The 2018 horror movie directed by John Krasinski is about a post-apocalyptic world overrun by vicious, bug-like aliens with an incredible sense of hearing. If someone makes even the slightest sound, the creatures come running and swiftly execute whoever made the noise. Stories like that, with a brilliant premise that's instantly intriguing, often make for good franchises (especially since there was still plenty left to learn about the monsters).
Yet Krasinski, who also co-wrote the film with Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, crafted a tightly focused story on a family living in this world. And while the dad of the family (also Krasinski) dies in the movie, the story is all about how the family manages to fight back against the three alien creatures that attack their farm. While there obviously was room for a sequel, the story told in the first one was perfectly satisfying.
But A Quiet Place was so successful that they went ahead and made a sequel anyway. Thankfully, that movie is really quite good and certainly worth a watch before it leaves Netflix on Oct. 11. Originally, Krasinski didn’t think A Quiet Place warranted a sequel.
In May 2018, just two months after the surprise blockbuster success of the first movie and a few weeks after a sequel was announced by Paramount, Krasinski told Deadline “To be perfectly honest, [a sequel] was never really on my mind while we were making it. I never really thought of it as an expanded world; I always thought of it as a one-off.” Krasinski changed his mind after realizing he could shift the focus to Regan, the deaf teenage daughter played by Millicent Simmonds. That hope is played out through Cillian Murphy's Emmett, who goes from a lost soul to someone fighting for a better future.
By building on the themes from the first movie, Krasinski made a sequel that is complementary to the original. While it’s not quite as good or as shocking, A Quiet Place Part II expands the world created in the first one. It shows the initial invasion of the creatures, and reveals more about them, like their inability to swim.
We also get to see how others are surviving, in the same way some of the best zombie TV shows and movies deal with people encountering other survivors. While the first movie is a tight, contained story about a family, the second one is about seeing some of that wider world through the eyes of that same family. The movie also made me realize just how ripe A Quiet Place’s world is for expansion.
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