Nothing Fantastic: In Review of Five Nights At Freddy’s
The famous game series Five Nights At Freddy’s hits the cinema screen in 2023 with Emma Tammi directing this well awaited text. Here, Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) lands night shifts at a pizzeria. However, it isn’t as easy as he suspects.
Unfortunately, though, nothing seemed to bounce off the screen and that is where the problems with this film begin as nothing seemed to reflect innovation or a desire to make the viewer leave the cinema having seen something memorable. There is a sense that this is just another Hollywood film with the intentions of cashing in on the video game to film movies that other franchises are doing currently like the Sonic franchise has done and the recent Super Mario Bros film.
However, the things that redeem this film to a small degree are the cameos and the aesthetics of the animatronics. Firstly, the cameo from Matt Pat when he appeared in the diner was short but sweet as he said what was needed and ended with ‘but that’s just a theory’ which was simply amazing to hear. The cameo from CoryXKenshin when he was in the taxi was also great to see. But the aesthetics of the animatronics were something else.
The way that they were constructed was interesting as they were (supposedly) crafted on a small budget which really does work when employed in a situation like this as it made them feel more abandoned as, of course, they were. To follow on from this, the budget for this film was only $20 million which worked in the films favour as it generated $80 million on its opening weekend. They went quite far for the aesthetics with this budget but, as mentioned, the other pieces of the film seem to fall short of their potential.
Overall, I believe that this film was average, not producing anything to interesting. I didn’t find myself on the edge of my seat or anything either as nothing was produced that induced any fear of any sort. There could have been so much more here, but we will have to see what the second and the third film brings to our cinema screens.
