Stranger Things 4: We’ve seen 7 XXL episodes … long but good!

Three years of waiting. Since the premiere of Season 3 took place on July 4, 2019, Stranger Things fans have been patient. With a higher budget – 30 million episodes! – Expanded area and pretty stunning horror sequences, the new Netflix hit season is the event of the week.

However, the warning is in order. The very long duration of the episodes, averaging about 1 hour in 15 episodes, and the slow development of the stories make any form of over-listening possible.

The notion of time has always been a bit complicated in the fictional city of Hawkins, where it is known that portals of nightmarish parallel dimensions sometimes open, but this takes on a new meaning as Stranger Things 4 catches on to the characters they have. Become a teenager!

Three years for us – and for the actors by the way – but for the band only six months have passed since the fight for Starcourt Mall. It was so intense that Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) was finally left without his forces.

He moved with Joyce (Winona Ryder), Will (Noah Schnapp) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) to California, and Mike (Finn Wolfhardt), Dustin (Gaiten Matarazzo), Max (Seddie Sink), Lucas (Keleb McLaughlin) Lime) remained in Hawkins.

Apparently dead, but alive and well, Hopper (David Harbor) is a prisoner of conscience in the Russian Gulag. And even thousands of miles from Hawkins, he did not end up upright …

Stranger Things 4 resembles previous seasons in that it remained in the cultural and pop law of the 80s with respect to the film genre of the time. However, in this fourth part, Stranger Things acquires more of its own identity and becomes something different than a stylized tribute to the creatures and wonderful classics that filled theaters in the 80s.

This season is clearly fuller, more exciting and more intense than the previous one. But it also follows the natural evolution of this vast epic that the Daphne brothers narrated from the beginning.

“Normal Life” for Elven, Will, Jonathan and the boys’ mother, Joyce Byers, plays the average American family, at least in appearance, settling into a new ordinary life in California, where everyone hopes that Jane is Elven’s real name. – Be able to make a fresh start.

For a young girl who develops in this new environment, without her strength and without her adoptive father, Jim Hopper, who is still missing, she learns to exist as an ordinary teenager. And it’s both a challenge and a pain for him. But Elven’s sincere enthusiasm and the apparent uproar of the lead after Hawkins’s departure calms the Bayers to a new life in the West.

This season continues the rest of the gang in Hawkins as high school students prepare for their infamous “spring break,” the spring break. Now Lucas spends more time with the high school basketball team. Max continues to struggle with the death of his brother, Billy. As for Mike and Dustin, they find new friends at the Hellfire Club – a group of nerds playing under the supervision of Dungeons & Dragons by Eddie Manson (Joseph Quinn), a much older tutor in high school.

Dividing the original strip into small groups and introducing new characters such as basketball team captain Jason Carver (Mason Dai) and pizza delivery boy Argil (Eduardo Franco) Jonathan’s new best friend, this season 4, approves the change as one of the defining changes. Themes for the season. There is a break fixed both in form and in substance, even if these fragmentary groups work on each side for the same reason.

If some change in the landscape is felt from the beginning, we are accustomed to this new narrative geography, as the episodes relate to the psychology of the characters. While Stranger Things continues to revolve around Eleven and its connection to Upside Down, this season plays with the idea that Hawkins is a cursed place and town, in a way, moving the inner lines of people who know its secrets.

While most teens are busy adhering to sexual maturity and, ultimately, school life, our characters also experience the knowledge of what kind of horror Hawkins’s National Laboratory has done to the world. And if they are obviously too young for that, they are gaining maturity very quickly, which has greatly helped in this matter now their appearance in young people.

While this season presents the inspired monster of the new Dungeons & Dragons – which is very similar to Freddie Krueger of Night’s Claws – it’s particularly significant. Because his presence partly answers some of the biggest questions in the series.

It is in these conditions that we feel the end of Stranger Things is approaching. We know that Season 5 will be the last. Maybe that’s why the first episodes of this episode are outrageously long. We assume that the Brothers Daphne want to say everything, not spare the details. But the impression remains that instead of completing the intricate weaving of the narrative, it opens up excess scenes that could have remained in the editing room.

There are still a few flashes. Like the upside, which always seems bigger, Stranger Things is changing and coming out with these new episodes of the classic series. By presenting one feature film per episode, he is transformed into a mega-series, the hyperserial nature of which makes him the object of a series-film in his own way. Short is long but still good.