You say when you were watching this, you felt like you were "watching someone trying to gratify me by giving me the exact thing I enjoyed once"- Presumably because when you were watching Jurassic World, you were thinking of Jurassic Park and The Force Awakens >> A New Hope.Quoting Dead & Messed Up (view post)
So what source material was the comparison you drew while watching Stranger Things? Was it one IP? Many? Or just an overall sensation?
Oh, got it. The most predominant ones were probably Firestarter and E.T. and Stand By Me/The Body/It.
As an example, King's "Shop" and "Arrowhead Project" in general felt like touchstones for the villainy of the film. But it didn't feel like there was anything new here. No greater sense of their purposes, no real sense of Modine's character ambitions beyond the most obvious (he wants foreign intel or whatever), nothing specific. It was so broad. Bad guys bad, white-haired guy leader (even E.T. gave dimension to Peter Coyote). Why not take the opportunity to tweak it? Is this group actually mysterious in a meaningful way, or are they just obscure? (As I recall, King's "Shop" was pretty lame.) The only creative thing about the group is Cronenberg-Gate, a nifty rejection of shimmery special effects portals.
As another example, like I said, the monster chasing people didn't feel interesting. It felt like a post-Giger, post-Cloverfield aggregation of basic creature design. Slick and grey and all mouth. The series goes to great pains to nod to Silent Hill and Pan's Labyrinth, but when push comes to shove, its monster is just a set of jaws, whereas those stories had monsters that felt more symbolically/psychologically exciting and engaging. They meant something important to their stories. And it's like this series decided, "Yeah, we should have a monster too!" but never quite tied it to the story on any deeper level. Again, it's catalyst.
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