failure.  He escaped his deserved fate this time thanks to Deus ex machina.  He and his children will not be so lucky next time.  Jane's romance with Jack is just a fling; if she was seeking marriage, she would have long since been married.  Clearly, if this is the adults they came to be, Mary Poppins failed them as a nanny.

 

Watch the original instead.

A Quiet Place

The story opens in an abandoned town sometime in the fall; the trees have red and gold leaves.  In a store that has been ransacked, a figured dashes through an aisle.  Soon, all 5 members of the Abbot family are shown.  They are on a shopping run and try to do everything in complete silence.  A newspaper hints at the monsters that hunt by sound.  On the way home, the youngest child turns on a toy that makes noise.  Before his father, Lee (John Krasinski), can get to him, a monster dashes from the woods and carries him away.  The story resumes a year later.  Evelyn (Emily Blunt) is pregnant and Regan (Millicent Simmonds) - who is deaf - is wracked by guilt because she gave her little brother the toy that summoned the monster.

 

In some ways, the movie reminded me of the recent It Comes At Night.  There is no explanation of how these monsters arrived on scene.  Sure, there mention of Day 89 or Day 472 but what happened on Day 0?  They arrived?  That was a benefit to the movie since it doesn't matter as far as the story is concerned.

 

The movie is excellent and well made.  The pacing is great, the tension is high, and the characters are well-developed despite the limited dialogue.  Really worth seeing.

 

Nitpicks: Yes, despite being a great movie that I recommend, there are some problems.  Why doesn't Lee have a big rifle?  Evelyn managed to kill one of the monsters with a shotgun (which is a terrible weapon against armor) so a rifle would have punched through that dense hide.  Granted, the gunshot would draw more monsters but how many of these things are there?  There are SO many rifles in the US that it would have required a huge invasion of these things to depopulate that rural town in only 3 months time.  At one point, Lee takes his son to the river and they speak, explaining how the river's noise masks them from the monsters.  If that's the case, why don't you live at the river?  We know there are other survivors in the surrounding countryside.  Why don't any of them live at the river?  Lee has setup a radio and he signals an SOS but gets no response.  Was even the US Navy wiped out?  Shouldn't there be some response?  Cade, the child who was killed, was 3 or 4 years old.  How do you keep a child that age quiet?  The monsters chase after any sound, which means you can lead them where you want them.  The monsters had some clearly exploitable weaknesses before the big one is finally discovered.