REVIEW: Stranger Things 4 Volume 1

The newest season of Stranger Things find our players scattered geographically, battered emotionally. Almost a year after the battle of Starcourt mall, Joyce moves her kids, including newly orphaned El, to California, away from the site of her grief. Meanwhile, those left in Hawkins get to try and put the pieces back together, and across the sea, Hopper fights to stay alive in the hopes that he might see his family again one day. It's not an ideal time for Hawkins to come under attack from the forces of the Upside Down, but when the Mind Flayer unleashes his newest threat, the cancerous Vecna, our heroes are all that stand between their home town and bottomless evil.

I'll acknowledge I miss the levity of the ten-year old players, but maturity looks really good on this cast. (The emotional depth, that is. I will never get used to Noah Schnapp's booming tones.) The best parts of this season feature our characters finally sowing wisdom from their experiences. They're not just getting older, they're growing up, and not just the kids. It's nice to know that all this time we've spent raking them across the monsters has given them some perspective. (Most of them, I guess. They apparently couldn't think up a better storyline for Nancy, one of their strongest characters, than to have her regress back to her sophomore love triangle.)

It's a token of the series' writing that the tension runs rich even when the monsters are nowhere in sight. While less graphic than last season, which literally saw human bodies being melted into flesh puddles, the monster violence plays more sadistically than seen with previous agents of the Upside Down.

Speaking of which, this arc devotes more time to worldbuilding than any season past. Questions we might have had about the Mind Flayer and the terrifying hellscape he reigns over all the way back in 2016 are beginning to be answered. In doing so, the series risks taking away what was arguably its funnest story element. One thing that separated this show from other fantasy shows was that there was no ambassador of the Underworld springing up to outline the terms and conditions, allowing the characters, and the audience with it, to take real ownership over the fantasy.

But even as various facets are finally defined and mapped, and even as its child stars begin to move past their grade school years, the show preserves its unique whimsy, a loyalty to a mindset that champions a childlike methodology. Gamers and nerds will stay standing long after the rest of us are gone.

A lot of the dialogue leading up to this season's premiere has centered around simply how big it is. The available episodes come in at about nine hours, and we haven't even hit the two-and-a-half hour finale yet. What's interesting is that the extra volume actually feels well-spent during the early half of the volume (the first third of the season overall). The extra time helps carve out the emotional intricacies of our heroes, which helps tether the action to a place that feels vulnerable. The latter-half, admittedly, feels a little bloated. Three episodes go by and you realize you've been spinning tires trying to break through problems that surely shouldn't be taking this long to resolve. From this side of the pay-off, it's difficult to say with much confidence whether the setup has been well-spent.

And yet, despite the darkness and despite the extra stuffing, the show remains loyally dedicated to the heart which has always set it apart. Episode 4 in particular culminates in a sequence which ranks as emotionally charged as anything else we've seen from this series.

With the season's final two episodes still hanging over us, much of this season's impact and success is still up in the air. With all the seeds this first batch of episodes has planted, it's not like that golden peak isn't within reach.

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: HOPPERS

In the 1950s under the threat of nuclear warfare, Hollywood premiered such exercises as The Day the Earth Stood Still or War of the Worlds where an alien power would pass judgment on humankind, holding its fate in its hands. Here in the 2020s under the shadow of such threats as climate change, Hollywood sends to be our judge ... beavers. Let me back up ... Daniel Chong's new film from Pixar Animation, Hoppers , sees Mabel (Piper Curda), a college student whose self-appointed mission is to preserve the glade where she used to find sanctuary with her now deceased grandmother. Her biggest opponent is hometown boy and beloved mayor, Jerry (Jon Hamm), who has designs to plow over the glade in order to open his new freeway--estimated to save travelers four whole minutes of commuting. Mabel gets her golden opportunity when she uncovers secret technology pioneered by her professor which allows a human to rem...

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Westerns Riding off into the Sunset

In both my Les Miserables and Moulin Rouge! pieces, I made some comment about the musical as the genre that receives the least love in the modern era. I stand by that, but I acknowledge there is one other genre for which you could potentially make a similar case. I am referring of course to the western film. See, musicals at least have Disney keeping them on life support, and maybe one day we’ll get the Wicked movie Universal has been promising us for fifteen years [FUTURE EDIT: All good things, folks ]. But westerns don’t really have a place in the modern film world. Occasionally we’ll get films like No Country for Old Men, which use similar aesthetics and themes, but they are heavily modified from the gun-blazing-horseback-racing-wide-open-desert w esterns of old. Those died, oddly enough, around the same time musicals fell out of fashion. Professors Susan Kord and El...

The Pleasantville Lie

Lynn Hunt, American Historical Association, University of California 2002, is best known for her 2007 work Inventing Human Rights , a cornerstone for academic work on the history of human interaction. This landmark work tracked the developing concept of human empathy across European history, especially the function that art and literature played in allowing humans to recognize the interiority and dignity of other humans who were different from them. But in 2002, she shared in the May Issue of Perspectives on History her observations in “presentism,” and the uphill battle of even getting students to engage with history at all, Gladiator (2000) “Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forebears constantly fail to measure up to our ...

Silver Linings Playbook: What are Happy Endings For Anyway?

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert gave the following words in July of 2005 at the dedication of his plaque outside the Chicago Theatre: Nights of Cabiria (1957) “For me, movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that, to me, is the most noble thing that good movies can do and it’s a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them.” Ebert had been reviewing films for coming on forty years when he gave that assessment. I haven’t been doing it for a tenth as long. I don’t know if I’ve really earned the right to pontificate in this same manner. But film ...

All The Ways Sunset Boulevard Has Aged Gracefully

So, stop me if you’ve heard this before: Hollywood has a dark side. Particularly in the wake of something like #MeToo or the double strikes of 2023, you can really get a sense for just how famishing, even degrading, it can be trying to make a living in Hollywood. But of course, it all goes back much further than those. One of my very first essays for this blog, for example, was a catalogue of all the ways Hollywood ravaged Judy Garland . Yet for all its mess, we cannot take our eyes off of Hollywood, or the people who build it. Stardom in particular becomes a popular focal point—what is it really like being on the other side of all that spotlighting? And Hollywood has naturally supplied the market with all sorts of imaginings for this as well. Thus, each generation gets its own version of A Star is Born. John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man (1952) Ty Burr wrote in his landmark work, Gods Like Us , “...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

I've heard a lot of back and forth over what the purpose of film is and what we should ask from it. Film as a social amenity kind of has a dual purpose. It's supposed to give the population common ground and find things that people of varying backgrounds and beliefs can unify around. On the other hand, film also creates this detached simulated reality through which we can explore complex and even testing ideas about the contradictions in human existence. In theory, a film can fulfill both functions, but movies exist in a turbulent landscape. It's very rare for a film to try to walk both lanes, and it's even rarer for a film to be embraced upon entry for attempting to do so. Let me explain by describing the premise of one of my favorite movies, Morten Tyldum's 2016 film, Passengers . A key piece of this film ’s plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who premat...

REVIEW: Star Wars - The Mandalorian and Grogu

I haven't historically considered myself a "Star Wars" kid. And to be clear, I take no pride in saying that or anything. I respect the property and what it's given to pop culture. But I do feel like it's worth mentioning in this review that I didn't really go into Jon Favreu's The Mandalorian and Grogu thinking I had much of what I'd call nostalgia for this movie to exploit. And yet watching this movie, I found myself hearkening back to the things about Star Wars that caught my attention as a kid. For me, that was the gladiator-style match in "Attack of the Clones." This film offers quite a few roller-coasters along those lines. And as far as the creature designs go for the monsters in these arenas, they were quite good. I wasn't trying too hard to anticipate which were computer-generated and which were puppeted, but the aesthetics of both the Jim Henson era and the Spielberg era sat very well here in this vessel....

The Belle Complex

As Disney fandom increasingly moves toward the mainstream, the discussions and questions that travel around the community become increasingly nuanced and diverse. Is the true color of Aurora's dress blue or pink? Is it more fun to sit in the back or the front on Big Thunder Mountain? Is the company's continued emphasis on producing content for Disney+ negatively impacting not only their output but the landscape for theatrical release as a whole? However, on two things, the fandom is eternally united. First, Gargoyles was a masterpiece in television storytelling and should have experienced a much longer run than it did. Second, Belle's prom dress in the 2017 remake was just abominable. While overwhelmingly successful at the box office, the 2017 adaptation is also a bruise for many in the Disney community. Even right out the gate, the film came under fire for a myriad of factors: the auto-tuned soundtrack, Ewan McGregor's flimsy accent, the distracting plot...

Fine, I Will Review The Percy Jackson Show (again)

I have wondered if I was the only one who thought that "Sea of Monsters" was the weakest of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians pentalogy, but I have seen my reading echoed by other book loyalists. This second installment is perhaps penalized partially because it marks several major junctions in the larger series. This is, for example, the part of the series where the scope of the adventure really starts to enlarge. We know going in that there's an angry, deceased titan out to destroy Olympus, and that he's amassing an army, and so we need a sense that this threat is growing stronger. But this also marks a turning point in how series author, Rick Riordan, chooses to develop his main character. And so, season 2 of the Disney+ television adaptation faces similar crossroads. Season 3 of this show is already filming as we speak, so its immediate future is already spoken for, as far as production goes. But stylistically, this second seas...

REVIEW: Jurassic World - Dominion

Film director and victorious fanboy Colin Trevorrow has justified Jurassic World: Dominion and his trilogy by saying it's not just a continuation but a culmination of all the "Jurassic" movies that came before. I suppose it's for each viewer to decide whether Trevorrow and the team he's assembled have pulled that off. We each come to the franchise bringing something personal to the conversation. As for me though, come the series' twilight moments, I was moved by the way that it made somberness and hope sit next to each other so gracefully. If watching the brachiosaurus tromping across Jurassic Park makes me feel like a kid again, beholding the dinosaurs travailing across the savannah with such dignity took me to a more mature place. Now that dinosaurs have proliferated across the globe, Owen Grady and Claire Dearing have secluded themselves in their woodland cabin, where they keep their adopted daughter, Maisie, safe from a world that would jump...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog