'A Quiet Place 2' evolves enough to justify the series

The original A Quiet Place created one of the most intense movie-watching experiences of my life, and I'll never forget it.

As I reflected on it back then, however, I truly felt like it was a one-trick pony. And since the movie really didn't seem to be setting up a direct sequel, I thought it was a perfect one-off with a relatively clean ending. When A Quiet Place Part II was announced, I read conflicting stories stating that writer/director John Krasinski both planned and didn't plan to write a sequel when he worked on the original film. Again, I personally felt the original was great, but was too gimmicky to merit a sequel, though I was left with many questions about the thin slice of this world I had witnessed at the time, and I would've been fine getting answers in another movie.

Sometimes, though, leaving questions unanswered without compromising the integrity and completeness of the story and world is a good thing, which is why the announcement of a sequel worried me. The original film maintained an aura and mystery that didn't need to be solved fully. Details like where the creatures came from, what state the rest of the world was in, and other pieces of context really could've fleshed out this world Krasinski created - these are details I was dying to know - and yet, I'm kind of glad we didn't get bogged down with a comprehensive world-building explanation. That kind of information dump would've better suited a novelization of the movie. Krasinski instead chose to keep a tight focus on the family's survival instincts and the moment-to-moment tension of their situation. A more simplistic, yet engaging, approach to storytelling in which less certainly is more.

In Hollywood, banking on the success of the original without a sequel initially in mind rarely leads to the same high-quality product for a variety of reasons. I was afraid not only that we would get too much exposure to this world, which would cheapen and disenchant my feelings about the first movie, but that a sequel also would be vulnerable to continuity errors. Looking at sequels from a broader sense, they either are too similar to the original or too different, and both scenarios tend to leave audiences wishing the original was left alone.

All of those trappings were primed to ruin my feelings of A Quiet Place Part II.

Somehow, some way, I felt the sequel was just as good, if not better, than the original.

The opening scene was the first major key to bridging the two movies organically. When the "Day 1" text is typed on the screen, I was worried we'd be in for the trendy time-hopping mechanic that is poorly utilized most of the time; thankfully, that was not the case. Instead, we got to witness what exactly happened that first day. Though it wasn't a thorough explanation (a meteor crashes), it was all the context I needed.

The second major major key to the sequel's success is how it evolved/iterated off the original. Sure, there was plenty of the classic tension (is classic too strong a word for a two-movie series?) derived from the need to be quiet. I felt the sequel could've shortened some of those scenes a little bit; seriously, we get that every step the characters take need to be extremely slow, but that doesn't mean it should be overused to pad the movie's runtime. Regardless, Krasinski kept intact the essence of what made the first movie great, but delved into new territories plenty enough to expand the scope of the first movie without veering too far from the beaten path (though the island scene towed that line quite closely; more on that later).

The best example of expanding the scope was the scene at the docks. Here, two of our main characters get captured by these unhinged, perhaps unhealthy, bandits who apparently take issue with any intruders, alien creature or human. The movie begs us to inquire about these bandits. Who are they? What happened to them? Why are they so hostile? But their mere existence was a perfect insight to one particular nook and cranny of the story's bigger picture. Some people found other methods of surviving this disaster. Who knows to what drastic measures other pockets of civilization resorted, but seeing these effects of the fallout gave the overarching story much-needed dimension, even if we didn't get a whole lot of explanation. Again, sometimes less is more.

From a technical standpoint, the movie was fine, but I had some issues with the sound mixing. These movies have maybe the best opportunities to communicate - through good sound mixing - the extremes of over-the-top loudness and hold-your-breath quiet. More so than the first movie, plenty of scenes lent themselves to more gimmicky tricks with sound mixing (the train scene and the sniper scene are the two examples that stuck with me), but flat predictable really muted those scenes' impact (you see what I did there?).

This is a small qualm, but I also didn't how similar the character development matched the storyline of the video game "The Last of Us" on PlayStation. Though that doesn't invalidate Krasinski's work in my mind, it very much felt like he ripped off concepts from that game.

So now we must ask the lingering questions. Will Krasinski make a third movie? And a fourth? Will this become a huge franchise? I'm not sure how much more time I want to spend in this world; because it started so small, it would require a lot of broadening to keep it interesting. But we could have seen the seeds for the next story already planted. When we arrive on the island, we discover that a small camp of survivors has started a new life, a life without fear of the creatures (the aliens can't swim, so the people are safe on the island). But it also seems like these people are fine isolating themselves from the rest of civilization instead of, oh I don't know, trying to help?!? I could see a sense of moral obligation dividing the survivors and creating new motivations in future installments of the series. Or we could just get a movie about the humans exterminating the aliens only to discover that the aliens have adapted, or maybe there are new threats altogether. There's plenty of story to mine, and I'm hopeful that Krasinski has the chops to improve his writing, world-building, and directing enough to keep the series interesting.