A Quiet Place Part II

I really loved A Quiet Place so, when I heard that a sequel was in the works, I was quite apprehensive because I didn't think it could possibly compare to the original.  I saw the long-awaited Part II last night and all of my fears were allayed because it is brilliant.  The movie begins with a flashback to the day the aliens arrived and then the narrative shifts to the immediate aftermath of the alien attack on the Abbott family.  Evelyn (Emily Blunt), Regan (Millicent Simmonds), and Marcus (Noah Jupe) decide to leave with their newborn baby because their house and barn have been destroyed.  They hope to find other people who have survived and immediately encounter their neighbor Emmett (Cillian Murphy) who is distraught over the fact that he didn't do more to save his wife and son.  They hear a radio broadcast from a nearby island and Regan wants to go to them to tell them that the aliens can be defeated by the feedback from her cochlear implants.  Emmett begrudgingly goes after her while Evelyn stays behind in a makeshift bunker to care for Marcus who was injured in a bear trap.  Both groups must contend with the aliens but Regan and Emmett must also face groups of survivors who may or may not be sympathetic.  I found this story to be even more compelling than the first because it is an exploration of the toll that survival has taken on all of the characters and it is very affecting, particularly Emmett's character arc.  The action sequences are intense, to say the least, and there were several times when I literally jumped out of my seat.  I loved all of the parallels between Emmett and Regan's narrative and that of Evelyn and Marcus and the editing is particularly effective in creating suspense.  The sound design and the atmospheric score add tremendously to the almost unbearable tension.  Blunt and Murphy are outstanding in their roles but, in my opinion, Simmonds gives an incredibly powerful performance as her character tries to live up to her father's memory.  I do think the aliens are more menacing in the original because they are mostly left to the imagination rather than shown as they are in this movie but that is a small criticism.  This is a worthy successor to the original and it is definitely worth the wait necessitated by the pandemic.  I recommend seeing it in a theater!

Note:  Crowds usually give me anxiety but being in a packed IMAX theater at the beginning of a holiday weekend made me very happy because it seemed so normal!  A man stood up just as the movie was about to start and shouted, "Three cheers because we are all at a movie on a Friday night!"  Three cheers, indeed!