Stranger Things Season 3 Rundown!
After what feels like forever, we finally have another season of Stranger Things to binge. And it was well worth the wait. The way I've always described the show to people has been, "What if Steven Spielberg and Stephen King did a project together in their 1980’s prime?" And this feels very much like that, as the Duffer Brothers and Co. give us what feels to me like their take on the summer blockbuster film, specifically, that of the 1980’s.
To set the scene, it's been a year since the events of the previous season, and the kids are all growing up. It's the summer of 1985, the boys and girls are now teenagers, and hormones are running high with Mike and Elle, much to the chagrin of Elle's adopted dad, the police chief of Hawkins, Jim Hopper. Dustin has recently returned from summer camp with a new girlfriend who lives in Utah and a homemade radio tower he's dubbed Cerebro, in a nice X-Men reference.
Also, the older teens have gotten summer jobs, Nancy and Jonathan are interns at the local paper, and Steve Harrington now has a job at the Scoops Ahoy ice cream stand in Hawkins' new Starcourt Mall.
It's nearly the Fourth of July and life is good in Hawkins, until the creature from the Upside Down the boys dubbed the Mindflayer manages to find a way back into our world, and that's only one of the problems the gang has to contend with this season.
I don't really want to get into too much spoiler territory, as the show is best experienced rather than being told about it. But I will say this, this tv show's second season felt a bit off the rails at times, but this time around it's a nice, compact 8-episode season, with no filler, all killer episodes.
The chemistry between all the cast members always feels like real friendships and relationships, and that's what keeps the audience invested in this series, the kids aren't kids anymore, and you feel their evolution as actors and characters. I like that Will (Noah Schnapp) really had things to do and a story arc this time, feeling his friends grow apart as they're growing up scaring him, is a far cry from the first two seasons, where he was missing/in a coma, and then just paralyzed by fear for the most part during the last season. He really impressed me this time out.
I also loved the story arc between Hopper and Joyce this time, as she drags him back into this world with her conspiracy theory as to why her magnets stopped working. They have that classic 1980's action movie couple/partner storyline, bickering back and forth, the Sam and Diane of Cheers, will they, won't they hook up, it's a lot of fun. And David Harbour plays the action hero perfectly here, I'll again state that he was a good Hellboy (check out our review HERE) in his movie a few months ago, it was more the movie that failed him than him failing the movie. I want to see this guy in more action movies, he’s got that Harrison Ford like charisma that just works.
Also shout out to new cast member Maya Hawke, who plays Steve's co-worker Robin who gets pulled into the Upside Down shenanigans. Her character arc with Steve was one of the highlights of the season for me.
Speaking of highlights though, this season is peppered with great small roles from character actors like Jake Busey and Cary Elwes, who is basically playing an even shadier version of the Mayor from Jaws here, and plays him with that perfect 80's bureaucrat smarm, I wish we had a little more of him but he's perfect here.
Also, a shout out to the production designers, who perfectly recreate the world of 1985, better than any other attempts I've seen in recent memory, everything feels straight out of that era. Where they found some of the cereals and other minor packaging details in the stores, I have no idea. It's insane how detailed everything is.
As for the monster effects this time out, the Mindflayer is out from the Upside Down in all his glory and he looks amazing. The best way to describe this creature would be picture the villain from Spider-Man, Carnage, but combined with a tentacle monster but the tentacles are all solid limbs, and a T-Rex from Jurassic Park. A very visually impressive monster, the right kind of gross and gruesome and it rules.
I cannot talk enough about how much I loved this season, binged the whole thing in two days, which I haven't done with a Netflix series in a long time. Watch it, enjoy it, and if you're a film buff like me, you'll catch a lot of tiny homages and references to other era blockbuster event movies of the 1980’s and even some 1990’s stuff in there, it's a blast, and you will love it.
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