The Complex Fate of the FNAF Movie

this video is very important to me and that's because I have been a Five Nights at Freddy's fan for Over N years I first got into the game through markipliers FNAF 1 playthrough just like many others before me and many after me when I found out there was going to be a Five Nights at Freddy's movie I was super excited but little did the 13-year-old me know I would be waiting for that movie for the next 8 years spanning nearly a dozen games countless books and in a Flash I went from being in seventh grade to having passed 3 years since graduating high school and then finally the movie came out was it worth the wait well yes definitely but well it's complicated the movie was was not as universally received as we might have hoped and this is honestly the expected outcome given the trend of critics not really getting video game movie adaptations but is that really all it is do they just not get it or is there a bigger discussion to have here now this is going to be a slight departure from the normal type of content on my channel and I also want to preface this with the fact that I did genuinely adore this movie aside from talking with my friends I've not heard anyone else's review so that is to say all of the thoughts in this review are my own and if you happen to disagree with anything that I say throughout the video that's okay overall we should be grateful for the fact that we got a movie in the first place and you can feel the passion and the fact that they put fans first in every second of the film how however that does not mean that it was perfect and in this video I'm going to talk about all of the things that I liked and then all of the things that I didn't like obviously this review will contain full spoilers for the movie so uh if you haven't seen it yet probably don't watch this video if you've been on the channel before welcome back if not hello my name is manaa and today we're going to review the long awaited Five Nights at Freddy's movie the first aspect of the movie I want to talk about are the sets and the costume designs I think this is probably the movie's strongest point the animatronics are pretty much identical replicas of the original character designs from the first game I'm not sure if anyone aside from Jim Henson's Creature Shop could have done it better than they did the actual Freddy's restaurant is also completely perfect I really like the stained glass above some of the seating and the dining area and the way that the arcade looks during the scene where foxy is searching for Abby I think this is probably one of the best looking parts of the movie if not the best looking part the scene is very blue and green which contrasts really well with the looming presence of Foxy's single red eye slowly making its way towards Abby in terms of costume design my main talking points aside from the animatronics of course would be the designs of the missing children whose clothes and appearance is all make sense relative to the animatronics they're associated with they just kind of give off the vibe I also want to touch briefly on the score of the movie unfortunately I can't say that I pay as much attention as I'd like to to music when I watch movies but I think overall the music was fantastic I really like that the producers of the film score are actually releasing physical versions of the soundtrack and my favorite song in the film is probably the one that that plays at the beginning during the pixel art Recreation of the missing children's incident that same Melody plays again later when golden Freddy takes Abby to the restaurant and also during the climax when Abby helps the children remember what Aton did to them when you associate a melody in a soundtrack with a certain feeling that you establish at the beginning of the movie it makes for a subtle payoff for when it comes up again even if the person isn't consciously paying attention to it all right right now let's talk about the acting first and foremost as you might expect I have pretty much nothing but Praises for Josh hutter as Mike and Matthew Lillard as Aton the latter of which I honestly think stole the show with his performance the atmosphere he brings to every second he's on screen as Steve Raglin is so slightly uncomfortable it feels just just wrong enough to make you feel like something is up and the way he stutters and starts to act awkwardly after he reads Mike's last name from his file is [ __ ] brilliant I think the best performance in the entire movie was the scene where he's berating the children after they remember what he's done trying so hard to get out of the hole he's dug himself into that only leads to his death aby's actress Piper Rubio offered up a really Charming performance as well and I definitely fell in love with the character I feel like some of her line deliveries were were kind of flat but overall she was cute and it was perfect Aunt Jane was played by Mary Stewart Matson and she did a great job of making us [ __ ] hate her guts I've got nothing but good things to say about her performance as well she nailed the villain unfortunately as much as I liked the idea of Vanessa's character I feel like Elizabeth L was a little awkward and it might not have been her fault it was mostly a problem with the script which is something that I'll talk about later but she does have a lot of strong moments such as her confession that Aton is her father and as we all know Michael P Sullivan as Doug was hysterical you know it's Doug need I even say more one of the most underrated performances in my opinion was from the kid who played golden Freddy's ghost he had a really menacing Aura when he was on screen but still felt like someone who was just a kid acting spiteful towards Mike I really really liked the scene where he convinced Mike to give Abby to them like just look at this expression finally we have Max her brother and the other two that were with him unfortunately I don't really have anything good to say about these guys so I'm going to have to talk about them a little later oh yeah and their cameos were [ __ ] awesome my theater loved them moving on to the plot of the movie right off the bat I have to say that I really enjoy the more loose adaptation approach that isn't adhering too closely to the gamees floor I think this is the best possible direction for the movie and subsequent sequels to head towards so that there's no attempts to tie in movie events with the games which is what the books seemed to do and we all know how that has kind of muddied the discussion and the theory crafting it's really not too ideal in my opinion based on the information that we've been given from the first movie alone it seems like they're going for a loose adaptation of Games 1 through 3 because I don't think we saw anything that had to do with FNAF 4 and Beyond aside from the occasional book reference but correct me if I'm wrong about that I could be personally probably my favorite choice that was made was to keep Mike Schmidt as a separate person unaffiliated with William another detail I also really enjoyed was making afon specifically work in career guidance so that he can find people down on their luck that would almost be forced to take that night guard job at Freddy since the average person would obviously never want to do this it was genius for some more kind of surface level Praises on the plot SL General decision making for the film story that I don't think needs much explanation the scene where they all build a fort together is fantastic and was probably the peak serotonin Rush that the movie could have possibly given me and using the living tombstones FNAF song for the end credits like holy [ __ ] that was perfect I also really like that dream theory which I originally thought was just going to be a passing reference was kind of a real plot point in the movie I thought that was cool as well I want to briefly touch on the general critic consensus of the film obviously the critics weren't going to get the movie I'm sure the vast vast majority of them have never touched a FNAF game in their life and on that note one thing I've heard a lot of the critics saying is that the movie wasn't scary enough for the the fact that it was a horror movie but realistically they just went in with the wrong expectations the movie was not quite as scary as the games were but I don't really think that there's any issue with the level of scariness that they ended up going with however I do think that they could have tried a little harder to at least add some good suspense because I pretty much never felt suspense while watching the movie as much as I would hope that I didn't have to say that another critic gripe I've seen is that they didn't really appreciate the B plot of the film with Mike's Aunt Jane trying to win custody over Abby however I think personally that is a ridiculously toned deaf criticism of the movie because that b plot is so so integral to Michael's character Arc and speaking of character arcs I'm going to go ahead and discuss the arcs and themes of the story next the main theme that really permeates the movie is about being stuck more specifically it's about being stuck in the past for one a vast majority of the movie takes place in a pizzeria that's been abandoned for the better part of two decades near perfectly preserved due to aton's unwillingness to let it go he himself is stuck in the past keeping the pizzeria that is blatant evidence of his crimes around for both sentimental value and the prospect of getting to kill even more people he's a self-centered narcissist and he relishes in the idea of being able to destroy people destroy their past therefore tethering them to it the children inside the suits are quite literally stuck inside of them fused with animatronic relics from an era that no longer exists and they can't ever hope to leave Mike Vanessa and the missing children are all people trapped by their past sharing a common enemy in afon him being the chain that keeps all of them from moving forward in case this sounds kind of familiar this is also golden Freddy's role in ultimate custom night but with afon on the opposite end Mike is a very traumatized individual he's quickly prone to anger and can hardly keep a job Mike tortures himself with a recurring dream about his younger brother's kidnapping every night purposefully reliving the most traumatic experience of his life just so that he can try to find the person who did this to Garrett Abby is the opposite having been born so much later that Garrett was rarely even a talking point in the family she has moved past the deaths of her parents and she loves her current life with her brother Mike as shown in the fact that most of her drawings contain him and she's adamantly opposed to living with her aunt but it's not until later on in the film that Vanessa makes Mike realize there's really no point in being stuck in the past and continuing to think of Garrett like this because he's already gone and he has Abby Mike still kind of fails to realize this and his character Arc reaches its ultimate low when he gives golden Freddy the go-ahead to take Abby away from him in exchange for the ability for him to live in the past with his parents and younger brother forever and I think the reason why he was so easily able to do this is that in his mind he had already decided he was completely unfit to be with Abby kind of thanks to Vanessa ironically enough and in having agreed to give his aunt custody over her he had already lost and he had nothing else left to lose he quickly realizes though that that was the wrong choice but by then it's already too late which kickstarts the climax of the film and leads to the resolution where he saves Abby and tells her she's the most important thing in his life Vanessa is a victim of her father a murderous psychopath with little regard for anyone but himself afon has such a tight grip over Vanessa that even when she grows up to become a police officer now possessing the overwhelming authority to make him pay for his crimes she still never does because she has been manipulated and gasted into being her father's accomplice for her entire life the reason why I think Vanessa so angrily and aggressively detests Mike's blatant disregard for Abby in favor of Garrett is because she sees herself in him just another person who's held as a prisoner to their past in the climax of the movie She confesses to Mike all of the things that she knows about afon and what's going to happen to Abby yet still refuses to help Mike because she believes that she wouldn't be of any use if he showed up fortunately she does overcome this Challenge and shows up in the final battle against Aton in the animatronics she didn't overcome it all at once though even as she faces her father down she still gets overpowered by him and eventually gets stabbed as we know leading to the coma in the hospital regardless she had finally been freed by her father's death and is now a hero to Mike and Abby Mike and Vanessa both helped each other get over their pasts and with those arcs complete they can finally both move forward towards the future together once she wakes up aby's character starts very closed off from her surroundings not necessarily being stuck in the past like her brother and Vanessa but definitely still stuck in her own little world it's very very heavily implied that Abby is neurode Divergent and her caretaker at school tells us that pictures are what younger children most resonate with in terms of communication she has the ability to communicate with the animatronic ghosts from the very beginning as we we can see in the drawings that she made before ever meeting them in person this likely has something to do with the fact that she shares a familial connection to one of afton's victims which can also be why Mike might be able to see them in his dreams when he sleeps at the pizzeria I think the reason why Abby spends so much time drawing is because that's her primary way of communicating with them and they are literally her friends this is also of course used in the climax when aby's drawing of afon reveals his true nature to them causing them to recollect the terrible things he did and ultimately leading to afton's downfall all of the central characters in the main plot are connected to afon and all of them have their arcs partially or fully resolved by the end of the movie with his springtrap transformation and that my friends is about where my praise is for the movie are going to end going forward I'll be talking about all the things in the movie that I didn't like as much but I want to make sure you guys know these are all coming from a place of wanting to see the movies improve going forward and I'm not just blindly hating or being negative for the sake of it let's start with some things that just didn't really make much sense to me after watching the movie a second time so we know that Mike's family took a vacation to Nebraska and that's when Aton kidnapped Garrett and we know based on the way that Vanessa talks about the poster in the room that the movie definitely doesn't take place in Nebraska so that begs the question what the hell was afon even doing in Nebraska it seems like a really weird specific detail that retrospectively does not actually mean anything they could have easily fixed this by having them not having gone to Nebraska but just having gone on like a local camping trip or something so I'm assuming that since this is an easily fixable plot hole that it's probably just an unexplained plot point being saved for a future movie I'll give them the benefit of the doubt with that one another one um what was with the weird like Freddy torture mask used on Mike in the previous Night Guard like why was that thing even there what was it for I thought it was cool and all but it's not talked about by any of the characters and it's just kind of there to generate suspense moments without consequence and it doesn't really make sense on the topic of Freddy I think it's genuinely criminal that a torador March power blackout moment never happened once in the whole movie it's one of the most iconic aspects of the entire franchise and it just wasn't used I don't have much else to say on that I just wish it had happened another minor nitpick I have is that they never actually referenced the fact that foxy was meant to be out of order as far as I know like his suit is torn and everything he is clearly in a worse State than the other animatronics so we know that something went wrong with him at some point but unlike in the games this point is never really brought up okay so do you remember when Max and the other goons broke into the pizzeria to make Mike look bad well why would it make him look bad they broke in after he left and Vanessa was literally there the entire time and watched him leave and lock the front door so why the hell did Vanessa show up to his door mad at him about it Mike doesn't even try to defend himself even though he did lock the door in front of her not only that but even though I really like the conversation in the scene right after this they never actually addressed the fact that the place was broken into they just talk about the sleeping pills which ultimately did not have anything to do with that break-in Vanessa was there the whole time another issue that I have with this is that Max and the others deaths are not referenced aside from Mike being seen trying to reach her on the phone and their bodies being seen in the climax despite both of those things nobody ever actually talks about it which honestly just makes no sense and speaking of Max what was up with them setting up a character Arc with her only for her to not have a character and just die like I can't be the only one who thought she was a huge missed opportunity clearly she was down on her luck alongside her brother and decided that she needed the money that she'd get from Jane more than adhering to her moral compass this could have been a really really interesting thing to explore and it wasn't we didn't get to see any of that unfold that uncertainty wasn't really shown another thing I don't really understand about Max is how she just happened to have a connection to Aunt Jane you could give the movie the benefit of the doubt and say that the aunt recommended that babysitter to Mike but this isn't shown so we can't really say that that was true continuing off of the topic of Aunt Jane I think it's kind of weird that the movie sets her up as a terrible person throughout but then leaves her fate kind of ambiguous after golden Freddy takes a swing at her like he says that she's sleeping and I figured that he meant that she was dead but she could have just been knocked out too I mean we didn't really get to see her and there's no blood or anything and the end of the movie does not address what happened to her which is the worst part it's really weird since there should be some kind of consequence she should either be alive and wondering how she got knocked out in Mike's house or dead and there should be an entire police investigation about the dead body that Mike and Abby came home to after the finale overall although I appreciated the B plot with Jane and Max for what it meant for our Central characters they themselves were hardly fleshed out and I found that very disappointing personally especially given the nearly 2hour run time that they had to work with which brings me to my next point for most of the movie The pacing was all right it leaned on slow the reason why I wish this wasn't the case is because Five Nights at Freddy's is an incredibly information dense franchise I would have much preferred if the movie was even longer but also had faster pacing overall which would have meant for more content overall the one spot where I thought the pacing was straight up bad was unfortunately in the movie's climax the entire thing felt way way way way too fast for me giving William Aton a sudden and very UNS ceremonious appearance in the finale was super disappointing considering how good of a job Matthew did portraying the character and how much I adored the movie's interpretation of Affton he really just doesn't have enough screen time man Vanessa is used as a massive Exposition dump for most of the film and in my opinion it's a little too Shameless it is not handled well tonally at all either in one instance towards the beginning of the movie she brings up the missing kids and then immediately brushes it off only for Mike to bring it up after she shows him the animatronics uh you could probably chop this up to her assuming that Mike had done his research on the place before he started working there but I still think that for the audience writing the script in this way was not appropriate I don't know I think stuff like this that is littered throughout the film is more of a problem in the script not really understanding how people should realistic Bally react to the information being adapted from the FNAF game Universe there is some really [ __ ] up [ __ ] in Five Nights at Freddy's and I think that really often the characters don't appropriately react to that another example at the end of the movie Mike has no tangible reaction to his brother's killer being brought to Justice despite that being what he was looking for for the majority of the film he kind of just tell him to go to hell when they're actually fighting and that's the extent of it it's yet another really dissonant missed opportunity in the writing at least in my opinion another weird inconsistency I noticed is that Vanessa does mention that the children's bodies are in the animatronics she specifically uses present tense when referring to that detail which implies that the bodies are still there this was a detail from the game that I was really curious on how they'd adapt because it felt like it would be pretty challenging to do so obviously in the games we know that the animatronics leak mucus and blood and they smell awful but that detail is just absent from the movie even if the bodies should not have still smelled in the present time it was weird that the detail was never brought up since it was so important in FNAF one all right so these next few aren't necessarily negative criticisms and they're more like questions that I still have after watching the movie I'm wondering how they will justify golden Freddy's ability to just kind of teleport into Mike's house completely separated from the pizzeria golden Freddy even to this day in the games is a pretty big question mark overall so I'm interested to see how he gets expanded in the movies going forward another thing is that the movie implies the existence of the FNAF 2 Pizzeria but the timeline in the movie universe is nothing close to what's in the games and that's okay I just kind of wonder how they're going to do it I'm also really curious to see if they will even attempt to adapt any of afton's other children if they even plan on doing that especially since the loss of his children seemed to be his motivation in the games even though we're kind of just assuming that like I said earlier in the video it really doesn't seem like they're committing to too much to anything at all outside of FNAF 1 through 3 and some novels as I wrap up this review I once again clarify that despite my issues with the movie at the end of the day it's still a Five Nights at Freddy's movie think about how crazy that is think about how crazy it is that we even got a movie in the first place even despite all of the things that I didn't like about the movie I still would not give it any anything lower than an8 out of 10 and I'm super excited to see what future movies have in store for us which will definitely happen I mean look at how much money the movie has already made regardless of anything that I might have said about the movie I cannot possibly deny that the movie had soul and spoke deeply to the true FNAF fan and I could never ever fault it for that if you have had a good time it would mean the world if you subscribed for more content like this and turned on post notifications so you never miss a video if you want to support me further $5 channel members get early access to new videos and you can also follow my socials and join the community Discord server and that being said that's going to be all from me I hope you enjoyed the video until next time

Channel: minaxa

Views: 110,114

Keywords: minaxa, fnaf, fnaf movie, five nights at freddy's, fnaf movie review

Id: PbCoEXyt7eU

Length: 27min 0sec (1620 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2023