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Saucy Cinema- The Obligatory Ghostbusters: Afterlife Review
NOTE: THIS FIRST PART IS RELATIVELY SPOILER FREE, I WILL NOTE WHEN THE SPOILERS BEGIN.
Hoo-boy…. So as a sort of spoiler for my thoughts on this film, I need to preface the interview by stating that I am a massive Ghostbusters fan! I still love the first classic entry, and I’ll even defend parts of the second film. I was obsessed with the first series and enjoyed Extreme Ghostbusters, played with the toys and bought a bunch of merch. In other words, I love this franchise!
When the 2016 reboot/remake came out, I’ll admit that the trailers did not grab me much, and it kind of looked a bit lame. However, I watched it with my wife, and she loved it while I liked it quite a bit. Over the years, it has grown on me, and upon my last rewatch I still found myself laughing hysterically and whooping over Holtzmann going ham on the ghosts. However, the movie cost quite a bit of money and simply did not gross enough to cover those costs, thus shelving any sequels. Before long, it was announced that a sequel in the original continuity was in the works, and after the release of the trailer, I was immediately deflated.
Taking the Force Awakens approach, the trailer seemed steeped in just reintroducing us to old familiar things through the eyes of the “next generation,” right down to the driving of the Ecto-1 as a sort of stand-in for the Millennium Falcon. The more the audience got to see of the movie, delayed like everything else, the more I got the sense that this was just going to be a nostalgia fest with no real care given to the new characters.
And… I was almost right! McKenna Grace carries this film into watchability territory almost by herself. The rest of the characters are simply placeholders with little-to-no development or depth and only tend to shine when they interact with Grace’s Phoebe. It is clear that Grace is talented, and the filmmakers wisely lean on her for the bulk of the movie.
The plot however is paper thin, meanders for a while, and then delivers an overly familiar conclusion. Essentially, Phoebe’s mother Callie (played by the immensely talented and underrated Carrie Coon) learns of her father’s death, who the audience knows to be Egon Spangler from the Ghostbusters. However, Phoebe and her brother Trevor (Finn Wolfhard in a surprisingly underutilized role) get to discover this with a fresh perspective. They inherit and move into Egon’s house located in a small-town in Oklahoma- or rather Alberta, Canada in a poor attempt to pass as a random city in Oklahoma. There the family discover what Egon was up to, battle the big bad, and try to make new friends.
These new friends include Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) who is basically just there for Trevor to crush on, and a character nicknamed…. Podcast (Logan Kim). While the latter has a few cute interactions with Phoebe, the name is pretty unforgivable, as that’s basically all anyone calls him. There is also the horror film-lover, seismologist, and summer school teacher Gary Grooberson (played by the always reliable Paul Rudd). Together, these characters carry the audience through an Amblin-inspired yet fairly mundane, predictable plot leading to a truly horrendous conclusion that undoes any goodwill the new cast manages to gain. Spoilers are to come, but suffice to say that outside of the Netflix teen comedy Tall Girl and the final episode of Mandalorian Season 2, there has rarely been a finale which retroactively hurt the entire product.
Overall, I can say that, despite my overall negative reaction to Ghostbusters: Afterlife, I hope it succeeds so we can get a follow-up truly interested in establishing this new generation in a film of their own. Grace plays her character perfectly, down to the fantastic delivery of bad jokes, while Coons and Rudd share some fun chemistry which indicates a potentially fun rom-com subplot down the line. It’s a shame these talents are slightly wasted in a movie with a fundamental identity crisis. The jokes seem primarily aimed at children (no shame there), while the references and larger plot elements are geared towards die-hards in their 30s onwards. The end result is a paradoxically watchable adventure-comedy for the whole family rendered forgettable due to the lack of genuine laughs, a failure in creativity, and an pathological need to appeal to nostalgia in the hope of garnering some emotional response.
GRADE- D
WANT TO SEE THE EXACT SCORE? BE WARNED- SPOILERS HAUNT THE SECTION BELOW!!!
WHAT WENT WRONG? AN ORDERED LIST OF COMPLAINTS-
1. CGI HAROLD RAMIS
Man… I didn’t like it when they resurrected Peter Cushing for Rogue One, and I hated it here when the filmmakers lost all faith in their film and audience, necessitating the insertion of an actor into the movie via (admittedly impressive) special effects. The problem is just the gross use of technology, but rather how long the ghost of Egon stays on the screen. He doesn’t even disappear when the army of ghost traps are opened, sucking in every spirit except the one the filmmakers need to stay on screen to milk for an attempt at an emotional response. They could have set the moment up perfectly, and all it would have taken is some restraint. In a nutshell, there is a running thread regarding Egon’s reputation as a father and friend, with Phoebe being one of the few to truly have faith in her dead grandfather early on. The introduction of ghost Egon begins not with a full shot of the deceased actor’s CG likeness, but rather with his hand and arm, helping Phoebe hold her proton gun steady for the climax. BOOM. That’s all you need. We don’t need to see the full ghost, because our faith in Egon is rewarded by the end, and faith does not require sight. In fact, faith is the “evidence of things NOT seen” according to Hebrews 11:1. I am not a religious man at all, but I understand faith. Trust your story and audience enough, and you do not have to pull such a ghoulish move.
2. REUSE, RECYCLE, REPEAT
The lack of creativity is really on display here with the enemies our new team faces off against. Muncher is basically Slimer that eats metal, the giant Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is traded in for a small army, and we literally just get the Terror Dogs (Gatekeeper and Keymaster) and Gozer from the first film. The kids are sent to jail, just like the original team is in the first entry. The first real ghost caught results in lots of property destruction, just like the first film. The use of callbacks are treated with less of a wink and nod (aside from maybe the tiny marshmallow creatures) and more with a reverential approach that feels odd with this franchise. I feel like there are newer elements critics are not giving the film enough credit for introducing, but these feel tertiary to the original lore and toys the movie is much more interested in featuring. Worst of all, for a movie which is, ideally, supposed to set up new characters in this existing franchise, the finale seems to suggest the opposite. Our new kids cannot stand on their own, and need the help of the OG Ghostbusters to defeat the enemy. This is a visual metaphor for the entire film, one incapable of being separated from the past, relying on the literal ghost of the franchise to prop it up. More frustratingly, the mid and post-credits scenes follow these original Ghostbusters rather than our new characters, making it appear that the franchise is simply returning to these guys and New York rather than continuing with Phoebe and her crew in Oklahoma. It’s the exact opposite of passing the torch. For whatever people may say about Force Awakens, it had the good sense of placing Rey, Kylo, and Finn at the forefront of the climax, rather than inserting the legacy characters in to save the day.
3. New Characters now in 1D!
Outside of Phoebe, the new kids are simply not interesting. Podcast (I just, I would call him something different if I could, trust me) has… a podcast. That’s it. That’s his character. Yes, he laughs at Phoebe’s bad jokes, but that’s not really a character trait. Trevor is attracted to Lucky who works at a burger joint. I guess he can also fix cars. Like this is the extent of their characterization. They seem to just be there to fill out the required four-person team Ghostbusters typically has. As a result, there is not real development and watching them just react to plot events is not really entertaining. Never has a Ghostbusters cast felt THIS unlike a Ghostbusters cast. That is not to say the kids put in bad performances. They just simply do not have anything to do other than act as foils for Phoebe to demonstrate her characterization. While Callie and Gary are very entertaining, particularly together, only Callie is allowed to grow as a character. This is as one-dimensional as a cast can get, and without the more self-serious direction, these characters need to be more developed if they are expected to carry a film. But, in fairness, the script isn’t interested in them, so hopefully they will have more depth in a sequel (which I again hope happens!).
4. A Very Strange Sequel
I kind of hinted at this before, but it’s worth exploring separately. It’s very strange to see such a serious approach to this sequel given the irreverent humor and self-deprecation of the original (and even the initial sequel and 2016 reboot). The laughs here are more subdued, the tone is more somber, and everything feels aimed at a younger audience. Which, again, is not a bad thing in and of itself. This where the interjection of the past creates a jarring experience, an almost tonal whiplash as soon as our original heroes return, only for the movie to veer back into saccharine sentimentality before the credits roll. Paul Rudd seems to be the only one to try and embody the tone of the original characters, which makes him both entertaining while also clashing with the rest of the film. The original contained a bit involving a ghost performing fellatio on one of the Ghostbusters, while this sequel tends to cut away any adult understanding of sex. Granted, we’ve already seen a sanitized version of this universe via the excellent cartoon series, but this film specifically and constantly invokes the original, setting itself up for failure in a completely unforced error. A kid’s version of Ghostbusters can and has worked, but through isolating the story from the live-action films rather than incorporating those elements. This dramatic shift in tone makes it more difficult to take in the rather silly story, as characters deliver the exposition with almost deadly seriousness.
5. A Missed Opportunity
These complaints really speak to the solid potential the film actually has. Watching Phoebe grow into a more functioning person, experiencing the Spengler family reconcile any differences and come together as a family, or seeing Trevor handle a dramatic shift in his life are all worthwhile plot threads worthy of following and exploring. Why not use the existence of ghosts to really challenge Phoebe’s understanding of the world while also utilizing her science-brain to turn the supernatural into an empirical subject? The key to growing a franchise is.. well growth. And this story has the potential for that, yet cannot cease its obsession with the past to allow the future of the series to develop. I do not blame the filmmakers entirely- this was a very personal film for the director Jason Reitman as he picked up the franchise from his father’s reigns. But perhaps that shadow is simply too big to escape, as it darkens the film’s positives to the point where it is easy to discount them. I, however, would not like to do that so let’s get to some positives and my final thoughts!
The Good Stuff and Conclusions
I cannot stress how good Grace is as Phoebe and how she elevates the other characters when she interacts with them. She is the star in every sense of the word, and by sheer force of will and talent turns the film into something one can watch pretty easily. While Rudd and Coons have some good scenes together, in general the bulk of my praise is saved for the effects and action direction. Considering this movie has half the budget of 2016’s Ghostbusters, it still looks incredibly good, and the Ecto-1/Muncher chase scene, while a bit long in the tooth, is still pretty fun to watch. There’s a VHS-era quality to these scenes which gives them a manic energy to charge the fairly lethargic movie. These qualities alone are enough to save Ghostbusters: Afterlife from a failing grade.
Despite these elements which work, there’s far more here that simply do not. By trading off the nostalgia of the original- sometimes to disastrous results- the movie trades in a potential new and exciting cast in favor of the old ones, bizarrely ending on a note which ignores the new characters and just tells us the old ones are cooler and more interesting. The visual metaphor of the climax could not be more emblematic of the film’s worst problem- the baggage of the past simply overwhelms any potential the present or future have. The spirit of the original, meanwhile, remains as trapped as the various ghosts in the franchise. FINAL SCORE- 6/10
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