Here is my review of A Quiet Place Part II

Did you hear that post-apocalyptic survival stories like this are inherently fascist? You wanna keep away from the sort of people who get giddy at the idea of a world where societal structures (and open carry laws) have vanished. Mind you, most of them do bugger off to prepper colonies in the mountains, with only brief sojourns to the US capital. Anyway, in this crummy sequel John Krasinski, whose Republican leanings are amongst Hollywood’s worst-kept secrets, comes surprisingly close to critiquing this fallacy of self-sufficent individualism. The introduction of Cillian Murphy’s traumatised survivor adds a note of nihilism to the wholesome all-you-need-is-family core of this blockbuster creature feature, his character having lost his entire family to the willowy-limbed antagonists.

Except Jim Halpert/Jack Ryan/Mr Benghazi’s small-c conservatism means that family still trumps Murphy’s hard-won isolationism within the space of a cut. AQP2 (as all the cool kids are calling it) consolidates the worst bits of the first film — clunky visual storytelling, boring monster design¹ — and lacks most of its pleasures. It’s both tension- and scare-free, barring a tense prologue, and the emotional content is centred almost entirely on Krasinski’s absence, like he’s Tom Sawyer at his own funeral. Its additions to the world and the questions it raises are glimpsed, then dismissed, from a gang of feral survviors with pink eye to an island idyll protected from the apparently hydrophobic-beasties. The main thing AQP2 asks is: what if a dad directed The Road? And the answer is: it’d be shite.