The unsuspecting Covid fable in “Quiet Place Part Two”

When i watch quiet place Three years ago, in the cinema, like many people, I was disturbed by the immersive, terrifying, world-shocking silent weight of horror films.Last week, when I saw Quiet place part twoThis is the first time I have entered a theater or any room with so many people in a long time.This experience is my personal emotion, but I noticed ironically how I was incredibly aware in a movie based on silence noisy The cinema is. All the ambient sounds—the creak of popcorn, the creak of skinny jeans on the vinyl seats, the expected whimper—make me deeply aware of the presence and intimacy of other moviegoers. In the logic of the movie, these sounds can kill me; in the logic of our reality, even their breath can do this until a few months ago.

Watching a doomsday movie more than a year after the global pandemic is an incredible exercise. The dystopian episode of empty streets and closed shops too intimately reflects our recent dystopian reality under Covid-19.

So maybe, Quiet place part two Be criticized for lack of imagination-either because Over-committed to realism (Weird criticism of monster movies) Or not enough characters or monster backgrounds are provided. Many critics seem to forget that the movie was actually released before the pandemic hit. The film premiered in New York on March 8, 2020, but it was repeatedly postponed due to Covid. For a film made before the pandemic was approaching, it actually had an amazing foresight for many of the challenges we encountered afterwards, making its late release ironic.

The audience has realized the premise of the original work, which makes the audience excited about the noise in the sequel, and the film handles this very well. We flinched at the popping sound of plastic water bottles, flinched at the roar of a car engine, and held our breath at the click of our boots.The film plays sound subtly and counter-intuitively, subtly making the invisible and inaudible visible-shaping silence into soundless Can’t help but HearFor example, the “silence” of the world will be enhanced and drastically alleviated by the amplification of environmental noise: the singing of birds, the singing of cicadas, the rustling of leaves. Even without us, our world has never been truly quiet.

I am not interested in defending the political issues of the original and the sequel.If the first movie can be read as a review White race fear, The second one eliminates this possibility.It’s frightening that people of color Platinum II They either appeared reckless and were used as convenient scapegoats, or were sacrificed as noble martyrs for the survival of the white Abbott family.People can’t help but think of Nancy Pelosi’s Terrible gaffe The death of George Freud is called “sacrifice for justice”. In addition to the uncomfortable beautification, dependence, and romanticization of guns in the first film, there is also an homage to reproductive futurism: Evelyn (Emily Blunt) shuddered, “If we can’t protect ,who are we? [our children]? “Even the indomitable Brent, when she asked for real skeletons in her closet, Emmet (Killian Murphy) risked her life to take her daughter back to her traumatized former neighbor, Even if it was short-lived, it appeared in the full glory of “Karen”.

But the film also managed to raise some valuable questions. When the Abbott family first met Emmett in an abandoned steel mill, he was unwilling to help them. In fact, he has completely retreated to a place isolated from the world, so that the closed blast furnace has become his literal and metaphorical inner chamber-a protection that provides the threat of suffocation.It is this tension Quiet place part one with two More extensive exploration is also possible: shooting can save your life, but it will always attract more deadly creatures. The United States and many other countries took this into consideration during the pandemic, because many people suffer from mental health and domestic abuse during the lockdown; on the contrary, premature reopening or exciting social activities will eventually lead to more serious infections Wave and inevitably lead to more deaths. Emmet’s inner temple symbolizes his asceticism and refusal to contact the world. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin proposed two forms of freedom: positive and negative. Negative freedom describes a person’s freedom without obstacles, while positive freedom means that it is possible to take action to control one’s life. However, positive freedom presents a paradox: in an oppressive system, a person may change his beliefs, convince himself that his desires have shrunk, retreat back to the “inner fortress”, and make himself feel satisfied. This is what Emmet did, and the power of this movie is to make him — and we — realize that what is needed to face disaster is actually the opposite.