Headscratchers / A Quiet Place Part II

• So the creatures can't swim. Why not take a boat with a loudspeaker out and lure the ones onshore into the ocean to help those on shore? You could even use it at the same time to tell people on the shore about this weakness and other news.
  • The creatures seem to ignore sounds that they learn over time that they can't or shouldn't investigate, such as birds and waterfalls. We also see the second creature on the docks acting much more cautiously when the first jumps into the water and fails, so it's likely that the creatures would learn to ignore the loudspeaker coming from across the ocean because they realize can't get to it. Worst case is that they might then be on the hunt for any humans they can find near the shoreline, which would hurt the shore folk's chance of survival.
• It requires a little Willing Suspension of Disbelief that the boats would still be neatly tied up at the docks after being unattended to, what with a year's worth of storms/hurricane season/snow.
  • It could have been the bad men had been maintaining the upkeep of the boats, but if that's the case why didn't they take one out to the island?
    • They might not have known the creatures couldn't swim, so they'd have thought it would be pointless.
    • Alternatively, they did make to the island, but were forced out. With nowhere to go, they must have decided to keep the boats in condition as a honey trap for those who want to get to the island, making their prey easier to ambush.
• So why doesn't the island have sentries and defenses; if not against the monsters than against raiding parties from the dock bandits? We see the aviation warning lights have been lit on the radio tower, so it's not like the bandits don't know someone lives there, and they have boats to reach it.
• How did the aliens wipe out most of the planet if they only crash-landed in Mexico and can't swim?
  • This is assuming they only landed in Mexico. I figured the landing in Mexico wasn't the only one, that a bunch of them landed all over the world.
  • At the beginning is a news broadcast about a ship landed in Shanghai, then one lands in the US - so there's more than one ship.
    • I thought they came in asteroids, that they aren't technically a species.
• An alien comes to the islands surrounded by water with a boat happened in the sequel, so it must have been far from the first time this happened.
  • It happened, but that doesn't mean it happened on that island with any particular frequency. In the sequel's case, this seemed to happen more or less by accident, with a perfect set of unlikely circumstances set in motion by the protagonists visiting the docks coming together.
• So have the aliens taken out most noisy animal life, too? Nature is known for being downright noisy at night and birds never shut up.
  • As shown in the first movie (where a monster kills a raccoon), the answer would be: yes. They kill any noisy animal they can get their hands on. As for birds, they are out of reach and keep to the skies, so the aliens must've elected to ignore them like they ignore the rivers and waterfalls.
  • You can see birds flying in V formation as Emmett and Regan are about to look over the bridge.
• This sequel establishes that the monsters can't swim... Yet the first film had a significant scene towards the end where one is swimming in the flooded basement! Even if the water in the basement was more shallow than the bay, the monster had no hesitancy to start swimming.
  • The creature didn't swim so much as start prowling just under the water. It did seem to be examining its surroundings when we first saw it, so it might have stuck one of its limbs in the water to see how deep it is, deliberated on whether there might be anything to pursue, then decided it was worth investigating the area.
  • Roanoke Gaming actually brings up a plausible explanation as to why the Death Angel in the first film had no trouble with swimming in the flooded basement versus the one that drowned at the dock in the sequel. The amount of water in the bunker was shallow enough to allow that Death Angel to move about despite its heavy armor, similar to how there are shallow lakes in underground caves, whereas the one that leapt off the dock was doing so over open water and there's no bottom for it to push against. Factor in their hardened armor that allows them to shrug off point-blank shotguns blasts, their body morphology lacking the various parts that'd grant them both land and sea access (their scythe-like claws versus webbed feet on frogs and alligators, or specifically shaped flippers on seals and sea lions), and more than likely aren't as buoyant as humans are, thus they can drown.
• If they can't swim, where is the US Navy? Where are all the other navies? They couldn't have been possibly wiped out if there was no way for the aliens to get to them.
  • Even if they discover this weakness, the aliens are still indestructible. The government is unlikely to create the same technology Lee did if he was the one developing it. They can't drag them into the middle of the ocean and shoot them alive.
    • You can set up a trap to catch one to experiment upon them. Lure one across a bridge to a small island, then demolish the bridge. Then use a nearby ship to start broadcasting stuff at them. Once it becomes clear they operate entirely by sound, an entire range of tactics and weapons becomes available. Saturate areas with white noise generators, lure them off of steep cliffs with a speaker anchored over midair, see if those sonic crowd control devices are effective, spray them with urethane foam (super-sticky and absorbs sound), etc. Take a page from the bandits' book and drop a net with noisemakers onto them. There's no excuse to just give up and roll over here.
    • Nothing's indestructible. Their insides are still squishy. Hit them hard enough, and it won't matter if the shot doesn't penetrate. The kinetic energy alone will turn their insides into mush.
    • Except only when their insides are exposed. The aliens are immune to bullets, explosions, and can handle falling on a car. An average human wouldn't be strong enough to hit them until their insides are exposed. They need the cochlear implant technology to expose their insides first. It seems like the engineers didn't have enough time to develop it before the aliens killed them all.
    • Human technology extends as far as nuclear power. We can use weapons to hit arbitrarily hard.
  • Perhaps worth noting that we only see one single family (plus a handful of others) in an isolated, abandoned region. For all we know the US Navy (or at least what remains of it) is working on this very thing, we just don't see it because they're not the central focus of the story and none of our viewpoint characters are in an area that the US Navy happens to be at. They can't be everywhere.

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