is the five nights at freddy's movie good? (review)
I came back from Vegas and I’m instantly ill… awesome. So I just got back from watching the new Five Nights at Freddy’s movie and… (that’s actually quite good). Let me preface this by saying that my expectations were admittedly mid to low. From the development hell that the movie has gone under, the switching between directors from Gil Kenan to Chris Colombus to Emma Tammi, the scrapped scripts that Scott posted on his subreddit, and the fact that Universal Pictures were very quick to dump the movie on streaming services on the same day as the theatrical release… things
weren’t looking good for the movie. Now that I’ve seen it though, I will say that my expectations… were met. And then some. I’m going to try and review it the best I can with as little spoilers as possible but I will warn you when I’m about to venture into uncharted spoiler territory. Before we get into the review, I must preface that I was invited to the premiere night of the movie and I met YouTubers like Dawko and 8bitRyan, cool guys- but I won’t let this influence my opinion on the movie… no matter how delicious the
pizzas were. In the next part of the main channel FNAF project I go into detail about the development hell the movie has gone through, but I think it should
the products released recently haven’t really been good. After an intense cycle of development hell and scrapped screenplays, Scott Cawthon settled with Blumhouse to have this FNAF movie made, and after that, production was actually pretty smooth sailing. So finally we have a Five Nights at Freddy’s movie being released in 2023 and was it good? Eh, it was alright. Let’s actually get into the things I actually liked about the movie, and I think I will agree with literally everyone who’s seen the movie or about to see it from the promotional material, that the stars of the show
were the animatronics themselves. These animatronics were made by the Jim Henson Company, and they are fully functional, with videos being posted of the animatronics themselves interacting with YouTubers. These animatronics look amazing in the movie and you can tell they really put attention to detail with the way they move, look around and interact with the characters in the movie. From what I can tell the production switched from actual working machines to people in the animatronic suits especially for scenes in which they do some slightly more extreme movements. Each of the animatronics are incredibly faithful to their
original game counterparts, although I will maintain that Bonnie is NOT blue, he’s purple and the purple erasure that’s occurred makes me SICK, literally SICK! A lot of people were a bit miffed that the animatronics had red eyes especially from the first trailer, but you’ll be pleased to know that the red eyes somewhat make sense within the context of the movie. Another thing about this movie I really liked is the cinematography and the set design. The aesthetic of the pizzeria is second to none, with the old janky arcade machines strewn around the place and the scuffed
lighting throughout really selling the ‘abandoned’ look that I think the FNAF franchise actually kind of lacked after Scott stopped making the games himself. I really liked how the neon lights and fancy party lights around the place allowed the cinematographer to go buck wild on some really stylised shots in the pizzeria. I’d say a good 60% of the movie takes place in the Pizzeria, which says a lot considering how short this movie is. There were rumors going around that this movie was going to be 3 hours long, and after watching it, I can see a couple
of people potentially bringing up how rushed the movie is. I’ll get to that a little later. Josh Hutcherson as Mike Schmidt was decent casting, I feel like he sold the nonchalant side of Mike pretty well throughout the film, you could tell that Mike was absolutely done with everybody especially at the start where he’s trying to find a new job which leads into- Matthew Lillard also brings his A-game to the role especially in the last act where he fully embraces the insane slasher villain side of William Afton. I know it sounds a bit vague and middle
school essay like but I’m basing this off memory and don’t want to go too much into spoiler territory… but I must. If you do not want to hear spoilers for the FNAF movie skip to this timestamp because there are quite a few things I wanna talk about, good and bad that I can’t really mention without spoiling them. You’ve got 3 seconds. Now there is a really big gripe I have with this movie, and I feel a lot of critics are going to agree with me on this one, but I thought the screenplay was terrible. The
biggest thing this movie suffers from is tonal inconsistency. If you’re going into this movie expecting the scare factor of the original Scott Cawthon games, you might be a little disappointed, as I think the movie suffers from a lack of identity. On the one hand it wants to be a creepy slasher with killer animatronics- there are several scenes in the movie especially a pretty gnarly one halfway through that kind of sell how dangerous the animatronics are if you give them free reign around the pizzeria. But then these are coupled with some of the goofiest writing and
tonally jarring scenes before and after. There’s a side plot in the movie that involves MIke’s sister named Abby, and it doesn’t really go anywhere after a certain point. They spend considerable amounts of screentime trying to make out Abby’s aunt to be a cartoonishly terrible person with a lawyer that clearly doesn’t want to be there… and the way in which it’s resolved is… actually I don’t think it got resolved past a particular point in the movie, you’ll know when you see it. I mentioned in my main channel video about Scott’s writing leaning more into gallows humor
the more games he made, and the movie tries to give some brief comedic reprieve by having jokes like Matthew Lillard’s character talking about how terrible the job at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria is, which are things that were explained by Phone Guy in the games, who doesn’t make an appearance at all in the entire movie, by the way. That leads into a big point that I wanted to make about the movie and it was the amount of fanservice the movie had to its benefit and severe detriment. Like I mentioned before the animatronics are genuinely the best part
of the movie. The way they move and interact with Abby is nothing short of adorable in some cases. But then a big problem is how the tone goes from ominous creepy ambience to the animatronics performing rock songs and attempting to build a fort out of dining tables complete with several comedic moments of the animatronics either messing up or fainting from exhaustion which got a few laughs in the cinema, but with how short the runtime of the movie is, these moments of Abby interacting with the animatronics don’t really feel earned in my opinion. They try and
pull the imaginary friend angle and Mike constantly dreaming the same dream every night of his brother getting kidnapped by an unknown figure- I think the short runtime meant that a lot of moments in the movie felt a bit randomly slapped together in the name of fanservice. Also speaking of fanservice there are quite a few YouTuber cameos in the movie, some are a blink and you miss it moment and others are pretty prominent. There’s one cameo in particular where the YouTuber in question says his iconic line- a lot of scenes in the movie are kind of
like that, where a character will say something specifically tailor made for the audience to gasp when they say the thing. It’s not always a bad thing, but the scriptwriters clearly went to the Marvel school of comedic screenplays because a lot of the moments in the movie suffer from the tension deflating when a character makes a quip. I will also mention for people who are interested in the lore, there are quite a lot of cosmic retcons in this movie that will definitely throw you for a loop. I know there specifically is one huge reveal in the
movie that kind of destroys the canon established by the games- not knocking it against the movie, because it is a good way of providing some tension, but for people who are looking for lore tidbits in the movie, prepare to be a little confused… or a lot. I know a few people are probably going to ask about the gore levels in the movie, and I will say except from a clear fanservice scene halfway through, there’s little to no blood in the entire movie, which I thinks works to its benefit because the sound design is pretty damn
good, especially the thuds of the animatronics walking around the place, the mechanical whirring and the flesh being eviscerated. While those were well designed, I very much wasn’t a huge fan of some of the jumpscares in this movie. None of the jumpscares really worked in my opinion, as a lot of them were just LOUD NOISE and quick movement. There is also a running gag with one animatronic from FNAF2 constantly jumpscaring the main characters and it was funny the first time, but then they did it again and again… Alright I think that’s all the gripes I had
with the movie, let’s conclude this I don’t want to make this video a plot summary of the entire movie with every thing I liked and didn’t, but I will say that your enjoyment of the movie entirely depends on what you expect from a Five Nights at Freddy’s movie. The film kind of see saws between a campy slasher feel and a family drama feel, but I feel like for a film that has languished in development hell for almost a decade, seeing these animatronics on the big screen after everyone enjoying them on little screens after all these
years is well worth the price of admission- the movie doesn’t overstay its welcome with its short runtime, but it feels like Blumhouse are definitely considering a sequel angle based on some of the things that happen at the end of the movie. So I’m going to be giving Five Nights at Freddy’s 2023 Live Action movie a 6/10 also known as… you know what never mind my voice can’t handle that. Leave a like and comment down below what you thought of the movie… after you see it in cinemas of course…!
