Stranger Things - Season 3 (2019)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2019
	Creators: Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer
	Actors: Winona Ryder (Alien Resurrection, Star Trek), David Harbour (Black Widow), Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown (Godzilla: King of the Monsters)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Thriller, SF, Horror
	Conditions of visioning: April 2020, VOD, 10" tablet screen.
Synopsis: At the end of the summer holidays, the group of friends from Hawkins is learning to grow up when Joyce (Ryder) finds some strange things with magnets, Will feels the return of Mind Flayer and Dustin detects a radio message in Russian.
Review: After a first and second seasons that played with our 80's nostalgia, it was hard to imagine the creators of this successful series would find ideas for a third. It seems a bit exaggerated that supernatural events occur once again to the same people in the same small town and nobody else does anything about them, but as they are ripples of the first seasons it is somehow justified. What feels a bit more odd is that it is again the mission of our beloved characters to investigate the mysteries. Indeed they are all back, growing up quickly as teenagers do, and thus now having new preoccupations. To that respect the series does relatively well showing how the boys are slowly more interested in girls than in playing games, even though I hated watching the teen romance bits. The best thing in this season is that as the characters grow up, the inspiration for story-telling and film-making too, from E.T. and The Goonies to more adult movies (that the kids watch in secret) like The Thing, Evil Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween II or Red Dawn which they even quote. The first seasons were scary, this one is Horrific. The series is still pretty generous, playing full-screen scenes from Back to the Future, playing the soundtrack from The Neverending Story, and showing lots of well-done gory CGI monsters. And David Harbour and Winona Ryder support all the scenes they are in. On the down side, as I mentioned I didn't like the romance scenes, was super-annoyed by the flickering neon lights in the hospital (this might be the worst use of that effect I have ever seen, it doesn't make any sense) and disappointed by the under-use of Jake Busey (Starship Troopers). I was fearing a much worse season when I saw titles of YouTube reviews like "Too much of a good thing" so I was pleasantly surprised. Still, it starts to be repetitive. I hope that season 4 in production will take use somewhere else, as promised by the season's ending.
Rating: 6 /10