Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNaF) is a popular media franchise that consists of horror-themed video games and lore influenced books. Released by Scott Cawthon, the first self-titled game was published on August 8th, 2014. The basis of the story happens where the player is usually a night-time employee at a location connected with “Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza”. This fictional children’s restaurant takes inspiration from family pizza chains like Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz Pizza Place. The restaurant has life-size animatronic characters resembling human-like animals that perform on a show stage, usually for children’s parties. The animatronics wander the restaurant at night, and the guard is instructed to watch over them. With that, there is a new Five Nights at Freddy’s themed movie that was released on October 27th.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead!)
The Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, dsirected by Emma Tammi, starred several actors such as Josh Hutcherson, Mathew Lillard, Elizabeth Lial, and so forth. It was released October 27th of this year and since its release, it has been trending on the internet. Many reasons for its popularity have been induced from viral memes, clips, characters and influenced internet trends. Recently we decided to go watch the new movie at our local AMC theater. For us, as previously obsessed with the franchise and quite educated on the story lore of the game, we were quite excited. With expectations and curiosity, we gave in and watched it last weekend…
To recap the movie, this is basically what happened:
Mike Schmidt, the main protagonist, is fired from his previous job for beating up a guy who he falsely accused of kidnapping a kid. This leads to Mike’s desperate need of a new job in an effort to take care of his little sister, Abby. He is hired at the Freddy Fazebear’s Pizzeria as a night guard despite not preferring to take night shifts. He does not like night shifts because at night when he falls asleep he purposely dreams about a time when his little brother, Garrett, was kidnapped. He indicates that he does this to try and find evidence for the man of the doings.
Meanwhile, his aunt is trying to win custody of Abby since the aunt is controlling and thinks Mike is crazy. Mike meets a police officer named Vanessa on the second night of work and she tells him a bit more about the place itself. Moving on, after a couple nights of Mike falling asleep on the job and dreaming his usual dreams, some people that don’t like Mike find out where his new job is (one of them being Abby’s babysitter, which is how they know of his job in the first place). The group of people decide it’s a great idea to go in during the day time to trash the pizzeria. The animatronics get a little quirky and out of anger, kill the group. When Mike can’t get a hold of Abby’s babysitter the next day for obvious reasons, he has to take Abby to the pizzeria with him.
Whilst at the Pizzeria, the animatronics feel a bond between themselves and Abby and do some goofy stuff like make a pillow fort, etc, corny montage of them playing. Fast forward through the story, Vanessa is William Afton’s daughter (William is the man who started and owned the Pizzeria and ended up murdering a bunch of kids including Mike’s little brother, etc, a bunch of kids that are now possessed into the animatronics) and that the animatronics were trying to kill Abby to get her to become one with them. The movie ends with the animatronics killing William by shoving him in a bunny costume he would wear when the restaurant first opened. He goes into what is known as “Springlock Failure” as the suit closes in on itself, crushing and killing him. And with that, the movie is finished and they all lived happily ever after…
Our feelings on the Movie:
Where do we start? First of all, the movie was pretty corny and not scary at all, but several parts of the story were inaccurate to the initial lore tied to the games and books. Man, we walked out of the theater not only annoyed with the people in the theater for making terrible jokes over the movie, but tremendously disappointed.
Character Analysis:
-The actors they used in the movie were well portrayed, we agreed. We felt like Josh Hutcherson was a great actor for Mike and the same for Elizabeth Lail as Vanessa.
-We were disappointed about the William Afton springlock (death) scene. Again, since we are such smelly geeks on the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise we know all about the part of the game where William Afton (The man as previously mentioned, who is squashed into the animatronic bunny costume) is caught in the costume he is wearing and is killed. It was weird and he stood up mid-way to yell some stuff, then finally once he died, there wasn’t any blood trailing behind him when he got dragged away. The scene ended and was of course inaccurate! There is a part from the First game of him dying and him calling after his son “Michael” (of course Mike in the movie) to help him and to “don’t leave me here”, leading to his body being smashed but none of that happened, so you know, we’re a little upset.
Cinematography:
-The movie’s cinematography wasn’t bad at all. It was professionally put together and we liked how the Pizzeria itself looked pretty accurate. Apart from that, we did not like how in some scenes they did not show the real luridness and gore the games were known for. It was a bit too family friendly compared to what our expectations were set for. Growing up with the game being much more graphic to see this portrayed in the movie was just a bit of a bummer.
-Apart from coming up with things to just totally bash, let’s appreciate a movie that does well with color symbolism. Whilst portraying colors to set the mood, the graphics were much more impactful when tied together with color code to birth the setting of the movie.
Soundtrack:
-Hey, the soundtrack was fire, we won’t lie! It is a great opening sequence to the movie. It feels very homogenous. The kids singing, the arcade sort of sounds, and the soft sounds of the music but the bass being heavy, just seems to make sense.
-We also needed a moment to appreciate them putting “Five Nights at Freddy’s” by The Living Tombstone in the end credits. Although it’s cringe worthy now, it brought back some personal childhood memories. With the movie being pretty unexceptional, that was at least worth a portion of our 10 dollar tickets.
Themes and Messages:
-In our opinion the movie and past content all have a sort of theme coiled around hope and hopelessness:
Hopeless, implying that not only are you trapped in a building (when associating with the game), fighting to barely survive, but the animatronics themselves have a sense of being trapped too, they’re helpless to their own situation and are unfortunately not in control of themselves or their fate. They don’t have the capacity to take action on a higher cognitive level since they are children. Therefore they are only able to lash out by killing random people, as a stressed animal kept in a cage for its whole life would.
And then for the sense of hope that there is. A hope that if the subject holds out just long enough, they’ll make it to see the sunrise, or in the animatronics’ case, that salvation will come to them.
Comparison to the initial franchise:
We both agreed that the only genuine good parts in the movie were when featured youtubers, MatPat and CoryxKenshin had their 30 seconds of individual screen glory. Other than that, there wasn’t anything super iconic towards us as fans. It was persistently inaccurate, and seemed as if they listened to the custom lore by a nose.
To conclude, the movie was decently made and won plenty of other long-time fan’s enjoyment, but us apart, we felt dismay. Since we were expecting much more from the movie such as lore accurate representation and a less family friendly atmosphere overall, it wasn’t exactly to our nitpicky liking. It’s not very common nowadays that you’ll see an outstanding Video Game influenced movie due to the same problems with false storylines. Personally, we would not recommend it to fans like us who enjoy canonically accurate content. But if you barely know any of the lore from the games then you will most likely enjoy it much more than us, so if we were you, don’t take this review for granted!
