Author:
Simularcum
<
nub
>
99.67.112.42
Use
this link
if you want to link to this message and its entire thread of discussion.
Date:
8/5/2019 5:42:36 AM
Subject:
Netflix redux
I heard somewhere that people couldn't get enough of Stranger Things, so I decided to give it a try.
All righty. Well, apparently, I am suffering some kind of cultural appreciation deficit in my golden years, because I watched S1 E1 and had a strange feeling that I had seen it before. It took a while, but I concluded that everything here had been inspired by Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, and Chris Carter.
By "inspired" I mean so heavily influenced as to be verging on plagiarism. But it wasn't quite that bad. It was more like fan fiction's characteristic of being unable to escape the bounds of the original material while simultaneously butchering it. You had fan fiction's tendency to take dumb source material and make it much dumber through bad writing -- embarrassing fantasizing, loss of causation and correlation, and amateurish dialog. Then you had the cringe-inducing habit of adding "me and my crazy friends" as fictional characters. This can't be proven, but it's almost certainly the case.
Stranger Things isn't fan fiction, but it might as well be. It tries to put "me and my crazy friends" in a combination of Goonies, E.T., the spoon-bending side of X-Files, and every Stephen King novel where childhood friends cement themselves together in order to fight Cthulu in the town sewers or whatever. It rattles around in these stolen worlds but can't find refuge in prefab conventions, characters, etc. in the way fan fiction does. It has to sort of make up its own stuff, which it's not very good at. Then it has to spread it out over entire television seasons, which is like trying to make a pint of some awful cafeteria no-name condiment last until the next Sisco shipment arrives.
tl:dr: can't get into it.
