Stranger Things - Season 1 (2016)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2016
	Creators: Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer
	Actors: Winona Ryder (Alien Resurecction, Star Trek), David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard
	Country: USA
	Genre: Thriller, SF
	Conditions of visioning: April 2017, VOD, 10" tablet screen.
Synopsis: Returning on his bike from an evening of Role-Playing Game with his best friends, Will Byers disappears. His mother Joyce (Ryder) seeks the help of local Sheriff Hooper (Harbour) while the young friends lead their own investigation.
Review: It is a blessing of the few past years that so many TV-series of good quality can be produced, and that they are not dragging their stories forever in order to just squeeze more advertisement breaks in them. For less than ten euros a month you can now have access to all episodes of series like Stranger Things at once, at any time you want and without commercial breaks. This series do not hide its ambition to replicate the recipe that made the success of Fantastic movies with kids in the 80's like Steve Spielberg's E.T. or Richard Donner's The Goonies. The same was said in 2011 of J.J. Abrams (Star Trek, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) when he released the movie Super 8 with which this series have the key ingredients in common: a group of inseparable young friends that behave and speak more like adults than their parents, nostalgic 80's tech (phones, bikes, cars...) ans design (aah, those orange lamps...) and a Fantastic element that will bring the group even closer and against the adult world. Thanks to those memories from my youth the series spoke to me but not as much as it did to friends I spoke to. Beyond that I could appreciate the fine characters, in particular the ones of the Sheriff Jim Hopper and the big brother Jonathan Byers, and the fine actors behind them: Winona Ryder is just amazing (compare her performance to the one she gave in Star Trek for a shock) and the young Millie Bobby Brown quite something in the role of the mysterious little girl. Even though I didn't live in the USA during that period I also found that the 80's style was well rendered in everything: colors, clothes, furniture, cars and most importantly and difficult: people's habits. This sense of details is something I already appreciated in the scariest movie I have seen in years: the 2013 Conjuring. The biggest question that remains is: how does the modern audience react to such a series so obviously targeted to people nostalgic of the 80's? Do you relate to the characters if you were not born in the middle of those phones and those bikes and those wallpapers? Either it works on all audiences and the series is a broader success, or it is limited to a more restricted population but one that may constitute the core of the Netflix subscribers, and anyway the format of a series produced and distributed by a single network make it easy to cope with even a limited success. A second season is under way.
Rating: 7 /10