A Quiet Place 2’s Alien Monster Origins Explained
Emily Bell A Quiet Place 2 further explores the post-apocalyptic Earth the Abbotts live in, including the origins of the alien monsters who attack humanity.
The sequel A Quiet Place Part II gives a much clearer picture of the monster origins for the blind creatures terrorizing an apocalyptic Earth. The movie builds on the subtle information Lee (John Krasinski) had acquired in the basement from A Quiet Place. Fittingly, A Quiet Place 2 reveals alien origins for the monsters, with the alien design giving the horror movie a distinct sci-fi edge.
A Quiet Place 2 is the anticipated sequel to John Krasinski’s critically acclaimed horror movie, expanding on the story of the Abbott family, whose habitual use of sign language allowed them to communicate without the monsters detecting them. A Quiet Place explained that the monsters are blind and attracted to sound, and are quick to brutally attack their victims once any noise is detected. A Quiet Place's monster design makes them quite difficult to kill, with a kind of body armor that makes them immune to fire, and typically only die when their faces/brains are destroyed by bullets or other strong weaponry. The alien monsters in the A Quiet Place movies have certain weaknesses like aural sensitivity and the inability to swim.
Horror movie villains are almost always mysterious figures, typically intriguing audiences enough to warrant an origin story. Thankfully, A Quiet Place Part II reveals the monsters' origins. A few clues to the monsters were set up in the first film, but A Quiet Place 2 gives much more information on what they are and how they arrived on Earth.
A Quiet Place Part II Reveals The Monsters Are Alien
The A Quiet Place 2 monster design is similar to the creatures in Alien or the Demogorgons in Stranger Things. A Quiet Place Part II confirms early on that the monsters are in fact aliens, and later refers to them as such. The idea is hinted at earlier in the horror franchise as well; in A Quiet Place, newspaper clippings that Lee has reference meteors crashing down on Earth, but nothing specifically connected the meteor with the monsters' arrival.
The alien origin of the monsters is confirmed in A Quiet Place 2 in the flashback scene to day 1 of the apocalypse. Lee walks through a store shown earlier in A Quiet Place, and the store’s TV is broadcasting news about a mysterious giant meteor crashing in a foreign country. Shortly thereafter, however, the Abbott family attends a baseball game that is interrupted by a sudden meteor. The town starts to run from the impending crash, and the confusion turns into a frenzy when alien creatures begin attacking and killing the citizens. The implication is clear: the A Quiet Place monsters are alien.
Where Did The A Quiet Place Monsters Come From?
Although neither movie spends too much time explaining the A Quiet Place monsters' origin, Krasinski said in an interview (via Collider) that the aliens came to Earth after their homeworld was destroyed:
"So the idea is if they grew up on a planet that had no humans and no light then they don’t need eyes, they can only hunt by sound. They also develop a way to protect themselves from everything else so that’s why they’re bulletproof and all these things. ... [which is] also the reason why they were able to survive kind of the explosion of their planet and then survive on these meteorites, because they’ve evolved to be bulletproof. Until they open themselves up to be vulnerable, they’re completely invulnerable.”
These details reveal that A Quiet Place's alien monsters arrived from a planet much harsher than Earth that lacked any kind of light. The alien planet's environment forced the creatures to develop their strong body armor that makes the creatures so difficult to kill in A Quiet Place. The monsters were strong enough to survive their planet exploding, which speaks to how invulnerable they are to force.
The A Quiet Place aliens' planet also likely didn’t have water — or at least water deep enough to drown in. One of the monsters' most significant weaknesses that A Quiet Place 2 introduces is their inability to swim. When Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and Emmett are attacked, they escape by diving into the water, taking a risk to swim away from the chaos. By doing so, they're able to watch as the monster that jumps in after them immediately drowns. Based on that behavior, it's safe to assume the aliens don't have experience with bodies of water.
Alien Monster Clues In A Quiet Place 1
The most obvious clue from the first A Quiet Place that the creatures are aliens is the newspaper clipping of a meteor landing in Mexico, suggesting the monsters came from another planet and are neither a science experiment gone wrong nor a manifestation from Earth. There’s also a small newspaper clipping from A Quiet Place with the headline “Alien Invasion,” but it seems more like a guess than an actual confirmation of the species. Another clue in A Quiet Place is the young son’s obsession with rocket ships and escaping the chaos through space. These subtle clues indicate a connection between the problems on Earth and space travel.
A Quiet Place 2's Alien Origin Plot Hole?
One fault with movie sequels is that when they include more information about the past or the origins of a situation, they tend to adjust certain details for the narrative to fit more cleanly with their new exploration. This causes a few movie plot holes in A Quiet Place 2 regarding the aliens’ origins hinted at in the first film. For example, the newspaper clipping Lee has posted in the basement indicates that the first known meteor carrying the aliens crashed in Mexico. If the meteor had crashed in Mexico, it wouldn’t be as visible as it was for this coastal New England town in A Quiet Place 2. In fact, the aliens come so quickly after the meteor hits that it isn't possible that the same meteor in A Quiet Place 2 had crashed in Mexico. It's possible, however, that the meteors are debris from the alien homeworld, and that multiple meteors crashed across the Earth.
Another plot hole with the aliens arriving on Earth is that the meteor they were carried on was enormous. More immediate destruction would have been caused by the meteor’s impact, debris, and explosion radius than by the aliens themselves. If the meteor was that close in A Quiet Place 2, it’s nearly impossible that they wouldn’t have felt some of its impact, especially since the aliens began to attack so quickly after its initial sighting.
A Quiet Place subtly mentions multiple crashes on Lee’s whiteboard, which reads cities and timestamps like “Bogota: 19:52, Moscow 19:54, and Boston: 19:58.” This creates another plot hole because there’s no way that newspapers would have been able to widely circulate a meteor crashing in Mexico or Singapore with no mention of alien creatures before the meteor in New England hit. In A Quiet Place 2, Americans have no knowledge of the aliens or a meteor until they see the live newscast on TV and the meteor itself coming down, so a newspaper story about an international crash wouldn't have had time to be printed and circulated before the ensuing chaos.
