After spending half a billion dollars, why does Stranger Things look so cheap and ugly?
Author: Chris Snelgrove Published
finals stranger things The season has proven to be a disappointment, with fans taking to the internet to complain about everything from poor acting and a bad plot to Millie Bobby Brown’s unmoving eyebrows (Botox may turn out to be the weirdest thing of them all). However, I have a more fundamental question about this season, involving the aesthetic of everyone’s streaming show.
After spending nearly half a billion dollars stranger things Season 5, why is every episode so ugly?
Budget turned upside down
if you don’t know stranger thing‘ The budget for the fifth and final season is reportedly $50-60 million per episode. At eight episodes long, that means the latest season has a budget of between $400 and $480 million, a budget that seems reasonable at first glance since Netflix claims each episode is like a mini-movie in itself. While we can debate whether this was a success (most movies are longer, better paced, and offer better payoffs than these episodes), one thing is for sure: this season doesn’t look like it cost nearly $500 million to make.
About the most basic questions stranger things The visual effect of Season 5 is that the background always looks blurry. Part of the charm of Season 1 was that it had an authentic ’80s suburban coziness to it, and you could easily see every little painstaking detail. Now, everything looks like a cutscene from a mid-2000s video game, with blurry backgrounds (and all that awful soft focus) obscuring detail and making the show feel as claustrophobic as Hawkins itself.
From amateur CGI to pretend scenes
Additionally, Season 5 relies on a lot of CGI effects, and they look terrible. like, bad The Bad: For example, the “strange matter” blobs in the Upside Down look like a regular screensaver effect, and the Demon Lords look so fake that I half expected to see health bars above their heads. This combined with flat lighting and poor green screen effects creates a visual that is both artificial and boring. Look at almost every scene in Upside Down and ask yourself, does this look like it needed the budget of two standard Hollywood blockbusters? merged?
On a related note, the collection stranger things Season 5 was pretty brutal…the cave where Max was hiding out looked very artificial, and some of the sets in “The Upside Down” looked like they were hastily put together before filming. As Dustin, Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan search for a “force field” to dismantle, they wander through rooms where every wall looks like it came from a frozen oversized cubicle. That’s probably why they filled these scenes with white goo, which makes me complain a little: did the producers do that? real Does it have to be a super exciting moment where the character is surrounded by white goo that looks like semen?
‘Stranger Things’ looks filtered and fake
In the end, everything looks filtered and true to the life of the original, underscoring the fact that the show seemed like a manufactured counterpoint to Season 1. That’s why the show has what many fans disdainfully call “the Netflix style,” as the streamer’s style is as bland as the Marvel movies. Now, that style has infected the streamer’s biggest show, with the Duffer Brothers spending nearly $500 million to create a production with the ugly aesthetic of a forgettable Netflix rom-com.
As of this writing, stranger things The show’s finale hasn’t aired yet, and it’s entirely possible that it could be so visually stunning that fans forget how ugly the rest of the season looks. But so far, there’s no real reason to believe that the final episode will be any better than the ones that came before it. This leads to the last thing Netflix wants: stranger things Despite the huge investment in every episode of Season 5, fans are as indifferent as Millie Bobby Brown’s eyebrows!
