Stranger Things (Netflix) debuted in 2016 as a modest series steeped in a genuine love for 1980s sci-fi and horror movies.
T tells the story of four nerdy Dungeons & Dragons-loving boys and a mysterious girl with terrifying telepathic and psychokinetic powers who must save her hometown of Hawkins, Indiana and its people from a monster.
Now this series itself has become a monster. Season four of the streamer’s most important franchise is a behemoth: nearly twice the length of the previous one and sliced into two, five weeks apart.
Of the seven episodes that come out Friday, only one comes in an hour; Five are between 74 and 78 minutes, and the seventh is a feature-length hour and 38 minutes.
The season will conclude on July 1 with two jumbo-sized episodes, the second of which will reportedly last two hours and 20 minutes.
And don’t forget, there’s still one more season to come before it’s over.
therefore, Stranger Things 4 Bigger, bolder, costlier (the budget was increased to $30m/€27m per episode), more extravagant and . , , Better? Well no, not really.
It’s just that there’s more to it, which isn’t automatically a good thing.
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It’s still tremendous fun and the best time you can have on Netflix. Frankly, though, you feel the stretch on a regular basis.
It’s been three years since the third season – something that’s evident from the fact that some of the actors are now looking too old to play characters in their teens.
In Screen Time, however, only a year has passed since the epic battle of Starcourt. The old gang is scattered and scattered.
The Byers family – Joyce (Winona Ryder), Will (Noah Schnapp), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), better known publicly as Jane Hopper, have moved to California.
Joyce has a job selling encyclopedias over the phone. Jonathan spends all his time baking with new stoner friend Argyle (Eduardo Franco).
Eleven, her powers abandon her at the end of season three, is being bullied in high-school by the queen b**ch and her besotted acolytes—a plot point that producers the Duffer brothers spend too much time on.
Eleven pretends in her letters to Mike (Finn Wolff-Hard) that everything is hunky dory.
Will, who attends the same school, is fed up with Eleven’s lies and angry that his best friend Mike never makes contact with him and seems to have forgotten he exists.
Things aren’t exactly rosy at Hawkins either. Mike and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) are leading as usual, but Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) is backed down by them.
Fed up with a bully, he joins the high-school basketball team, desperate to gain acceptance from the Jocks.
This no longer goes well with ex-girlfriend Max (Sadie Sink), who is still deeply traumatized by the trauma of seeing his half-brother killed by a mind flayer.
But if they’ve lost Lucas, they’ve got a new D&D friend: self-confessed school “freak” Eddie Munson, a fun addition to the cast, played by Joseph Quinn, who is more than just gets comic relief he appears at first.
Steve (Joe Keery) – who is feeling like he still has a thing for ex-girlfriend Nancy (Natalia Dyer) – and Robin (Maya Hawke) working at the video rental store and Steve’s sparky with Dustin The sarky bromance remains a highlight.
We’ve known since the post-credits sequence at the end of season three that Hopper (David Harbour) is still alive—and so, in the end, is Joyce. The long, grim scenes of his ordeal in a Russian prison camp slow everything down and give Harbor no chance to shine.
The compensations are: 1980s pop culture is as largely taken over and a nightmare from the Upside Down is the new monster called Vecna, which preys on crime-ridden minds and lucky their victims. Sends in fashion (limbs broken, sucked- eyeballs out).
As Stranger Things 4 Pinball between Hawkins, California, the Soviet Union and Alaska (it’s tied with a quote for Spring Hopper), it feels both overstuffed and loose motion at the same time.
The Duffer brothers had three years to play and a ton of money.
A tight fourth season could have a tight budget.
