By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 40 seconds ago
The final Stranger Things season has proven to be a disappointment, with fans online complaining about issues ranging from bad acting and poor plots to Millie Bobby Brown’s unmoving brows (Botox may ultimately prove to be the strangest thing of them all). However, I have a more basic question about this season, one that concerns the aesthetics of everyone’s streaming show.
After spending nearly half a billion dollars on Stranger Things Season 5, why does this show look so ugly in every single episode?
A Budget Turned Upside Down
If you didn’t know, Stranger Things’ fifth and final season has a reported budget of $50-$60 million per episode. At eight episodes long, that means the most recent season’s budget ranges anywhere between $400-$480 million, a budget which seemed justified at first because Netflix advertised that each episode would be like a miniature movie unto itself. While we can debate whether or not this was a success (most movies are longer, have better pacing, and provide better payoffs than these episodes), one thing is for sure: this season does not look like it took nearly half a billion dollars to produce.
The most basic issue about Stranger Things Season 5’s visuals is that the backgrounds constantly look blurry. Part of Season 1’s charm was that it had the cozy feel of an actual ‘80s suburb, and you could easily make out every painstaking little detail. Now, everything looks like a cutscene from a mid-2000’s video game, with blurry backgrounds (and all the freaking soft focus) obscuring the details and making the show feel as claustrophobically closed-off as Hawkins itself.
From Amateur CGI To Fake-Looking Sets
Additionally, Season 5 relies on plenty of CGI effects, and they look bad. Like, bad bad: things like the blob of “exotic matter” in the Upside Down, for example, look like a generic screensaver effect, and the Demogorgons look so fake I half-expected to see health bars over their heads. This combines with the flat lighting and bad green screen effects to create visuals that are as fake as they are boring. Take a look at pretty much every scene in the Upside Down and ask yourself, does this look like it needed the budget of two standard Hollywood blockbusters combined?
On a related note, the sets of Stranger Things season 5 are pretty atrocious…the cave where Max hides out looks painfully artificial, and some of the sets in the Upside Down look like they were hastily assembled right before shooting. When Dustin, Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan are searching for the “force field” to take down, they wander through rooms where every wall looks like it came from a frosty, oversized cubicle. That might be why they filled these scenes with white slime, which brings me to a minor gripe: did producers really have to have a super emotional moment with characters surrounded by white slime that looks like semen?
Stranger Things Looks Filtered And Fake
Finally, everything looks filtered to within an inch of its life, emphasizing how the show looks like the artificial antithesis of Season 1. This is why the show has what many fans have disparagingly called “the Netflix look,” as the streamer has a house style every bit as bland and uninspired as a Marvel movie. Now, the house style has infected the streamer’s biggest show, with the Duffer Brothers burning through nearly half a billion dollars to create something with the ugly aesthetics of a forgettable Netflix rom-com.
As of this writing, Stranger Things has yet to air its series finale, and it’s entirely possible that it will be so visually stunning that fans forget how ugly the rest of the season has looked. So far, though, there’s no real reason to believe the final episode will be any prettier than what came before. This has resulted in the last thing that Netflix wanted: a Stranger Things fandom as unmoved as Millie Bobby Brown’s eyebrows, despite all the piles of money that have been thrown at literally every episode of Season 5!
