Stranger Things Season 3 Review

I’m sorry to report that once again I haven’t been able to get to a theater to see the many movies on my time-sensitive backlog this week – Crawl, Midsommar, Yesterday, The Art of Self-Defense, and of course Spider-Man: Far From Home among them – but what I can talk to my beloved readers about today is the third season of Netflix’s instant 1980s sensation Stranger Things, which dropped on the Fourth of July, and which I’ve recently completed.  Some of my more dedicated and maybe creepily invested fans will recall that I reviewed Season 2 of the very same show on this very site way back in 2017 when it first dropped (read that here), so this post will probably read pretty similarly to that one, but before I dive in, I have to of course give an obligatory SPOILER warning, although I don’t plan on going into depth on critical plot details if I can help it.

When the squad parties too hard and you have to go to the ER.

For the most part, Stranger Things Season 3 is really great, and it hits on a lot of the elements that made the show the success that it became in the first place.  The Starcourt Mall, an overwhelmingly 1980s set that happens to be hiding a dark secret far beneath its foundations, is the perfect venue for stimulation of the audience’s nostalgia pressure points, showcasing the kooky fashion trends of the day in its many boutique stores and playing such memorable hits as Day of the Dead and Back to the Future in its cinema.  With the colorful backdrop in place, and an Independence Day milieu that heightens the summer viewing vibe, the show is able to squeeze yet another paranormal series of events from the Hawkins area, engaging a sizable slew of protagonists against vividly terrifying inner and outer demons alike, and it’s all of course tracked by a soundtrack featuring either synth-heavy ominous scoring or classic rock A-sides.  As I wrote in my previous review of Season 2, one of the things that the writers of Stranger Things continue to do so well is pair its vibrant cast of characters in the right way – I was overjoyed to see the hero team of Dustin and Steve reunited after a largely successful outing in the previous season (with the addition of newcomer Robin, who’s subjected to a real crash course in the oddities hiding in Hawkins), while the Hopper-Joyce-Murray team is a fairly natural banter factory.  Splitting the crew up at the season’s beginning also organically builds hype in a very effective way for the eventual reunion, which in this case (like in Season 2) happens in the phenomenal final episode – an episode that manages to provide both heart-pounding action and quiet introspection within its hour-twenty runtime (not to mention that spellbinding duet that people are talking about).

Anyone else spend the entire season terrified that they were going to kill Steve?

Among the cast, the standout who deserves the most attention is probably Dacre Montgomery returning as Billy Hargrove – the human villain introduced in Season 2, and purportedly everything the show’s writers wanted Steve Harrington to be before casting the ultra-charming Joe Keery.  With the possible exception of Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven), who also turns in a stellar performance once again, Montgomery probably has the hardest acting job within the events of the third season, playing a role that demands convincing internal conflict essentially throughout.  David Harbour – I’m going to try not to get emotional as I write this – is also excellent once again, though his role really attains no further depth here, and the aforementioned Keery is also solidly likable for a third straight season.  As for the younger members of the cast, there are certainly some shaky moments, especially from Noah Schnapp and (surprisingly) Finn Wolfhard, and the inevitability of puberty removes some of the charm that makes Stranger Things so special from their characters, but they nonetheless continue to make an effective ensemble that’s due at least one more return to Hawkins.  I was also thrilled to see more of Brett Gelman after his brief appearance as certified wacko Murray “Bald Eagle” Bauman in Season 2, and am looking forward to him potentially carrying on as a recurring character.

Imagine if Steve was a creepy muscly lifeguard who predatorily seduces housewives at the local pool and then unrelatedly becomes the co-pilot of a monstrous being set on killing Eleven and essentially destroying Hawkins/Earth.  Glad the Duffer Brothers went a different way on this one.

My real sole issue with Season 3 amounts to a problem with the romantic subplots weaving in and out of what we really show up to see: monsters, spooky setpieces, and Hopper punching people.  I’m all for at least one will-they won’t-they instance (I’d say the Hopper-Joyce flirtation is the most compelling), but it seemed like essentially every character was enduring some kind of romantic tension at some point, and it was simply a bit too much, and not at all what I think of the show as being about.  My frustration with this was (perhaps intentionally) personified by Noah Schnapp’s Will, who takes overly dramatic issue with the gang’s testosterone-driven obsession with the gentler sex and apparently in doing so births a fan theory that he is in actuality gay.  Perhaps all of the hormonal hubbub is simply a product of – and a reminder that – the gang has hit puberty, where subplots like that tend to take hold.  After all, we saw essentially the same thing happen in the weirdly quirky but also dark rom-com that was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, certainly a far cry from the more innocently inclined Sorceror’s Stone.  Either way, while Hopper’s “keep the door open three inches” rule laid the foundation well for his profoundly emotional posthumous heart-to-heart monologue, I’d much prefer a “keep the door closed and locked” approach when it comes to watching teenagers awkwardly make out if I were him.

I mean, talk about shirt goals.  This style absolutely needs to be brought back, and this is Exhibit A.

Stranger Things’ third season definitely trumps the highs of the second season, and also contains fewer lows – and no, I’m not just talking about that bizarre and widely panned episode from the second season where Eleven goes punk – and while the show’s attempt to be more John Hughes-y is more than a bit unwelcome on my part, this penchant for sappy teenage romance is balanced by a stronger dose of spookiness than the sophomore outing boasted.  Given that the Duffer brothers have reportedly aspired to end the show’s run after four or five seasons (not much of a neverending story after all, Dustin), I’m beyond curious to see where things go in what could be the cultural phenomenon’s swan song, and how they plan on bringing a number of characters who have seemingly been removed from play by the events of this season’s finale back into the fold.  For now, it’s unclear how long we’ll have to wait to find out whether Eleven will get her powers back, and also what the hell happened to our beloved Hopper, but until that time comes I have no doubt that the internet will be teeming with speculation.

RIP Alexei – gone but not forgotten.

Have you watched Stranger Things Season 3 yet (hopefully you have, otherwise you’ve been spoiled by reading this far)?  What’d you think?  Drop me a comment!

Stranger Things Season 2 Review

Never fear, friends – no spoilers here!

Well, it’s the weekend after the release of Stranger Things Season 2, so naturally, I’ve watched the whole thing, and in lieu of a movie review (maybe critical darling Thor: Ragnarok next week, we’ll see) I thought I’d talk a bit about that on this glorious spooky Halloween Tuesday.

Me and three friends dressed up as the infamous “party” from Stranger Things for trick-or-treating this Halloween.  This is a picture of us.  We’re really good at costumes.

With that said, Stranger Things Season 2 really isn’t all that scary, and most of the time, it’s not even as slightly scary as Season 1 was.  Any adrenaline-inducing horror/action sequences are somewhat sparsely peppered throughout Season 2’s nine episodes, with far more of the gleeful, arcade-style demon-fighting scenes coming in the last two episodes than anywhere else.  The combat is at times anxiety-inducing, but more often than not the sense of actual danger is minimal, and you feel more like you’re watching someone play a video game (seriously – why hasn’t this happened yet, Netflix?) that’s pretty easy to beat.  I’m not starting off by saying this to make a claim that Season 2 was bad – in fact, that’s not how I feel at all – all I’m trying to do is get the mediocre elements mentioned and out of the way before proceeding to what makes Season 2 truly and consistently good (barring a somewhat slow build, along with an objectively pointless side-quest episode).

Exactly the face I was making while watching the Season 2 trailer.

Indeed, where Season 2 (and Stranger Things as a whole, I’d argue) excels is in its quieter moments, and the weight of its immense success is borne largely on the shoulders of its incredible characters, not to mention the still-fantastic cast that brings them to life.  All of the players from Season 1 are back (even the sinister Dr. Brenner makes a brief appearance), but where Season 2 really shines – namely in the way of bringing surprises – is in its creative re-teaming of our intrepid bunch of heroes.  While some duos or trios of characters retain threads as closely intertwined as before (Jonathan and Nancy, for one), some other groupings truly caught me off guard, and in a pleasant way – the dynamic between Hopper (as glorious as ever, by the way) and Eleven (yes, she’s back, and I don’t count this as a spoiler; watch the trailer, people) contains much of the dramatic meat on Season 2’s bones, whereas Steve and Dustin, who I’m not even sure shared any screentime in Season 1, comprise another refreshingly novel – and oftentimes comedic – pair.  As in the first season, we feel each character’s happiness and experience their failures, and more importantly, I found myself rooting for most of them – even Steve – all the while.

That box is too small to house a demogorgon…what are we fighting this season, boys?

While the technical aspects and overall method of storytelling employed by the Duffer brothers are no doubt effective, the dialogue isn’t at Sorkin levels, and the plot hardly features many unexpected twists and turns (save for the unexpected character intersections mentioned above) – it’s the cast that, in my opinion, really sets it apart.  Winona Ryder (Joyce), coming off a Golden Globe nomination for her work in Season 1, is as excellent as ever, as is David Harbour (Jim Hopper) and the cast of Hawkins kids led by Finn Wolfhard (Mike) and Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven).    Joe Keery (Steve) continues to charm with his vicious bat-o-nails in spite of his initial character arc, and Natalia Dyer (Nancy) continues down her path of broken hearts and badassery.  Truly, every actor/actress right down to the somewhat oafish Mr. Wheeler (obscure shout-out to the one and only Joe Chrest) is impressive, and of special note are the fresh faces: Sean Astin, Paul Reiser, Dacre Montgomery, and Sadie Sink all bring welcome performances to Season 2.  Counted among these new faces should also be Noah Schnapp, playing Will Byers.  While Schnapp didn’t have much screentime to work with in Season 1 – after all, no one could even find him, let alone put a camera on him – he fares well in Season 2 in what proves to once again be a fairly pivotal role in terms of the season’s inciting and continued action.

Sadie Sink (left) and Dacre Montgomery are just two of the numerous additions to the cast for Season 2.

To draw a cinematic comparison, I liken Season 2 of Stranger Things to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.  Aside from the obvious parallels to be drawn concerning continued preying on a seemingly nostalgia-starved and somewhat rabid fanbase, I think what I can say critically about one can be said for the other: still great, but not quite as great as the first, if only because the originality brought to the cultural fore by the first simply can’t have the same pop the second time around.  Maybe this is painting with a broad brush, and it’s hardly something that can be blamed on the Duffer brothers, or those helming the further development of the MCU – doubling down on success is, after all, never a bad plan – but I think it’s unavoidably true, and in the end, it’s hardly a stinging critique.

How this woman restrains herself from simply proposing to Chief Hopper on the spot is just beyond me at this point.

As I often do, though, I’ll end these thoughts with a (spoiler-free) question for those in the know to ponder.  Given the ending of Season 2, which proves to be at least moderately less ambiguous than Season 1, what can we the future viewers expect from the already-confirmed Season 3?  It’s hard to imagine, thinking even further ahead, what the Duffer brothers have in mind for their proposed four-season arc, even with the halfway mark in the rearview mirror, but if history tells us anything, it’s that one thing is certain: whatever mysteries are contained within Season 3, I’ll probably just go ahead and try to uncover all of them in a weekend binge session.

Here’s to you, Netflix!

Review: IT

IT finally happened.  And by IT, I mean I went and saw IT.

Bad title-related puns aside, this is one that I’ve been pretty excited about for a while now.  While I’ve never read the source novel nor seen the original miniseries, I have read and enjoyed a number of Stephen King‘s other works, and I like a good scary movie now and again.  Add a record-breaking trailer and a solid amount of positive reviews and buzz on top of that, and you have my attention.  Let’s get right into it.  Spoiler alert, though – I was a big, big fan, so if you’re looking for a review that somehow differentiates itself from the chorus of praises being piled upon IT, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

This isn’t IT-related, I just needed to fill space, so here’s a picture of my house.

Make no mistake: while IT has its fair share of jump scares, where I found it truly at its most horrifying was during the quieter, more unsettling moments.  Andy Muschietti makes excellent use of lights and camera to deliver countless action shots that might be more apt to make an audience cringe and shrink with fear rather than scream, feasting on a number of the setpieces that King so graciously provides – and that Cary Fukanaga (of True Detective fame), Chase Palmer, and horror vet Gary Dauberman so faithfully bring to the silver screen.  Some scenes that stand out: Richie’s heavily foreshadowed confrontation with a room full of clowns on Neibolt Street, Beverly’s Dexter-esque bathroom bloodbath, the slideshow scene (pictured below) and of course Eddie’s encounter with the Leper, which in fact was cut from early drafts of the screenplay.

No spoilers, but this scene had me extremely on edge by the end of it.

Another aspect that drives the horror home effectively is the use of children as the protagonists.  We’ve all watched countless scary movies in which a number of the cast members are killed due to an overage of curiosity, a lack of good survival sense, or both, and I personally found that with children navigating the twists and turns of Pennywise’s various torments, I was more forgiving of a character’s wanting to investigate that creepy voice or wander into a dark room to see if they actually heard that door slam.  Take it this way: kids are more naturally curious, and less is typically expected of them in terms of understanding the world’s darkness, and for that reason it feels pretty silly yelling at a screen when they’re the ones on it.

If ever I break my arm, I can only hope my cast is this flattering.

Compounding this crucial perspective is the fact that most adults in Derry either seem oblivious, uninterested, or at times straight up evil.  Disregarding for a moment the outwardly abusive situation Beverly finds herself in, we also at various times in the film see parents yelling at their children (berating them for holding out hope over a missing sibling, blaming them for a broken arm that was actually caused by an ancient evil, etc.), stuffing an absurd amount of medications down their throats, and at one point even shooting at them.  Furthermore, this makes no mention of the absolute indifference of most adults towards the fact that so many more innocent people – namely children – go missing in Derry, never to be found, than anywhere else.  Here’s a tip – if you’re a librarian and you bump into a clearly terrified kid in the poorly-lit basement of a library in a town with a known child-napping problem, you might want to ask him a few questions before brushing him off.

Sophia Lillis is excellent as Beverly Marsh.

The film’s heroes, and the primary ensemble cast around which most of the action is centered, has affectionately dubbed themselves The Losers Club, and they all – in their own way – possess traits emblematic of high school’s less socially fortunate, which really took me on a pleasant trip down memory lane.  There’s the protagonist, Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher), leading the rest on an often ill-planned mission to find his lost little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott).  There’s Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor), a portly new kid in Derry who chooses to spend his lonely summer becoming a small-town historian.  There’s Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs), a gun-shy homeschooled kid with a devastating past who takes up a spot in the Losers’ group after a run-in with the fiendish Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton).  There’s Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer), a hypochondriacal, Macaulay-Caulkin-in-The-Pagemaster-like boy constantly in a young Fred Savage lookalike contest.  There’s Stan Uris (Wyatt Olef), the son of a rabbi with a particularly relatable fear of misshapen fine art subjects.  And finally, there’s Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis), the oft-sought-after lone female in the group, forced to deal throughout with an abusive father and an overabundance of false rumors swirling around her.

IT is like The Sandlot, except instead of playing baseball they all get together to fight shapeshifting demons.

Rounding out the Sandlot-esque teen crew is perhaps the most enjoyable character of the bunch, at least comedically speaking – Richie Tozier.  Richie’s dialogue is rife with one-liners throughout, and Finn Wolfhard plays the role excellently.  All told, the entire child cast did quite well, with Wolfhard and Lillis setting themselves apart with roles that are respectively funny and heavy.

Why, yes, I did let IT’s costume department use the glasses I wore in the third grade.

Driving all of the chaos, though, is Pennywise, the embodiment of an evil so pure and so powerful that even the twisted creator himself, Stephen King, refuses to write about him again.  Having never seen the Tim Curry version of the character, I have little basis for comparison here, but as far as I can tell, Bill Skarsgard was fantastic from his beginning interaction with Georgie in the sewer to the bitter end.  Perhaps the most chilling piece of Skarsgard’s character was not the sinister voice, nor the menacing smile, but the way it moved, be it through the famous dance, general contortion, or the truly bone-chilling berserker-like head-shaking charge demonstrated at various points throughout the story.  Skarsgard’s dedication to the role shows through in his performance, and it will be a thrill to see him bring even more to the role in the next go-round.  The real question: can he make all of the adult actors cry during his first day on set like he did with the kids?

Truly the stuff of nightmares, and I’m not even afraid of clowns.

Being the first chapter, plenty of other questions remain unanswered at this point, but not all of them relate directly to the plot, nor the fate of IT.  What’s the significance of the key that Beverly Marsh wears?  Who will headline the cast for IT Chapter Two (set 27 years in the future)?  Will anyone else besides The Losers Club notice everyone going missing in 2016 after the advent of social media?  Here’s hoping we find out when IT Chapter Two drops in 2019, but in the meantime, check out the first installment if you haven’t already.