Dark feels like a ripoff of Stranger Things - only w/out the charm

I know copyright law can be nuanced when it comes to purloined ideas, images, and general themes, but I think that The Duffer Brothers, creators of Stranger Things, could make a good case against the German team that developed the Netflix series Dark. Let's see: Part of the series set in the 80s? Check. Group of teenagers from a small town hike in the woods. Check. One goes missing, sending town into a search frenzy. Check. There's a nearby industrial plant sealed off for high security. Check. there may be some kind of chemical or poison leakage from the plant? Check. A police officer leading the search makes his way through a dark underground passage - stupidly, alone and poorly prepared - and comes upon doors that seem to lead to an underground entry to the mysterious plant. Check. Cut to the management of the plant, which we see is in some kind of collusion w/ local officials to keep things quiet. Check. The gang of friends includes a red-headed girl whose presence causes rivalries among the boys - check - and one member who disappeared for some time but has returned. Check. The search for the missing child leads the boys to find an obscure map that may help them find their way to the "crossing." Check. I could go on - but why bother? Dark is amazingly, suspiciously like Stranger Things, but with a shift to a slightly older generation (h.s. v middle school) and more focus on the adult relationships, some adulterous, pushing the story from PG to R. All OK I guess if Dark were ... any good. It was promising at first, despite the extremely complex plot that involves something like a warp in time, juxtaposing contemporary scenes w/ episodes from 33 years back. But instead of becoming more clear and focused as the season progresses, the series to my mind has become a tangle of plot lines, almost impossible to follow, and why bother anyway? None of the adult characters is interesting or even particularly likable, and the kids are basically blanks. What made ST work is the charm of the young kids finding their way in life - plus some very appealing adult characters as well. Dark has none of the charm of ST so we're left with the plot, which is not enough, or maybe too much.

Stranger Things: Better, the less you think about it

In short, Stranger Things (Season 2) is better the less you think about it; the plot - building on Season 1 - in which monsters and monstrous forces generated by a secret government installation in central Indiana are threatening to multiply and destroy the nearby town and beyond, and they somehow devour the consciousness of some of the children whom come into contact w/ them (never mind that in Season 1 the nefarious nature of the government agents involves capturing newborns and treating them like lab rats in hopes - successful - of endowing them w/ supernatural powers), is entirely incidental. The show is about good folks v evil forces, about a mother in distress and a couple of good men who risk and even give up their lives to protect and save others and most of all about a group of teenagers who work together to fight the evil monsters as they do battle w/ the equally strange, alien forces of adolescence. The greatest character is Eleven, subject of the mind-control experiments who has escaped from the government lab and now wants nothing more than a normal teenage life, but she can't quite decode all the messages of the world around her - taking undo risks, struggling to understand friendship and, later, the first blush of teenage love and affection. Unfortunately, Eleven plays less of a role in Season 2, but she still dominates the story line whenever she touches it. Despite the strong production values, the supernatural elements of the story make no real sense, but never mind - these series is really about people, and as such it rings true. The Duffer Brothers, writers and creators and directors of some of the episodes including the season finale, have a great sense for how kids talk and think and interact, they touch the right moments without getting overly sentimental or cliched, and they have a good sense of the period (circa 1980) as well. Thought the conclusion of Season 2 wraps up almost all of the loose strands, the door for another season was left ajar - I suspect we'll see more of these kids until they outgrow their roles.

The success of Season 2 Stranger Things

Stranger Things Season 2 is actually better than we'd thought it would be; Season 1 was fresh and imaginative and ending on a pretty sharp note, and so many of these miniseries are unable to build on the first season and most just shrivel up and die the quiet death of non-renewal - but Season 2 of Stranger Things, at least at the half-way point, keeps up the nice spirit of the first season. Most of all the show is about the kids and their friendly, slightly nerdy relationships, and that carries on really well, even w/ the isolation of the central figure in Season 1 - Eleven - who unfortunately has only a peripheral role in this season. (The young actor who takes on the mantle of the one girl in the guy-group is a little too cool and pretty for the part, I think.) Winona Ryder carries on with her role as the mom outraged and frightened by what's happening to her son, Will - she's great for the part, as is a new character, her kind of goof and insecure boyfriend, Bob. I'd also say that the technical scenes - that is, largely, the goings on the "upside down" world are more sophisticated visually and musically than in Season 1 - budget must have been upped. All this, though, goes with a caveat: The series is good as long as you never stop to think about it, as the premise of this government-sponsored lab of evil doctors and scientists who manage to create some weird fungal virus that various appears as lizard- or slug-like creatures or as a mass of slime or as something like a giant spider or - I don't know - none of it makes any sense nor is it credible for a minute, but the point of a series like this is to just give in and let it take you were it will. ST works because it never takes itself too seriously (compare with, say, Glitch, which tries too hard to be credible) and stays close to the kids-eye-view.

The surprising success of Stranger Things

Obviously the Duffer Brothers were not going to tie up all the loose ends and the conclusion of season 1 of Stranger Things, but it's a pretty solid ending to this surprisingly good 8-part series. I kept wondering why I was so interested in this story, as it is on one level just a pastiche of about a hundred sci-fi, fantasy, monster, government conspiracy movies and you can't really buy into the facts of the story - a secret government agency has been kidnapping children and using them as subjects for mind-control experiments but something went wrong and they ended up creating a carnivorous, grotesque monster that is haunting this small Indiana town, whew - but what you can buy into is the relationships among the kids: the 3 pre-teen boys who set out to find their friend who disappeared and step into the middle of this government conspiracy, the high-school kids who take on the monster and who grow and mature over the course of the series, most of all the young girl who was the mind-control subject who escapes from the Energy Dept facility and who yearns for a normal life. The D Brothers to a fine job re-creating the look and mood of the 1980s; one of the sad things about the series, for me, is to watch the boys play gathered in the basement for hours and days playing their fantasy game (seems to be Dungeons and Dragons, or something like it) and to think that, today, they would each be at home online playing the game alone or perhaps in consort with other players around the world. That human bonding of kids at play seems something we may be losing or have lost.

Very entertaining Stranger Things - as long as you can willingly suspend your disbelief

Half-way through the first season of The Duffer Brothers' Netflix drama, Stranger Things, and finding it surprisingly entertaining. Yes, it requires and enormous suspension of disbelief - as the story involves some kind of conspiracy centering on the U.S. Department of Energy facility in Indiana, with scientists using a young girl ( the daughter of the lead scientist) as a subject for mind-control experiments that someone get way out of control and produce a blob-alien all-devouring monster that is attacking children in the small Indiana town, got it? You really don't have to, as I find the sci-fi-conspiracy elements uninteresting in and of themselves - but they're a vehicle for the Duffers to get at the personalities of the town, in particular the children in the schools whose friends are abducted and who pledge to find them. Also, Winona Ryder is very good as the mom of the first abducted child and who believes he is communicating with her via electric currents. As in so many scifi movies, everyone thinks she is delusional, suffering from a serious breakdown, while of course her only problem is that she's in a movie about the paranormal - we get it, and we feel for her in her misery. The Duffers do a nice job w/ the 1980s period setting - the topical details and the style all seem right, and give the series a little bit of a creepy flavor - a la Blue Velvet, perhaps. The greatest influence, though, is the huge debt to ET (as M pointed out): the adult scientists cruel and lacking in understanding, the sensitive lost alien (in this case the girl who's been the subject of the experiments), the contrast between the dramatic and unusual plot and the mundane domestic life of the town and of the time - kids riding around on bikes in a seemingly safe community, w/ the unknown lurking around the bend.