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Despite being planned for release before anyone had heard of
Covid-19, A Quiet Place Part II can be read as an allegory for the world’s
response to the pandemic.
That at least is the contention of Jerrine Tan in an op-ed
for Wired.
“The dystopian vignettes of deserted streets and shuttered
stores too intimately reflect what was very recently our own dystopian reality
under Covid-19,” she writes.
The same can be said of many a film set in a post-apocalyptic
world. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later or I Am Legend starring Will Smith
are just two visions of a virus wiping out most of humanity with survivors left
to face off against zombies or mutants.
Tan extends her treatise a little further though,
recognising it is her response to the film rather than the filmmaker’s intent
that she is critiquing.
The film premiered on March 8, 2020, but repeatedly delayed
its theatrical release due to Covid until this month and is, she finds, “uncannily
prescient about many of the challenges we have since encountered, making its
belated release ironically timely.”
For example, the character Emmett (Cillian Murphy) is depicted
isolated in an abandoned steel mill and reluctant to help anyone but himself.
“The strength of the film lies in getting him—and us—to recognize
that what is necessary in the face of disaster is actually the opposite,” of
retreat into ones “inner citadel” she contends.
This serves as an allegory for national responses to
Covid-19.
“Physical isolation measures such as the closing of borders
and travel restrictions may have been necessary, but a total solipsistic turn
inward will not ultimately help any country (developed or developing),
especially with regard to diplomatic engagement, sharing vaccine technology and
supplies, and cooperation on virus-related research,” says Tan.
Vaccinating an entire domestic population does no good with
such a transmissible and mutating virus if equal measures are not taking for
the good of all.
“Alien monsters and viruses alike have a knack for crossing
oceans and borders, penetrating bodies and communities,” she says.
It is the response of Emmett, empowered by child heroine
Regan, that Tan says “subverts the usual postapocalyptic paradigm, in which
survivors find a safe haven and make their way there in order to find community
and rebuild.”
Instead, Regan and Emmett reveal their discovery about how
feedback from the cochlear implants can be a defense against the monsters to
the other survivors, and enlist their help to broadcast the feedback over the
radio.
“Regan’s commitment to thinking beyond herself and even her
family is what ultimately and inadvertently saves them all,” she says.
“At this milestone in the pandemic, A Quiet Place
Part II serves as an ironically prescient… metaphor for the lessons we
have learned as a global community—that our lives and fates are inexorably
intertwined; that thinking selfishly about one's own protection will not work
as a long-term fail safe measure.”
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