Stranger Things Season 5 Review – This deluxe final walk-through will have you standing on your chair and screaming with joy | Strange things

Tim up for the weird stuff. The fifth and final season comes nearly three and a half years after a fourth run that felt like the end, not least because the kids seemed to have grown up. Having originally imitated beloved 1980s films where brave, stubborn kids avoid the end of the world, the franchise now starred young adults and the plot and dialogue were modified accordingly. I have learned life lessons. Their selves have been found. Teenage fears – as embodied by Vecna, a telekinetic tree-man who rules a parallel dimension adjacent to the humdrum town of Hawkins, Indiana – have been cast aside.

But Stranger Things is now making a delayed return, with all the actors clearly in their 20s. This is a problem. The point is that it’s fun to watch kids outrun monsters by going faster on their BMX bikes, or ignore their mother’s invitation to dinner because they’re downstairs with their schoolmates, making plans to outwit the US military with pencils, gum, and Dungeons & Dragons figurines. If everyone looked old enough to own a studio apartment and a portfolio of stocks, none of the above would really work.

The four new episodes — three more coming at Christmas, plus one more final episode of course on New Years — get around this by shrinking the Stranger Things universe. We won’t leave Hawkins, unless it’s to visit the nightmarish mirror city of the Upside Down, or the mind palace world made of memories that Vecna ​​takes his victims to if he really wants to mess with them. Even Hawkins as a site is rarely present: parents, teachers, and the general public no longer show up unless absolutely necessary. There’s only the sinister government research facility (now heavily guarded by soldiers) where all the trouble began, and the main group of characters, planning to storm the Upside Down and defeat Vecna ​​once and for all – a mission that will obliterate all other concerns.

Our friends have become immortal, their essential characteristics trapped in amber. Gadgetty Herbert Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), fast-talking free spirit Robin (Maya Hawke), tough psycho warrior Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), and nerd Mike (Finn Wolfhard) continue to do their jobs. Colleagues like Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), who never find what they’re looking for, are still welcome along on the journey, as are the group’s standout adults, Joyce and Hope (Winona Ryder and David Harbour).

With each of the four episodes continuing on from the previous one, we have a five-hour horror, action and comedy film, where each part of the story is sumptuously extended. The first episode has been prepared; Episode four is an extremely exciting 90 minutes of flame-throwing, bullet-dodging spectacle that makes good use of what seems like an almost limitless effects budget, culminating in a moment that will have fans standing up in their chairs and screaming with joy.

Along the way, the gang sets traps, crawls through tunnels, recruits spies, tampers with radios, and cheers and argues with each other as they improvise their way out of each impossible situation just as they always have. This year’s reference points, in lighting, composition or plot, include The Exorcist, Home Alone, Back to the Future, Little Red Riding Hood, The Great Escape, Jurassic Park and the 1985 French-Canadian animated film The Peanut Butter Solution – but the overriding influence is Stranger Things itself. It successfully tinkers with its own unique genre vibe, a formula that could be rebooted profitably, at least once again.

Most importantly, character development is not completely absent. Most of the action is driven by budding investigative journalist Nancy (Natalia Dyer), who discovers her inner fire when an older man taps her on the shoulder, calls her “sweetie” and tells her not to worry about tough adult stuff. Then there’s the long-awaited flowering of Will (Noah Schnapp), who was Vecna’s first victim in Season 1, Episode 1. While it succumbs to the instinct to end by returning to the beginning, Stranger Things opens Season 5 by revisiting that moment, then working to transform Will, who for ages has been a frustratingly pale, haunting presence defined by his trauma, into the most important member of the group.

Will is secretly gay, which may just be another adulthood misfortune, but the Duffer Brothers writers and directors have always approached their creations with more thought and sensitivity than you might expect a billion-dollar fantasy film to allow. Now, in Will, they find not just another journey of self-discovery to embark on, but the most poignant journey the show has ever seen. Sure, Stranger Things needs to turn off its boom box, hang up its catapults and admit that it’s a little too old for these biggies, but it’s worth immersing one last time.