Stranger Things 4

Ex-stranging
The Experience

Stranger Things 4
USA May - July 2022
Nine episodes

Warning: Some spoilers running right up that hill at you.

Okay, it has to be said that series four of hit show Stranger Things was a little bit hit and miss for me. I didn’t like it as much as the second and third series, for sure but, I still liked it a lot better than the first. That being said, there’s lots of good stuff within it too so... let’s take a little look.

Okay, plot...  it’s Spring Break and various characters are reunited, after the close of the last season meant that some of them had to move away from the sleepy town of Hawkins. Something, though, is killing high school kids in Hawkins, making them see dark visions for a week or so in advance... before levitating them into the air, breaking their bones and then sucking their eyeballs back into their head. However, as with other seasons, the plot strands are split both globally and in terms of character threads, into three or four different groups, which merge and then diverge over the series. You have one lot trying to figure out what’s going on with the bizarre murders that look very much like they come from the Upside Down (the physical manifestation of the alternate, dark version of Hawkins where all the dark things dwell), you have Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) being retrained (through ordeal) to recover her superpowers by both Mathew Modine and Paul Reiser, themselves pursued by an army splinter group, because they believe Eleven is the only way to stop what is coming to Hawkins. You also have three of the kids trying to recover Eleven (along with new stoner character Argyle) and we have Joyce (Winona Ryder) finding out that Hopper (David Harbour) may still be alive after the events of the last series finale but, needs assistance to help break him out of a Russian security prison in Alaska. And, of course, the series concludes with all the characters reuniting but, things go a little differently this time around.

Okay, so lots to like here. The playing of a Dungeons And Dragons game crosscut with a basketball game is pretty well done. There’s a nod to the famous real life Hellfire Club (although mostly just in the name used for a D&D group) and, being as it’s set in 1986, the usual pop culture artefacts such as an Elvira poster, a Halloween mask and, in a series of moments which surprised everyone in terms of the spin off benefits... using the Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill as Max’s (Sadie Sink) favourite song, used to save her life and pull her away from the clutches of the creature at one point midway through the season, resulting in it being number one in the world charts for weeks (and still counting at time of writing). I remember when this song came out in 1985... it turned me on to Kate Bush big time and within the space of about six weeks I’d saved up enough money to purchase all of her albums, of which there were then five in total. Of course, in those days they were vinyl albums but they were certainly among the first non-soundtrack titles I upgraded to CD when the format was introduced.

Another great pop culture moment is when the kids are trying to find a drug supplier by only his first name. The two who work in a video store run it into their computer and narrow it down to about seven people in the area before checking the rental records... when they find the one who keeps renting out all the Cheech And Chong videos, they know they’ve got their man. And Dustin quoting Han Solo in normal conversation (Never tell me the odds!) was a nice touch. Not to mention the casting of Freddy himself, Robert Englund (from the Nightmare On Elm Street films... which don’t really appeal to me, I remember him best in V), as a key character in one episode.

Another thing I liked about the show was that the main villain turns out to be someone from Eleven’s past (she’s repressed the memory for so long) and, not only that, it turns out he’s the prime mover for the villains in all three previous seasons. I also liked that, although it seems for a little while that the day has been saved by the usual suspects... there’s one important character left in a coma and, as the Upside Down has ruptured Hawkins in various multidimensional rifts... well, it starts snowing that kind of ash that is in the air in the Upside Down... it’s clear the kids aren’t out of the woods yet...

Although I really thought they would be because, well, I was under the impression that the fourth series was the final one for the show but, no, it turns out that there’s going to be a fifth and final season at some point and, all I will say about that is, they’d better get their skates on. Those kids are growing up fast and when you compare them to flashback footage from previous iterations, it’s really noticeable. The other thing about that is... usually a year has gone by with each new show but... I just don’t see how they’re going to be able to pick up the storyline again without carrying on from exactly where they left it this time around. Which makes getting it in the can even more urgent, I would have thought.

Talking about the music though... there’s a thing about the needle drop of pre-existing tracks that I really didn’t like. Namely the way they’ve been cut up and looped about. For example, would it have killed them to cut the big Kate Bush scene (out of the many in the show using that song) to the actual track as it exists rather than keep chopping it about like that? And in one long scene where the villain is monologuing for quite a while, the music seems to start off with the last track from Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi score before, bizarrely, jumping into his opera Akhnaten midway through. Not quite sure what’s going on there.

All in all, though, like I said, I still appreciated Stranger Things 4 more than the first season and I have the two volumes of score CD (not the stupid song compilations) on pre-order (which at two discs each makes it the most music we’ve had from a season in one hit). So if you liked the other three seasons you should probably be okay with this one. I’m kind of hoping that Season 5 will be a marked improvement though... and I hope they continue to bring Kate Bush along for the ride.

Godzilla VS Kong

Kaiju KO

Godzilla VS Kong
USA/Australia/Canada/India 2021
Directed by Adam Wingard
Warner Brothers

Warning: This review will have kaiju sized spoilers.

Oof! Godzilla VS Kong is something I’d been looking forward to for a while. The fourth in the new US Monsterverse movies and following on from the two good films in the series, Kong: Skull Island (reviewed here) and Godzilla: King Of The Monsters (reviewed here), I was probably expecting a lot more from it than it could maybe, in hindsight, have credibly delivered. Also, I’ve quite liked some of director Adam Wingard’s previous movies and, although I think it’s a bigger film than he’s used to heading up... I had a lot of confidence in him on this.

And I can certainly confirm that the film looks really nice and has some beautiful, bright colours and lots of ‘monster smack’ carnage on show. It also has returning performers from one of the previous installments in the form of  Millie Bobby Brown and Kyle Chandler reprising their roles from Godzilla - King Of The Monsters. They are joined by some equally cool people such as Alexander Skarsgård as a good guy scientist and one of my favourite modern actresses, Rebecca Hall. And it even has the return of one of my favourite, iconic kaiju characters who tends to turn up from time to time in the Godzilla movies over the years, Mecha-Godzilla. So, yeah, I should have probably got a lot more out of this than I did. It looks great, has lots of explosions and punching of things and has great actors delivering the lines. Terrible nonsense lines though so, that doesn’t help things along, to start with.

I think my biggest complaint after seeing it is that I just didn’t understand what the heck this movie was about at all. Now it doesn’t help I was being hit by ‘buffering’ every minute or so for a while (I don’t know why streaming is so popular in the UK when our internet infrastructure is so terrible trying to handle anything remotely HD) and I’m sure I would have responded to this much better if I’d seen it in a proper cinema (the only way a movie should be watched the first time)... but I’m not sure anything would have helped me comprehend the plot to this film, which re-positions Godzilla as the bad guy and then, at the end, says it’s alright because he was just attacking ‘company x’ because they were doing bad things. Nope. He was killing innocent people and destroying cities in the process and that’s not a cool look... Gojira was definitely back to his old 1954 self as far as I’m concerned. And the general comments shouted by the rest of the family as we were watching, echoing mine such as... “What’s going on?”, “What just happened?”, “Was there two of him in that shot... how?”, “Is someone going to come and explain why they’re doing this and what this means?”... well, I think they speak for themselves.

I know that, for some reason I couldn’t figure out, people needed to get Kong to get them to the centre of the Earth (you know, the old hollow Earth theory again) but something to do with the gravity shift was a danger but... it’s okay because Kong was with them and... sorry, what? And a ludicrous subplot that re-introduced a less than interesting redesign of Mecha-Godzilla when, frankly, after we saw a giant mechanical eyeball near the start of the movie, we really didn’t need it spelled out. And no Charles Dance in sight? We saw him as the main villain making off with a dead Ghidorah head in the post-credits of the last movie but here, the head is back but the villain isn’t. Like he just disappeared into the ether.

But we do have the Ghidorah head... now a skull. Because obviously, a human mind needs to make a connection with a Ghidorah head to be able to control the man-made Mecha-Godzilla right? I mean, what? Just what? And then, when the human brain is destroyed, this makes Mecha-G go off into its own rampage... why? Lots of whys and whats here because... I’m sorry but this movie’s plot is just absolute twaddle. And don’t get me started on how it’s set just a couple of years in our future but there’s no mention made of the Coronavirus. I’m pretty sure that’s going to be around for a while and it seems kinda stupid that Hollywood would think we would forget about that. Nobody is masking up in this film, for sure.

Also, I know the director and composer are probably huge fans of the original films in the respective franchises but, I felt the whole thing played out with a lot less respect than either monster deserved. Junkie XL’s score has one, possibly accidental, similarity to Ifukube’s five note power theme for The Big G which I noticed in one action scene and which I suspect was just serendipitous. The previous score by the great Bear McCreary was loaded with musical references to a whole host of Toho monster themes giving the leitmotifs associated with them their due in a fan pleasing score that really served the movie well. This new score is appropriate to the action but just feels like a wasted opportunity and gives no real reference to Ifukube, Sato, Koseki or even Max Steiner in its make up. It’s just another score which could have been ‘anything appropriate’ when it’s been demonstrated in the last film that a good, striking, use of the previous material as musical building blocks can be carried out very well. I felt like this was a major step backwards for these movies and it’s now the fourth in a series which, like the previous three, has absolutely no musical continuity with any of the others. It’s just egos doing their own thing when they could have served a more functional purpose for the good of the whole canon of works.

And, by the way, King Kong has been around since 1933 whereas Godzilla is a relatively new character from 1954. Show some respect... there’s no way, despite Kong being stripped of his royal nomenclature for these movies, that Godzilla would beat him to near death. Kong's more dexterous. It just beggars belief. And, although the shout out to certain other Kong and kaiju movies where human intervention is necessary to restart (or in some films replace) a slowing heart is appreciated, the circumstances which took us to that point felt somehow unacceptable to me.

And so there you have it. Godzilla VS Kong looks great, has made huge gains at the box office but, sadly, under all the hullabaloo it’s just an empty and somehow inarticulate shell of a movie masquerading as something much bigger than it actually is. I can enjoy the moments of monster carnage and will probably do so again on Blu Ray but, as a consequential entry in the entire body of work of both the King Kong and Godzilla franchises, it leaves no mark and is, perhaps, best left forgotten. I was, at the end of the last picture, looking forward to this franchise continuing but now I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. Everything seems to be thrown away and the dots that are meant join the films together make a tenuous and unnecessary trail at best. I can’t recommend this one, to be honest.

Stranger Things 3

Flaying Alive

Stranger Things 3
2019 USA TV

Okay so... the kids are back. And so are some Russians.

This 3rd Series of Stranger Things takes place, for the most part, in 1985. Which totally throws things out the window when most of the kids, except Dustin who is on his way home from summer camp, sneak into a screening of Day Of The Dead on its opening night. It begs the question I have been asking myself all the way through these three series. How come none of the kids are accountable for being out and about, sometimes missing for days, with none of their parents wondering where the heck they are? You’d think after all the stuff that the kids went through in Series One (reviewed here) and Two (reviewed here), they would be closely watched and supervised by now.

Anyway, this third season is easily as good as the second and far superior to the first. It does kind of wear its influences loud and clear on its sleeve though... especially in terms of the plotting which sees the return of the mind flayer taking over host bodies and a group of Russians who have built a secret facility, underground near Hawkin’s new shopping mall, The Star Court... and who are foolishly trying to open the ‘big, portal of terror’ once closed by Eleven at the end of the second series. I’ll come back to the story influences, as I see them, in a minute.

This one sees Dustin return with his new, ‘super duper’ ham radio, which has truly unbelievable range and which he calls Cerebro (yeah, okay, we get it already) and a whole lot of loved up stuff. Right away though, things are thrown into turmoil in terms of people pairing off for relationships, dumping each other and, in the case of Will Byers, getting angry that his friends aren’t interested in playing Dungeons & Dragons anymore... just not so angry that he can’t feel the presence of a part of the mindflayer that escaped the last series in the back of his head.

And, it’s actually a proper, full on horror story kind of series this time. The plot, which has Dacre Montgomery’s Billy character from Season 2 taken over by the mind flayer so he can start converting other people in the local community into slave zombies for said creature, is pretty much a cross between Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and The Blob. And it really goes for it too... I rarely make a fuss over special effects (unless they’re really bad) but I was very impressed with the goriness of the exploding rats and people in this one. Especially a wonderful horror moment, unseen by the two people who have just left a scene, of a rat exploding into a splash of red gore and intestines, only for said innards to start oozing and crawling their way out of its cage. Beware of the blob, you guys!

The show is filled with the usual witty one liners... when Max, played again by Sadie Sink, takes over from the adults in sorting out a pretty ugly looking medical emergency, the line that seals the deal is “I skateboard. Trust me.” Someone who’s used to dealing with horrific injuries on a regular basis I guess. Or the wonderful moment where she refrains from answering herself, Millie Bobby Brown’s query as Eleven of... “What are happy screams?”

Alas, a couple of regular characters die in this season, including one of my favourites near the end of the last episode (at least, we think that persons’s dead.... there’s kind of a mention made of an “American” in the mid post-credit scene at the end of the last episode*). So that’s a shame. However, there’s a fantastic new ‘potential love interest’ character in the shape of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s daughter Maya Hawke playing Robin Buckley, who works at the Ice Cream parlour in the mall with Joe Keery’s Steve Harrington character, who’s certainly come a long way since his introduction as a possible villain in the first series. Actually, apart from being absolutely brilliant as a foil for Steve in this, Maya Hawke’s character demonstrates one of the things which impressed me the most about this series...

I just can’t tell you specifically why, in regards to her or it could be considered a spoiler.

What I can say, though, is that things play out a lot less predictably than they did in the previous two seasons. Things are set up, sometimes they have been set up from the previous year and... it does get pretty obvious how strings are going to be pulled but, for the majority of them (and excepting the death of two regular characters in the final episode, which you can kind of guess by the direction the script has gone in), the threads don’t pull together in quite the same way you thought they were going to... well, at least not yet, anyway. One or two things might still happen if there’s a fourth series but.. nope, things didn’t quite go as predictably as they did in the previous two shows... which I am very grateful for.

It also seems a lot darker... not just in the amount of blood and viscera in the majority of the episodes but also in terms of what’s at stake and the dramatic intensity of some of the scenes. There’s a beautiful ending to the sixth of the eight episodes where things get really dark for Eleven (and all of humanity) and the show's producers have decided to go 'full on' by using an extract from the Phillip Glass opera Satyagraha (probably my favourite opera, it’s on play at work all the time) and then allowed it to play out through the end credits too and, with the addition of this music, it really gives the visuals and dialogue a lift of ‘doom laden hell on Earth right around the corner’... which is just what this episode needed.

There are also the odd annoying things about the production. For example... and I can only assume this is in homage to the prolific nature of these same kinds of mistakes in many 1980s shows and movies, the kids penetrate a certain area of the Russian base by... crawling through air ducts. Dudes, this is such an awful cliché! My dad worked in the heating and building trade and he complains every time people do this in the media. Those things are filled with whacking great globs of machinery. You can’t be crawling through them. He also gets annoyed with the other thing the kids did in this one... look up to find a trap door in the lift so that they can escape discovery. Guys! When was the last time you ever saw a trap door in an elevator? Answer... never (or rarely). You don’t put them in otherwise you would have your passengers crawling out and making trouble when the lift gets stuck. This doesn’t happen!

Asides from that, though, Stranger Things 3 is probably the best of the three seasons so far but, honestly, after an ending like that where things seem to, despite the stupid mid-end credits sting, have come to a conclusion... well, I almost don’t want to see where they’d go with this one. I really don’t want another series after the way this one has finished so... yeah... loved it but not holding my breath for a fourth because, I suspect, unless the writers compromise themselves in ways I wouldn’t want them to, it wouldn’t be the same show. This season though... was a really nice slice of 1950s B Movie science fiction horror wearing 1985 clothes. So worth a look.

*Since I wrote this, that character is sighted alive and well in the trailer for Season Four, albeit in changed circumstances so, yeah, still in it I guess.

Stranger Things 2

Mazes and Monsters

Stranger Things 2
2018 USA

Okay so... people who read my review of Stranger Things (which can be found here) will know that I... well I didn’t hate it, I was just mostly not impressed with it in any way. Well, all that changed when I finally got access, via a friend, to Series 2 recently. It’s a real change of pace for the show, I felt and it almost feels like the clichés were all gotten out of the way in the first season so we hit the ground running on this one, immediately picking up from the loose end that Will Byer’s was left with ‘something’ from his experiences in the ‘upside down’.

This season won me over very quickly and it was great when you see the montage in the first episode as the four friends (minus Eleven) are seen making preparations for Halloween and go as the lead characters from Ghostbusters. This one felt a little more like the 1980s as I remembered it... in that rose-tinted nostalgia vision we all have for the decades we are growing up in and it was especially nice seeing the kids saving (and stealing) all their money to go down to their local amusement arcade to try and beat the new ‘animated video game’ sensation Dragon’s Lair. For those too young to remember, this was kind of an experimental game using proper cartoon footage which, if I recall correctly, cost about 5 or 10 times more to play than any of the other video games in the arcades, was way too expensive for me to play more than once and... always seemed to have a queue next to it.

Things like this heroic fantasy themed game would be important to those kinds of kids though and I appreciated the nostalgia hit here.

So, onto the plot and... it’s one of those again where you have a few different ends of ‘this season’s problem’ being solved by different sets of regular characters. This one involves a super intelligence, the mind flayer (named after a character from the Dungeons And Dragons manual), who has an army of growing demogorgons (the kids only had one to deal with last season) who are inhabiting an offshoot of the ‘upside down’ which has manifested and grown under the town of Hawkins and who the kids have to find a way of stopping... both helped and hindered by Will Byers, who has the intelligence of the mind flayer sitting inside him, using his mind and body as a host organism. We also have Eleven, who has been secretly living with the Sheriff of Hawkins, who runs off to pursue her own issues and has adventures in the big city, before finally reuniting with everyone at the end of the penultimate episode like the cavalry as she turns up to... if they’re lucky... kick some demogorgon butt by closing down the gateway to the ‘upside down’.

So... lots of things going on and, as you might guess, it’s riddled with loads of 1980s references and even the music, which is usually somewhat inspired by the sound of John Carpenter’s scores anyway, it seems to me, has a couple of moments in Eleven’s big city adventures with her soul sister who also exhibits special powers, where it either goes into a cover version or, more than likely, is straight needle-dropped in from one of my favourite cues from the score to Escape From New York. So, yeah... very much more my kind of thing, this series.

There’s even a new bully character... since the class heavy from last season turned out to be one of the nice guys after all and is now a protector for the main protagonists... and this new guy, who’s sister is the new love interest of one of the kids, is seriously channeling the vibe of Judd Nelson from The Breakfast Club, including looking just like him.

And yeah, good acting from all around including  Caleb McLaughlin, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Millie Bobby Brown, Winona Ryder and Noah Schnapp  but, also, a couple of new characters played by Sean Astin (presumably here because he was in The Goonies, a film I’ve never seen) and Paul Reiser... who seems to be both channeling and also atoning for his role in James Cameron’s ALIENS here. And talking of the A L I E N universe, there are an awful lot of references to various films in the franchise here... or at least the first two... with a particular Harry Dean Stanton skin shedding scene coming to mind at one point in the narrative.

So yeah, I was all over this one and watched it through fairly quickly... although I’m already a season behind again and am not sure when I’ll get access to the third series. This one also has a kick ass final shot which, more or less, has been seen all over the show in the form of a sketch, as the writers revisit some of the tropes from the first series... such as a new bully character and, instead of Christmas tree lights being used as a communication device, we have gazillions of abstract sketches which, when taped up all over the house, give a map of where the creatures of the ‘upside down’ are living. And tonally it plays out exactly like the first series, with the same ‘will they, won’t they’ romance beats and concerns of the main characters. I was surprised at one of the scenes of bloody aftermath when one of the new characters is feasted on by a few demogorgons because, I dunno, we’d already seen it happen once and for some reason the camera decides to back to the carnage, perhaps to explain to the audience that, yes, this character you all worked so hard to accept and started to like has now been shredded but, I dunno, the style of the content choice on that moment seemed a little out of place here.

Still, other than that, Stranger Things 2 is a much better incarnation of the show and, like the series itself, this review is a little short, I’m afraid. Looking to see how the series progresses now and kind of hoping we don’t just get more of the same in the third one because, yeah, this particular set of manifestations of the ‘upside down’ has been a little done to death now, I think. Check this one out if you have the time to binge.

Godzilla - King Of The Monsters

Ghidorah, Mon Amour

Godzilla - King Of The Monsters
USA/Japan 2019 Directed by Michael DoughertyUK cinema release print.

Okay, so Godzilla - King Of The Monsters is the third in an predominantly American made series of new ‘Monsterverse’ films based on the various Toho Kaiju Eiga such as the Godzilla films. The first of these was Godzilla (reviewed by me here) and the second being the much better Kong - Skull Island (reviewed by me here). Now the fourth entry in this series, due next year, will be Godzilla Versus King Kong which brings me to ask... why have so many of these films got titles ripped from older movies utilising the same characters.

This film is particularly problematic in this aspect since Godzilla - King Of The Monsters was the title for the American release print of the 1954 film, Godzilla (aka Gojira) which started it all. You know, the one where a lot of it was cut, Raymond Burr was added into the linking scenes and Akira Ifikube’s masterful score was mostly replaced with old Universal monster movie cues tracked in. So, yeah, this particular title evokes some bad memories and associations at best.

However, while I can see exactly why many of the critics are giving this one fairly negative reviews, it’s actually far superior to the 2014 Godzilla movie and I enjoyed this one a lot.

There are four main monster characters in this one plus, or so we are told, some new ones. There is The Big G himself, of course, in what I suspect is a slight redesign that does the character absolute no favours. He pretty much looks like a mean thug in this... just the kind of giant, fire breathing reptile monster you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alleyway on your way home from work one night (as opposed to the more friendly and convivial giant reptiles you might wish to pass on the street). Which could have worked really well for the character if he was, as he was in a few of the early Toho films, being portrayed as a villainous force of nature that needed to be stopped. However, it’s made abundantly clear from the story here that he is definitely being seen as the heroic saviour of mankind so the extra mean look didn’t really work all that well for me, it has to be said. Just a pair of googly eyes would have done the trick.

We also have three more ‘fan favourites’...

We have Rodan, who starred in his own films as well as crossing over with the Gojira movies back in the 1970s and probably later. We also have everybody’s favourite larva turns giant moth creature Mothra, who is also seen as one of the ‘hero kaiju’ in this (as she pretty much always is whenever she’s in the movies, it has to be said). Lastly we have the kaiju who I always think of as Godzilla’s arch enemy, the three headed dragon-like creature Ghidorah (or King Ghidorah as he used to be known). It’s actually the best of the Ghidorah’s I’ve seen in the way the various heads of the creature interact with each other and, as far as I’m concerned, even though he’s the lead non-human villain of the piece, he’s also the best of the monsters in the movie. In a nice touch, the less clued in audience members (as far as the history of the genre goes) don’t find out Ghidorah’s name until much later in the movie. Instead, the humans have designated him Monster Zero, in a nice touch to the history of the character and his designation in his second appearance back in Invasion Of The Astro Monster (aka Godzilla Vs Monster Zero).

In addition to these, I’m pretty sure I spotted Kumonga a couple of times but it wasn’t shouted out to the audience like the others were.

And its a really fun film with some nice twists and turns to the characters and all the human story built around the monsters, in structure at least, is really well done and gives the film a certain lift absent from the previous US attempts to bring the Godzilla character to life. That being said, the human element of the story is also where the film fails in some regards. By that I mean...

Well, like the two predecessors, the film is cast with some major A list actors who always do a fantastic job with the material they are given to work with. I mean we have Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Ken Watanabe (reprising his role as the modern version of Dr. Ishiro Serizawa), Ziyi Zhang, Sally Hawkins (back as Dr. Vivienne Graham), Charles Dance as the human villain of the piece (or one of them... don’t want to get into spoiler territory here) and David Strathairn (back again as Admiral William Stenz). These are all fantastic actors and they all do a hell of a job with the dialogue they are given. Which is the main problem, I think, if any were to be found in such an entertaining confection as this. The dialogue is truly atrocious and the phrase ‘trying to get a silk purse from a sow’s ear’ comes to mind. Some of this dialogue is just embarrassing, even when it’s not trying to jargon the ears to death with its fictional, scientific gibberish.

Coupled with that is some unusually stylised acting from pretty much all the players. Every eyebrow twitch or look or head movement seems to be directed to the camera with the express intention of underlying and punctuating every dramatic moment to the nth degree. It’s like the director was saying... “More gravitas. More weight. Less subtle... give me moooore!” all the way through. Seriously, just between Chandler, Watanabe and Hawkins we have more chin and brow action than you’d get on an episode of Battle Of The Planets (aka Gatchaman). I was sitting there in the audience thinking I was stuck in some kind of artificial ‘gravitas well’. It might be that this style of acting is more appreciated in Japan, one of the primary targets for these films I suspect but... all I’m saying is that, as great as these performers are, they all looked like they were trying to get away with understating, as far as possible, some really broad strokes in terms of their physical presence and... well, it’s certainly something that stands out.

However, for all this, the film still manages to be immensely superior to some of the other Godzilla movies over the years and, frankly, there are some really nice references to the history of Kaiju Eiga productions for the ‘old school’ days... such as the use of the ‘oxygen destroyer’, featured in a few of the movies including Gojira’s 1954 debut. Heck, there’s even a revelation that one of the main characters is descended from the characters played by The Peanuts in the original Mothra movies... which is a really nice touch. There are also a fair few references to Skull Island and the history of the organisation Monarch, which is being established.

An inconsistency with the previous two movies is that this one doesn’t have a similar opening title sequence as those two, utilising real and fake news coverage. However, this one does use this device over the end credits to help set up the coming Godzilla Vs King Kong movie so at least there is some brand consistency here. And, by the way, you might want to stay until the end of the credits for another scene that might be important in a future movie in the franchise.

The cherry on top of this film is the new score by Bear McCreary. I’ve been saying how good this composer is for years now (since the modern Battlestar Galactica TV show which he scored) and he really delivers the goods here, utilising not just his own music which perfectly matches the mood of the film but also bringing in some new versions of the Ifikube scores with the two main themes you might associate with Godzilla plus the Mothra main theme (alas, the Mothra lyrics don’t make an appearance here). The score is brilliant and... mixed way too low during the action scenes so, yep, waiting for the double CD to turn up from Amazon any day now. Can’t wait to hear this one away from the visuals.

And there’s not much more ‘spoiler free’ stuff to say about Godzilla - King Of The Monsters, I think. Some good acting (despite the script obstacles to it), some great action, a nice story idea and, alas, the death of my two favourite human characters... one in the first third of the movie and another during the inevitable act of heroic redemption at the end. Definitely a film to watch if you liked the previous two and are a fan of the genre in general. Despite bad reviews for this, which are mostly unwarranted, I think we have a remarkably ‘on the right track for once’ American look at the title character and I am really looking forward, now, to next year’s monster smack down.

Stranger Things

Needful Kings

Stranger Things
2016 USA

A friend of mine gave me access to Stranger Things saying “This is a show I think you might like.” Since it’s one of those streaming thingies on a web site (or something like a web site but a bit beyond my understanding), he probably knew I would never bother to try and see this show any other way than him letting me to watch it. I really don’t like the digital world and streaming deprives me of the neccessary ownership of holding a shiny disc in my hand, not to mention allowing me to ignore the studio if they decide to play puppet-master and pull it from their virtual releases schedule. Having now seen it, I’m not sure I’m the particular audience that Stranger Things is catering for... although I did warm to it by the final couple of episodes.

Set in the, presumably fictional, town of Hawkin (named after Professor Hawking, I would guess), this is the story of four teenage friends who are into cool stuff (like Dungeons & Dragons, for example) and it mostly takes place in 1983. However, as we see at the start, some kind of ‘monstrous thing’ is unleashed and, when one of the boys, Will Byers, goes missing, his three friends try to find out what’s happened to him in the face of establishment adversity, even when the boy’s body is found (which will make sense once you start to watch it). Along with their new super powered, escaped Government Research Group experiment friend 011, aka eleven or Elle for short, the friends become embroiled in a fantastic adventure involving an alternate layer of reality, a monster and a sinister, threatening Government conspiracy. And, of course, multiple sets of investigations... where different, older sets of characters get involved with alternate elements of the mystery so everyone can accidentally end up meeting near the end and then, by pooling their resources and discoveries, beat the evil government agency responsible and find the missing character.

So, yeah, it’s trying to tap into exactly the same kind of source material that J. J. Abram’s Super 8 (reviewed here) was trying to get into... and so you have loads of 1980s horror and science fiction references on show here, with many nods to Stephen Spielberg thrown into the mix... along with stuff like ‘Salem’s Lot, John Carpenter, The Evil Dead... basically everything you’d want to showcase in a loving homage to the 1980s. Even some of the music is a little like something John Carpenter might have come up with for The Fog (reviewed here) in a kind of light form. Having said that, the producers have included The Bangles cover version of Simon & Garfunkel’s Hazy Shade Of Winter in one episode and, thinking about it, that’s a bit of an anachronism. Admittedly it’s a disturbing cover for me because The Bangles only cover two thirds of the original song and left out my favourite verse (“... at any convenient time. Funny how my mem’ry skips while looking over manuscripts of unpublished rhyme... drinking my vodka and lime...”) but what really infuriated me as I was thinking about it on the bus coming home from work was that Stranger Things Season One is set in November 1983... but The Bangles didn’t bring that version of the song out until 1987, if mem’ry serves and is not skipping here. So, you know, if you’re going to do 1983... get it right!

So, okay... all this referential stuff is something I should be well into and, normally I would be... but I found it really hard to get into here. Ditto for my dad who only managed to make it a half an hour into the first episode before bailing on it in disgust at the amount of formulaic writing showcased here. I at least made it to the end of the last episode and, I’d have to say from about episode 5 onwards, things start to get a little more interesting in terms of just wanting to find out what is going to happen next. The characters do grow on you.

For the most part, though, all this stuff is dull and clichéd... something you don’t want to have with even the most post-modernly eclectic approach to popular entertainment and, with its obvious plot line, it did feel like somebody had just taken an old episode of The X-Files and expanded it into something unnecessarily longer. The opening of each episode proclaims it to be A Netflix Original Series but, honestly, it’s so far from original it’s not funny.

That’s not to say there aren’t any plus points and, like I said, I did stay to the end with it. For example...

Although the story is pedestrian in nature and not exactly full of surprises (trust me... you’ve seen it all before, sometimes dressed a little differently), it does at least stick rigidly to being an all round, coherent narrative and this is very much improved by having some really warm characters and, frankly, some great actors in it. I’d heard that Winona Ryder was in this one and she does an absolutely phenomenal job as Joyce Byers, the mother of the missing boy. Of course, it took me half an hour to realise which one she was in it because, frankly, she still looks like she’s in her mid twenties and certainly not old enough to be anyone's mother, especially not of the teenage brothers depicted here. She plays a character halfway between losing it at the disappearance/possible death of her boy and a perceived crazy but driven warrior as she becomes embroiled in the phenomena... talking to her absent son through Christmas tree lights etc. Don’t worry... it’ll make sense if you sit down and watch it.

She is more than ably supported by David Harbour as Jim Hopper, the post-tragedy washed up excuse for a town sherriff who, perhaps somewhat predictably, straightens himself up and opens his mind, becoming one of the real good guys when he realises there really is a government conspiracy and that Joyce’s youngest boy may still be alive. And we have Mathew Modine as the head of the Government group who knows much more about what’s going on, and what’s gotten loose, than anyone else in town. Actually pretty much everyone is really good in this and I could just list the whole cast here and say, these people are all doing a swell job... but you’ll see that if you watch the show.

Special shout out to the four kids who are going after the mostly absent Will, though, because they’re awesome... Finn Wolfhard, Caleb McLaughlin, the outstanding Gaten Matarazzo and the quite unbelievably phenomenal acting tour de force that is the eleven year old (at time of filming) Millie Bobby Brown... who plays Eleven with an amazing level of intelligence and understanding that a lot of actors don’t sometimes get when they are over twice her age.

Now, the story is clichéd, it’s true, but it is kinda addictive... mostly in terms of staying around to see if you are right about what’s going to happen next. However, I did think that the 1980s theme was kinda downplayed quite a lot in places and... I don’t know why I didn’t respond to it much since, well, I remember the 1980s pretty well in terms of the pop culture. It’s funny, I really like movies and books that are retro set in the 1960s and I have to wonder if the majority of the people on places like Twitter and the like who are raving about Stranger Things are so positive about it because many of them are quite young and it gives them a sense of borrowed nostalgia for a time they never, actually, properly lived through themselves, maybe? I don’t know whether that’s true or not but Stranger Things has proven very popular with young audiences, it seems to me, and a second series has already been commissioned. 

Which is lucky because, as is the nature of such shows written by people who know that a follow up could always be on the cards, there are still quite a few questions raised about, for example, the strange world of ‘the underneath’ which features so prominently in this as a mystery element. Is it really a parallel realm or is it, in fact, a near future reality of this town in this fictional version of 1983? Is one of the most interesting characters in the show really gone at the end of the last episode or will that person return for the second season? Is one of my favourite characters really dead at the end of episode three or can something be done about that? And what is really going on with that other character everyone has been making such a fuss about? There’s definitely something up with him.

So, yeah, the writers have written it as open ended as possible so they can riff on other genre conventions in the next series along... so there’s that. And that’s going to happen sometime over the next year, I would guess. Meanwhile, I keep asking myself if I’d recommend Stranger Things to any of my friends and, I think, judging from my own reaction and that of my dad, that it will probably play better to a much younger audience than people who actually lived through those times. It does have its moments of intrigue and mystery and, in terms of direction, shot framing and some nice camera movement which echoes some of the props from one of the episode's directors. It’s certainly a competently put together piece, if you can ignore the clichéd nature of this particular postmodernistic beast. So if you’re 30 or under, I suggest you may want to give this one a go and... if you’re over that age, maybe you’ll try to be a little more understanding and forgiving if some of the stuff in this seems painfully obvious and protracted. At that age you’re not necessarily the target audience, methinks.