I have only managed to watch season one of this series. Overall it's another one of those lazy attempts to re-create the 80's ever since Super Eight became a massive hit with audiences.

In fact this reminded me a lot of J. J. Abrahams' school of filmmaking. In that it takes all familiar elements of 80's tropes and unsuccesfully string events around those archetypes. It starts promising but eventually drops the ball midway through the story. The same thing happens here. The kids are all caricatures form the 80's, none of them have a real personality, just character traits at best.

Everything feels fake in this one, starting from the posters in the bedroom of the kids. For example 'THE THING', none of those kids would ever be allowed to see a screening of The Thing nor would parents in the 80's allow their kids to hang up those kind of posters. Those are minor things but there are many decisions like this where the Duffer brothers just couldn't resist to shoehorn hommage after hommage in to the screen, without thinking if it is servicing the story.

None of the actors, were terrible, only Winona Ryder is chewing the scenery...hard, and not in a good way. The only interesting thingthey're trying to do is when they invert the trope of the jock. Unfortunately the love triangle they're trying to push doesn't work when the other two thirds of that relationship are stale tropes.

Other than that they straight up rip off images from Jonathan Glazer's movie 'Under the Skin', well, that movie wasn't from the 80's , it was only two years ago before this series. I guess originality isn't in the repertoire of the creators. Speaking of the devil, the design of the creature looks like any other hellspawn we've seen a million times in videogames.

And honestly it might have worked if they would have focused on the mystery of the disappearance of a kid and only that. That's where the drama lies. But unfortunately they have to throw in E. T. as well, so we have a girl with superpowers who seems alien and it all muddles up the story. So on the way we get introduced to the obligatory shady corporation who is so easily dispatched off so don't bother paying too much attention. The whole premise is so clumsily woven together with no interesting payoffs or themes, that I'm stunned how this got greenlit in the first place.

I give an extra star since the series does at least look visually good sometimes, so whoever did the production design should get props. Too bad the writers didn't have the same work ethic.