My honest opinion on the major faults of the film...

(The bulk of this is copied from other replies I've made.)

I was very supportive of this reboot during production, but in all honesty... I think this might be the single most disappointing of all the horror-remakes/reboots/re-imaginings of the past 15 years. Simply because the original franchise is so iconic. So imaginative. And of a generally high quality for the first several entries.

And this film squandered all potential.

My main issues with the film boil down to a few key points...

1- The poor handling of story-structure and plot-points. It's a very messy film and unfortunately the focus and pacing are very out-of-whack for much of the runtime. The movie doesn't place what ought be in center-stage, and instead infuriatingly spends too much time bouncing back and forth between frankly lazily-assembled exposition dumps and even lazier scares that were some of the most phoned-in I've ever seen.

2- Speaking of the lazy scares, the next big point was the utterly unimaginative way the film handled its material and how it betrayed the actually "horror" of the film. Too many of the nightmares were just copy/pastes of the same darned sequence. ("Oooo! Scary boiler room! Be scared, audience! Oooooo!") And those that tried something new just fell flat because of the boring use of "fake grit" to make everything "grimy and scary." Sorry, but I'm getting a little tired of this false, manufactured "grittiness" that every horror movie now has to shoehorn into the visuals. It doesn't always work and when it falls flat as it did in this film, it falls REALLY flat. There's so much that could be done with the concept of nightmares... so much fresh, unique material. Thanks to the advancement of effects technology, the limit for what these films can be is truly only limited to what one can think of. So why make every nightmare the same boring "fake-gritty" nonsense over and over and over again?

And I've seen people defend the laziness by saying "Not everyone dreams of crazy stuff, so shut up! The same boring boiler room over and over is ok!" No, it's not! And people who enable the laziness are part of the problem. This is Freddy's world- the world of a child killer/rapist with a dark past. He obviously has a twisted mind that can conjure up the darkest of fantasies. He can do whatever he wants. If he wants serpents to rain from the ceiling, he can do that. If he wants the dead to rise, they will. If he wants to place his victims into the middle of a vast crowd of raving lunatics and monsters, it'll happen. If he wants your flesh to appear to be rotting away, you'll see it. So, no. The same lazy "Let's put them in a red-lit boiler room... oh, and be sure to shake the camera a bit and de-saturate the colors so the dumb 14-year-olds know this is gritty and cool!" bullcrap over and over isn't good enough and is not acceptable.

Then of course there was the fact that rather than establishing an atmosphere, the film goes out of its way to just be loud and obnoxious with insultingly obvious jump-scares in almost every single scene. After the initial jump, when I saw it in a packed theater, the entire audience would begin giggling and joking around before each subsequent jump because everyone saw them coming. Being so obvious ain't a good thing, folks. It makes the film tedious at best and unintentionally hilarious (as it was for my audience) at worst. The only jumps the audience didn't see coming were the extremely shoehorned in "fake jumps" where they'd randomly speed up the film, which got no reaction at all... except for my friend who just kind of rolled his eyes the first time it happened and said "Oh... they turned Nightmare on Elm Street into one of these movies, huh? That sucks."

3- Perhaps literally the least developed characters I have ever seen. Honestly, you cannot say anything about the characters in this film because frankly, the characters have no "character." They're all vaguely defined by their gender and maybe if they're lucky, one or two "quirks." And that's it. (Ex. "Oh, she does art in one scene... that's her character!") Sorry, but a character needs more than a gender and a "quirk" to be properly established. There's nothing to latch onto. You feel nothing for anyone in this movie.

The big fundamental flaw is that the production team seems to be under the misconception that simply seeing characters react to a situation is the same thing as defining and developing a character. This isn't always the case. True, in a better-written film, we might learn of a character's motivations and personality through their actions and how they change or refuse to change given the circumstances of the story. But this film doesn't do that. The characters are literally lowest-common-denominator "Girl who was saw doing creepy art one time and is now scared for her life" or "Guy who kinda likes girl and is scared for his life." Those aren't characters. Those are blank slates that desperately need establishment and development. They're cardboard cut-outs... planks of wood... decorative ornaments the look like people on screen. They're not characters.

The film tries once or twice to inject character through revelations about backstory, but doesn't play out. Ex. Nancy learns she was molested... but it doesn't inform her character or really change her in any way. That's poor handling of character. Nothing more.

4- One word. "Blatancy." As in, a complete lack of subtlety. This film has no sense of self-control. Everything has to be "extreme" and "in your face." And much like the characters, it makes the film as a whole a completely vapid experience.

Frankly, this film very much reminded me of one of other more infamous remakes- 1999's dreadful The Haunting remake. Both films share many of the same problems with their lack of grasp on the concept of subtlety. Gone are the quiet moments that build mood and dread... now replaced with loudness and obnoxiousness with imagery that practically punches you in your face. You can't just have a character silently sitting and contemplating the situation... no, these films take those moments and diminish their power by placing plastic-y CGI effects and "bigger than life" visuals all around.

Take the iconic stretching-wall from the original- a startling and eerie image that shows the influence of the dark powers at play through a simple, elegant and terrifying image... in this film, the stretching wall is a big, loud cartoon effect that goes on too intricately for too long and it looses its power as a result. You can't just have the hint of Freddy's presence looming like a deadly threat in the back of your mind... the film has to play loud music stingers and throw him in your face.

And it isn't just the imagery. It's the Freddy character as a whole. What was once silent subtext in the original series that ate at you with the notion that he was likely child-molester in addition to murderer is now thrown in your face and force-fed to you. It doesn't make him more frightening... it makes the film feel dirty and insecure in itself.

-And then there are the plethora of little things that just irritate me as a filmgoer. From the lousy gore effects (the opening neck-cut is hilariously awful-looking)... to the ho-hum score... to the fact that despite a $35 million budget it looks like a $5 million tv-episode... to the contrived attempt to try and make it a mystery whether Freddy was guilty or not... Nothing in this film works. (Except for Jackie Earle Haley... It's a shame. He could have made for a good Freddy... if the entire production had any competence whatsoever.)

I've said many times before and I'll say it again... watching this film is akin to sitting in a chair while the producers dance around you, banging pots and pans together while chanting "Freddy's evil! He's soooo evil! Isn't this scary?!"

No. No it's not.

The real tragedy of this is that there was such great potential. And I do think that with most of the key players involved behind the scenes and on camera, there are hints of a good film somewhere buried deep under the mess. It just became lost and misguided due to consistent poor choices and what was no doubt endless studio notes and nit-picks.

It's sad in a way. I almost would have been on board for a sequel just in hopes they could have improved on the formula because I do enjoy the actors involved as they have proven themselves over and over on other projects. (Although I'd honestly just prefer another film set within the original canon.) But I'm hoping that the proposed new reboot will be better. I honestly hope so... because it really did hurt seeing such a mighty franchise that I've been a longtime fan of fall so hard with such a haphazard effort.

And FURTHERMORE, this is my signature! SERIOUSLY! Did you think I was still talking about my point?