STRANGER THINGS 3 REVIEWS MOVIE
STRANGER THINGS 3 REVIEWS SERIES
STRANGER THINGS 3 REVIEWS TV

It’s a joy to watch him go berserk over such a familiar rite of fatherhood, and also for Hopper and Will’s mom Joyce (Winona Ryder) to turn their unresolved sexual tension into near-constant, amusing bickering. Harbour’s face is a roiling sea of bitter mustache twitches and incredulous brow furrows.

STRANGER THINGS 3 REVIEWS SERIES

The series has always had fun with Hopper’s sweaty dadbod, but these new episodes dial up his fundamental goonishness to… well, eleven. The comedy stylings of leading man David Harbour are on spectacular display in the season’s early episodes, as Sheriff Hopper struggles to contain his feelings about adopted daughter Eleven making out with Mike in her bedroom. More of the action takes place in the daytime, and the characters spend more time swapping jokes and insults. But in relocating the action from fall to summer, the Duffers and their collaborators have made the entire show much lighter. There was always a certain degree of lightness to a show about four nerd boys (Finn Wolfhard’s Mike, Gaten Matarazzo’s Dustin, Caleb McLaughlin’s Lucas, and Noah Schnapp’s Will) fighting demons with the help of a waffle-loving telekinetic girl called Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown). Rather, the greatest joy in the series at this stage comes from the way it’s evolved into a hangout sitcom with periodic monster attacks.

STRANGER THINGS 3 REVIEWS TV

And the best parts of Stranger Things Season Three are the ones that feel most like TV - and not even the high-concept, intensely-serialized kind.

STRANGER THINGS 3 REVIEWS MOVIE

And its creators, the Duffer Brothers, have a strong command of mood and the appropriate timing to throw in another action or suspense set piece, so it’s rarely dull.īut the funny thing about telling an ongoing story that periodically returns to television is that, whether you’re trying to make a long movie or not, you can’t help but make a TV show. It has an ever-expanding cast of colorful characters who keep things feeling both lively and dense enough to merit the time investment.

Its seasons are relatively compact - we’re back to eight episodes after last season experimented with nine - so there’s never that sense of foot-dragging you get from the likes of Jessica Jones or Bloodline.

And rather than referring to each new installment as Season Two or now Season Three, they’re instead titled like movie sequels: Stranger Things 2 and Stranger Things 3.īut where this notion that television is just “movies, but longer” has mostly been a plague that’s led to many poorly paced and structured narrative sludges, Stranger Things has managed to be the Platonic ideal of a stretched-out movie. The horror pastiche’s nostalgic Eighties references are all to movies (or, occasionally, books that were turned into movies) of the period from the likes of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and Stephen King. No show in the Peak TV era has leaned harder into the “this isn’t a TV show it’s an XX-hour movie” attitude than Stranger Things.

Stranger things 3 reviews