By Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein
She’s a weapon! Do you seriously wanna fight the Demogorgon with your wrist rocket? That’s like R2-D2 going to fight Darth Vader. We’re no use to Will if we’re dead.
the thing I love about “Stranger Things” is the same thing I love about “And Then There Were None” and “Being Human” and the better Marvel movies and The Force Awakens and s1 of “Hannibal”: these are pieces of media that embrace their own goofy, theatrical premise and then play very seriously by the rules that premise establishes. “Stranger Things” is an 80s movie we watched when we were 12, and it loves being that, it’s having a ton of fun playing up parts of that – the slightly dated acting, the slimy effects – but it’s not making a big hamfisted point about “subverting” the genre, and it’s not being shallow or untruthful within that framework, and it’s not making fun of you for liking it. It brings emotional stakes to an inherently silly ballgame without losing the silliness, because the silliness and the emotional stakes are not, contrary to Zack Snyder, mutually exclusive, and IN FACT the pursuit of emotional truth in an innately bonkers situation is just, like, basically what we are all doing all the time on Earth