Stranger Things Review
What a wondrous thing the Duffer Brothers have wrought! From the opening title screen with red letters crossing one another across a black background done to beats of a John Carpenter inspired synth soundtrack; the 80s tone is for the show is set off immediately right down to blemishing white speckles that mar the title sequence. Stranger Things does not reinvent the wheel but takes a lot of elements from various sources and mixes them up in new and fun ways: 80s Spielberg E.T., The Goonies, and Stephen King’s Loser Club from It.
Matt and Ross Duffer have crafted a wonderful love letter to the 80s and the result is they have become household names over night. Stranger Things landed on Netflix on July 15, 2016 as another piece of original content. All eight episodes dropped at the same time and are perfect for binge watching.
The show opens in the summer of 1983 in Hawkins, Indiana with four boys, who very much fill the same roles as the kids from Stephen King’s It – Losers Club, are the main, but not sole focus of the series. They are playing Dungeons & Dragons and Will Byers is faced with choosing to fight or flee from a D&D monster. While biking on his way home, Will appears to face something right out of a D&D game and goes missing. Finding Will is the story engine for the rest of the series.
Hawkins is a small town with a small police force – three full time officers – and the chief of police, Jim Hopper played by David Harbour, is in a tale spin after the loss of his young daughter to cancer. Will’s mother, Joyce Byers played by Winona Ryder is a single mother raising Will and her older teenage son, Jonathon Byers played by Charlie Heaton. She is frantic and the depth of her emotions stirs the embers of Hopper’s grief. He is propelled out of his pain and becomes energized with a chance to redeem himself by doing everything in his power to find Will Byers.
From the setup of the episode, the series branches out into three threads: one with the kids, one with the adults, and one with the teenage siblings of Will and Will’s friend – Mike Wheeler. Mike is the de facto leader of the kid gang. Each group experiences, well strange things as they try to find out what happened to Will. Joyce seems to be losing it as she hears odd noises about their house that she believes are from Will and their house is plagued by electrical disturbances and burnt out telephones.
The kids find a lost girl who is nearly clean shaven, does not know her name, and has a tatooed number eleven on her wrist. She speaks little and knows even less about the world. Oh, and she also possesses telekinetic and mind projection capabilities.
The sheriff’s investigation leads him to become suspicious of a nearby military base where secret research is being carried out. The base is run by a silver haired and very menacing Matthew Modine.
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“The other strength of the series is it takes the time to build up all the characters so that the audience comes to care about all or most of them.”
The teenagers story arc is driven mainly by Mike’s sister, Nancy Wheeler played by Natalia Dyer and Will’s older brother, Jonathon Byers. The two cross paths and find out there is something out there that is hunting down and killing animals and people.
One of the refreshing things about Stranger Things is to see the main characters in all three groups treated with respect and they all come across as intelligent people. There is no dumbing down of anyone simply to advance the story lines. The only character that is never developed at all, is Matthew Modine’s evil scientist, Dr. Martin Brenner. You also have to admire how the three story lines run parallel to one before they all come together at the end. Also the ultimate success or failure here is contingent on the interaction of each group with one another either knowingly or not.
The acting across the board is very strong especially for Winona Ryder who has to straddle the line of a worried mother who appears to be going crazy and yet remaining sympathetic to the viewers at the same time. It’s a long stretch of worry and eccentricity for Joyce Byers but she finally gets to become proactive in the story about three quarters of the way through. Those moments of vindication for Joyce are well earned and Ryder plays them very well. This is probably my favorite performance of hers.
The other strength of the series is it takes the time to build up all the characters so that the audience comes to care about all or most of them. There is a meandering nature to the story that anyone who has read one of Stephen King’s larger books will be very familiar with. The actual meat of the story could be told in half of the eight episodes but would be nowhere as emotionally satisfying.
The 1980s tone of the series permeates the series and is probably driven home the most by the large walkie talkies that the boys carry around with them. The police uniforms are modeled on the ones in Spielberg’s summer blockbuster movie game changer, Jaws. Characters smoke with wild abandon and mix tapes are still a thing. Layered under all this normalcy is a hidden world that Eleven, or El for short, calls the upside down.
This is just a fun series that will invoke many fond memories of great adventures for anyone that has watched Indiana Jones movies and Goonies plus the awe of such movies as Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Fret not. The adventure is not over. Stranger Things Season Two has been greenlit!
Check out Stranger Things, it will leave you with a big smile.