First, the milestone: According to Letterboxd, this was my 100th movie of the year. However, it counts shorts as films, and I’ve seen a bunch of those. It also counts each repeat viewing, and I had a couple of those. The actual number of full-length movies I’ve seen at least once this year is closer to 80, and the number of full-length films I had never seen before this year is around 75. Still: Close enough to celebrate. Yay for too much time at the movies!
As for the movie: It’s fine. Lupita Nyong’o is wonderful as usual, but she can’t do anything about the inescapable challenges of making the third film in a franchise (particularly a sequel). It can’t just rehash the first movie, but it can’t add anything that contradicts it. So we get new “secret” facts about the creatures and how the government responded to the noise monsters. Some of them make sense, but others make it hard to understand why they couldn’t actually solve the problem. Here’s the solution I came up with:
Build noisy rafts. Float them close enough to the shore that the sound monsters can get on, then send them sailing and sink them.
Also, maybe cats are magical?