'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' is not a reboot; it's a regurgitation
Jason Reitman's legacy sequel has some fun, but is too worshipful of the first film to work.
This post contains spoilers for Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but I notate when we’re about to get into the really heavy ones.
I wouldn’t be a writer if it wasn’t for Ghostbusters.
I don’t think the term “fan fiction” was around when I was in fourth grade, and if it was, I hadn’t heard it. But as a budding movie geek with an overactive imagination, I immediately gravitated toward the concept.
I’d seen Ghostbusters II that summer, around the same time I discovered a fondness for jotting down five-page stories in a loose leaf journal. Frustrated that it would likely be a long time before I got another big-screen Ghostbusters adventure and tired of just strapping on a plastic proton back with my siblings to play pretend in our backyard, I began writing my own epic adventure.
The 60-page Ghostbusters Jr. was the first complete story I ever wrote. I put my friends and I in the jumpsuits and sent us to New York to battle a host of spectral villains and a giant demon called Sheboppie Sheloppo (I was 11; it was as creative as I could get). I even doodled my own logo featuring the traditional Ghostbusters symbol; the ghost inside had a pacifier in its mouth and a bow atop its head.
That story has been lost to time, but it was a turning point for me. From that moment, wherever you found me, there was usually a 100-page Mead notebook nearby, filled with my own scribbles that placed my friends and I into our own adventures, usually shaped by whatever I was watching on television and in the movies. And it’s all thanks to this silly little franchise about ghost exterminators.
In its best moments, Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife captures that affection. As I suspected, it’s less a film for die-hard fans of the first movie than it is a movie for any kid who ever dreamed of strapping on a proton pack or commandeering the Ecto-1. And in certain instances, it manages to charm and reinvigorate the inner child.
But in its other moments — and there are a lot — it’s one of the laziest and most crassly cynical bits of nostalgia exploitation I’ve seen, choosing to repeat familiar plot points in a way that makes The Force Awakens’ new Death Star (sorry, Starkiller Base) seem like the height of originality. It made me wish I’d held onto my Ghostbusters Jr. story; what was in there might have been dumb, but it was a hell of a lot more original than where this ends up.
The Goonies of Ghostbusters
There really isn’t much originality in Ghostbusters: Afterlife at all; it’s just that what feels new has been ported in from a whole different subset of nostalgia.
After a sequel with the original cast failed to light the world on fire and a remake made internet bros angry (even if it’s not bad), Reitman and co-screenwriter Gil Kenan decided that what the franchise needed was a little bit of that ol’ Amblin magic (Kenan was co-writer and director on Monster House, which recreated the tone of those Spielberg productions pretty accurately). Which seems odd on the surface — the Amblin films trafficked in sincerity; Ghostbusters is defined by its irreverence — but makes sense from the perspective of a studio looking to revive long-dormant intellectual property. Stranger Things became a hit by tapping that Amblin vibe, and a generation of kids who grew up on The Goonies and E.T. now have their own children and grandchildren; what better way to draw in new eyeballs than mixing the wonder and magic of old-school Spielberg with the toys and ghoulies of Ghostbusters.
It’s that mix of two great tastes that don’t necessarily go great together that had me worried about Ghostbusters: Afterlife. I couldn’t imagine a Ghostbusters movie that wasn’t an out-and-out comedy, fronted by funny individuals and thumbing its nose at any attempts to be emotional.
But Reitman, best-known for helming low-key, intimate comedies like Juno and Up in the Air, handles this stuff well. The film follows a young girl named Phoebe (McKenna Grace) who is dragged from her home in the city to Oklahoma by her mother (Carrie Coons) and older brother (Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard). Phoebe’s an introverted, science-obsessed girl who has trouble making friends. When she finds a mysterious ghost trap in the home’s floorboards, her science teacher Mr. Grooberson (Paul Rudd) clues her in to the strange supernatural activities that took place in New York in the mid-1980s, and Phoebe quickly learns she’s the granddaughter of Egon Spengler, who abandoned his family and friends years ago to head out to to the country, obsessed with stopping the end of the world.
It’s an interesting way to update the mythology and bring a new audience in; make no mistake, much of Ghostbusters: Afterlife is aimed squarely at kids. That might turn off people obsessed with the first film’s deadpan humor and anti-establishment overtones, but it provides a new way to approach this material without totally losing the wit and excitement. It also gives Reitman a chance to lovingly linger over all the expensive ghost-busting tools and gadgets.
This is Grace’s film, and she’s fantastic. You can imagine that this kid is related to Harold Ramis’ Egon; she has the same trouble relating to other people and the same fascination with science and technology. But it’s also charming to watch her begin to make friends, not only with Grooberson but also a classmate named Podcast (because he hosts a podcast). I’ve seen several critics gripe about the later choice, particularly the name, but I think the scenes between the kids are a lot of fun, and they capture the “hey, let’s go bust a ghost” excitement and energy of the original. When Phoebe lets a proton stream loose in a cornfield, I actually gasped because it’s something I dreamed of doing as a kid.
Coons is solid as ever as the frustrated, harried mother who doesn’t understand why her dad abandoned her to live like a madman in the middle of nowhere. Wolfhard is fine, but he’s not given too much to do other than get the Ecto-1 rolling again and strike up an awkward romance with a co-worker at a local diner. The emotional stuff is capable if not particularly resonant, and Rudd’s enthusiasm helps bridge the gap between the more sincere story and the wisecracking films that came before. I can think of few other modern comedians who would fit so perfectly into this franchise, and I wish the film didn’t abandon Rudd about three-quarters of the way through.
Reitman’s basically pulling a J.J. Abrams, bringing back old visual and aural touchstones in a modern context. As someone who’s seen Ghostbusters upwards of twenty times, I’ll admit to a strange chemical reaction to hearing the whine of Ecto-1’s siren or the sound made when a proton back charges up. I enjoyed the visual spin that Paul Feig put on his remake, but I’ll admit that one thing that held back my enjoyment of it just a tad was that the proton packs and streams didn’t look the same as the 1984 film. Reitman lavishly recreates the look and sound of that movie, and leans hard on a remix of Elmer Bernstein’s original score. When it wants to, this film looks and sounds like a Ghostbusters movie.
And carefully employed, that’s a lot of fun. The film’s central set piece, when Phoebe and Podcast encounter a blue spectre that munches on steel, is exciting, chaotic and funny in the same way the Slimer sequence from the first movie is. The Ecto-1 careens through a wheat field and down a cozy main street, proton streams doing damage to cars and buildings before the ghost is trapped. It’s recognizably Ghostbusters and yet it’s also something new, the same way that watching John Boyega and Daisy Ridley fly the Millennium Falcon was. Jason Reitman wants to assure fans who disliked the remake that yes, he’s seen and respects the original Ghostbusters, and he’s going to honor it.
But then he pushes further, and reanimates the entire corpse of the first film.
Exhuming Ghostbusters
In my review of the 2016 Ghostbusters, I mentioned that its reverence toward the first film stood in the way of its originality. I enjoy a lot of what Paul Feig does in that movie, and it works best when it takes the concept that Aykroyd and Ramis came up with and then puts its own spin on it. Even when it doesn’t visually look the same, it’s still a lot of fun. But then the film tosses in various Easter eggs to say “hey, remember Ghostbusters?” and it stops the whole thing cold. By the time we got a post-credit scene hinting at the return of Gozer, it became clear that it couldn’t escape the legacy of that first movie.
But compared to Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the nods to the 1984 movie are positively subtle. This movie doesn’t have Easter eggs; Reitman makes a whole damn omelette.
Matt Singer at Screencrush described the film as “basically the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for 125 straight minutes,” and he’s not wrong. Every shot features a wink to the original, whether it’s a line of dialogue, a sound effect or a background detail. It’s not just enough for Phoebe to find Egon’s flight suit in a secret underground bunker. She has to reach the bunker by going down a fire pole. There’s a Nestle Crunch bar. Eagle-eyed viewers will even see the “Maid: Please Clean” sign that hung on Venkman’s office door in the original. There’s a symmetrical book stacking in Egon’s living room that looks very familiar, and when one of the film’s first shots features the Ivo Shandor Mining Company, people who’ve seen Ghostbusters countless times know where this is going.
But it’s not just that the film feels the need to constantly pelt the audience with references. Some of those are just fun riffs, others help recreate the world of the movie and others are just excessive but excusable. What’s baffling is that Reitman steps back into this world and now has all these toys to play with, a new location to explore and centuries of supernatural and religious mythology and folklore he could mine for a new threat and he decides...to just remake Ghostbusters.
Here is where we hit big spoilers
Like I said, the shot of the Ivo Shandor Mining Company was the first thing to make my stomach drop. Shandor was, in Ghostbusters mythology, the architect who designed Dana Barrett’s Central Park apartment to be a gateway to the supernatural. But I figured maybe Shandor was just a key to another supernatural menace. But no; it’s not too long before we get glimpses of a familiar temple in the middle of an Oklahoma field. There are terror dogs and Stay-Puft marshmallow men (which makes no sense if you understand why Mr. Stay Puft was in the first movie). The film makes one character the Keymaster and the other the Gatekeeper, and then it brings in Olivia Wilde as Gozer, looking exactly like Slavitsa Jovan did in the original (they didn’t even think to do the obvious and finally give Paul Reubens his chance to play Gozer and at least provide some new visual look). There’s a brief thought that they might do something different by having the ghost of Ivo Shandor himself show up to get involved, but poor J.K. Simmons gets two lines before he’s dispatched.
It’s lazy and cheap in a way that makes J.J. Abrams’ choices with Star Wars feel almost bold. Aside from the absence of a giant Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man (see, we get tiny ones here, so it’s different), the film follows the same rhythms and plotting as the first. And it’s all to assuage fans who were angry about the remake. “No,” the film says. “We know Ghostbusters. Here is literally everything you liked before. We’ll even have Carrie Coons bark like a dog.”
And it’s a total overcorrection. I picked up on every Easter egg in the first half of the movie, but I went with it because I hoped you could take the iconography of the first movie and do something different. Even if it didn’t work as well as the original, it still has moments of humor and fun. But when Rudd and Coons turned into dogs, I threw up my hands and said, in exasperation, “they’re just doing the same exact movie.” This shows a creative bankruptcy like few things I’ve ever seen, and it utterly deflates the entire movie.
The movie goes through its paces until the last 15 minutes, when it makes some choices that utterly derail it. The first is the return of the original three Ghostbusters. I’ll admit that I perked up when I saw Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson donning their proton packs and jumpsuits one last time. But it’s as if Reitman told them to just show up and “do the thing.” Ray gives a riff on his lengthy cease and desist speech from the first film. Murray spouts some one-liners. Gozer asks if Ray’s a god and, of course, this time he says yes. The movie so predictably follows the template of the original that there are no surprises; just slavish regurgitations. It’s watered-down, and not helped by the fact that none of the three look particularly enthused to return to their old roles.
And then the film goes one more and gives us a CGI Harold Ramis for a truly ghoulish (and not in the right way) finale. Ramis has been dead for seven years, and I’ll never think it’s a wise or ethical choice to bring back a dead actor just to further some intellectual property. Until then, the film’s done an admirable job of honoring Egon by having his ghost invisibly guide Phoebe and even have a touching moment with his own daughter. And maybe I’d excuse a quick shot of a ghostly hand guiding Phoebe’s proton blaster. But the film lingers, making sure we get a shot of all four Ghostbusters together; Aykroyd and Murray, in particular, seem embarrassed to be part of this resurrection. When Egon E.T. 's into the sky in the film’s finale, the attempts to wrest tears feel cynical and gross, utterly divorced from the very non-emotional template of the first movie.
But then, of course, they give Ray Parker Jr.’s song a spin over the end credits* so that we can remember how great it is and how much fun we had in the 1980s. Yay, nostalgia!
Maybe it’s just a time to put a pin in this franchise. As I said before, the first works despite itself. A sequel, a remake and a legacy sequel all kind of prove that the lightning in a bottle of that first movie can’t be recaptured, and while there are hints that this could continue on in future films, I don’t trust that anyone would do anything new or different with it. They may not be afraid of no ghosts, but they’re definitely being haunted by that first movie.