The new movie, even moreso than the 2018 Requel, was really just a Jason movie pretending to be a Michael Myers movie. I realize a lot of people will find Jason and Myers indistinguishible, but if you go back to the source (the first Halloween film) Myers is actually very cautious and methodical (and to a lesser extent in Halloween II). He is nothing like that in the newest film. Jason was always the brutal force of nature, Michael was the careful, calculated stalker. I think Blumhouse has wanted to get a hold of the rights for Jason and Friday the 13th for years, but with all the lawsuit issues holding up any possibility of a new film, they went after the next best thing with Halloween.
But Like almost every other Halloween sequel before, it's just another Jason lite film. I liked it, but the whole time I was watching, I felt like the tone and style was way more in line with Jason movies. The whole regenerative, super strength thing didn't really come into play in the original Halloween. That was sequel bullshit added in later movies that were only filmed to capitalize on the success of other slasher films. It's ironic that Myers was one of the proto slashers of cinema, and yet he ended up becoming a clone of his own cinematic clones. The Blumhouse team tries to have it both ways--they want to recapture the essence of the original, and they somewhat achieved that in the 2018 requel, but they completely pissed that away and just turned Myers back into another boring Super Slasher in this one. Key example with the problem with this film is the scene where Myers takes on multiple firefighters. What kind of John Wick action movie bullshit was that? It's not scary. That whole sequence with the fire in the house could've been made very creepy and tense, but no, we need to fetishize Myers as a super badass slasher with some post-Matrix styled fight choreography.
It largely coasts on nostalgia for the classic slasher film era and boring "super hero slasher" tropes that were barely scary in the 80s. It hit the lowest bar possible, but that seems to be enough based on audience scores.
The constant need to remind us "40 years" and "evil dies tonight" got old really fast. I'd like to play a drinking game and take a shot every time we hear a character say "40 years ago tonight..." or "evil dies tonight". Most people watching know about the original, yet every bit of dialogue seemed written to remind us as much as possible of the lore and legend of the first film. I did, however, like the 1978 flashback scenes, much moreso than the dialogue that kept reminding us of 1978. Show, don't tell...always a good approach.
