Bustin' makes me feel bad
1984's Ghostbusters is a pretty damn good movie - prone to being over-praised by nostalgic fans, but pretty damn good - and it doesn't seem like it's all that difficult to understand why. But for whatever reason, it seems impossible to replicate it. Setting aside the question of the many sci-fi action-adventure comedies that clearly wanted to carve of some of that film's Zeitgeist-dominating success for themselves, there have now been three official Ghostbusters follow-ups, every one of which is trying to do something different, and every one of which fails. The 1989 Ghostbusters II is merely a mediocre sequel, one of the countless number of such things, in which the same director, writer, and actors came back to do all of the same things and did them worse. The 2016 Ghostbusters, which is somehow the second-best film in the franchise despite not actually being particularly good, at least has some energy and a few locally excellent scenes, but mostly it's just not funny, a straightforward example of a director who can work with actors in a very specific way trying to force themselves and him to do something very different that nobody involved really "gets", and so it's basically just like an endless game of improv that isn't finding its footing.
And that leaves the new Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which against the odds and by every standard I can think of is the worst movie of the four, and not by any close margin. This is possibly the single most pandering and witless example of a film whose entire strategy is to prey on the viewer's basest nostalgia from the last decade, a period during which that became one of the dominant forms of pop media; it is, I think, clearly the worst example that wasn't financed by the Walt Disney Company. It has no idea what it wants to do, or how it wants to do it; it's an attempt to extend the narrative of the 1984 film (and only the 1984 film; it's not that Ghostbusters II is explicitly countermanded in Afterlife, but it doesn't come up in passages of dialogue where it feels very strange that it doesn't come up) that sort of ruins it, and its uncertain strategy of taking the material in a new direction is crushed like a cockroach under the third act, which isn't so much "paying homage" to the climax of Ghostbusters '84 as it is "precisely restaging" it, down to some very specific shot choices. And even when it is trying be its own thing, Afterlife is never more creative than just grabbing onto chunks of Stranger Things, one of the ur-texts of or current nostalgia-saturated moment.
Things start in a promisingly mysterious mood, at night on a farm God knows where, where a man (Bob Gunton) whose frame looks close enough to the late Harold Ramis that you can see what they were going for gets filmed with a lot of edge lighting. So you can see what they were going for there, as well. A few supernatural goings-on later - one of which is a very direct nod to a scene from the original movie, and thus an early indication of what we need to be prepared for here - and he's dead. Perfect timing, too, since his estranged daughter Callie (Carrie Coon) and her two children - 15-year-old Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and 12-year-old Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) have just been evicted, which means that her unexpected inheritance of even as godawful a rundown old farmhouse as is waiting for them in Summerville, Oklahoma is helpful at this point in time. Cue about 45 minutes of looming foreshadowing, as the three of them situate themselves into what passes for the society of Summerville, and Phoebe in particular begins to investigate the strange activities plaguing the town, including daily earthquakes despite the geological impossibility of such a phenomenon. And then, cue the slow reveal, as coyly drawn-out as a striptease, in which Phoebe and Trevor find - goodness gracious! - an old ghost trap, and then - mercy me! - the dusty old ghostbusting vehicle Ecto 1 in a barn, and then - land sakes! - a proton pack. See, it turns out that Dead Grandpa was Egon Spengler, of the ghostbusters who were active in New York back in the 1980s. And I cannot fathom why the film holds that name back for so long, given the complete lack of effort it puts into hiding that fact in everything from the Ramis look-alike at the start to the Egon-like design of Phoebe's hair and glasses to the terrible and bizarre cameo of Annie Potts as Janine Melnitz, who shows up to hand Callie the keys and then just drifts away without providing any of the pages of exposition she would have had access to that could have accelerated our trip into the film's rising action by about 30 minutes.
Anyway, once Ghostbusters: Afterlife gets going, it's basically paying an extended game of "what if we did X?": what if the ghostbusters were children? What if they were operating in an Oklahoma farm town rather than New York City? What if this wasn't even a little bit a comedy, which gets to my overriding theory for why the 1984 film was good and none of the others are: you need to have Bill Murray being selfish and trying to destroy Dan Aykroyd's overworked mythology with his cynical sarcasm to make this work. In the first sequel, Murray was too bored to try, and the latter two films both suffer from taking the material basically at face value - so much so in this case that, again, it's really not even telling jokes. And this despite bringing in Paul Rudd as a science teacher and the only person in this universe who remembers how 36 years ago, the entire city of New York was almost completely overrun by the undead.
But yes, all those what ifs, and none of them are terribly compelling, though you can at times tell that director and co-writer Jason Reitman (son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two movies - making him at best the fourth most important authorial voice behind Aykroyd, Ramis, and Murray, but whatever, let it become a weird heirloom property) had some ideas and images he's been noodling around with for a while, hoping to give them cinematic life: the Ecto 1 racing through a wheat field is obviously one of these, for example. For the most part, the script he's written with Gil Kenan is full of "this had to happen for the plot to work" choices, and I'm not even sure that they all did have to happen: on the logic of the first movies, there's no reason for Egon and Ray Stanz (Aykroyd, whose cameo during a phone conversation is less bungled than Potts's, though it shows up at a very weird place in the story) to have had the split they have here, nor did anything in the '84 Ghostbusters seem to leave open the possibility that the danger from that movie was unresolved in the way Ghostbusters: Afterlife makes it out to be.
Anyways, it's a frustrating failure as a sequel, and it becomes an outright disgusting one in the last several minutes of its running time, but I will leave that horrible surprise unspoiled. Worse still, Afterlife is a failure on its own merits as a film, not least because it is so desperately hungry for all that nostalgia, enough that it races through a lot of explanations about what the hell is going on, to make more room for all those drawn-out, lingering sops to the old movie. It has a really lousy array of characters for us to cope with, for one thing: Callie, Trevor, and Phoebe seem hellbent on competing to see who can be the most off-putting, selfish, and needlessly meanspirited to the other two, and if Callie wins, this is in large part because Coon is giving such a weird, brittle performance. On paper, she's by far the best member of this cast, and she is recoiling from the script as only a gifted actor who is compelled to take unworthy roles in shitty scripts can be; the result is a performance that's unnervingly limber and naturalistic, given what the project is, and focused on playing all of the hardest, most unsympathetic parts of the character; hell, inventing new ways for the character to be unsympathetic. There's something gleefully toxic in her sarcasm that's both thrilling and extremely fucking weird for the mom in a nominally family-friendly effects-driven tentpole. Anyway, the family is a miserable trio of angular, off-putting SOBs, and that leaves Rudd's affable nerd and Celeste O'Connor's blank teenage love interest to do all of the work anchoring this in something appealing, while Logan Kim's work as the horrible, shrill little conspiracy geek Podcast, Phoebe's only friend, at least succeeds in bring to life an appalling bad character just as he was written.
Reitman's handle on his actors is bad, but his handle on his imagery is no better: Ghostbusters: Afterlife is full of cumbersome shots that seem to be driven at most by "that would be a neat angle, don't you think?" and at worst by a desperate hope that it might be possible to distract from the gruesomely pedestrian and sluggish writing by throwing some showy compositions in there. There is no feeling that this is a real world: at one point, Rudd enters a Wal-Mart (where we get just a firehose of product placement), and it is empty, just a completely barren, inhuman space that feels in no way like anything but a place that got emptied out so Movie Star Paul Rudd and a camera crew could shoot a movie there. And then Reitman completely fumbles the task of making the town, the ol' Spengler farm, and the ghostly mine on the outskirts function together in any kind of coherent physical layout, something that's vaguely itchy in the first hour and change and becomes so bad as to make the story almost incomprehensible as it races to the climax. And somehow, that climax really does make everything worse: first by listlessly replicating the original movie, and then by leaning into the nostalgia-baiting in the most tacky, shabbily-written, irritating material of a movie that has virtually no good material at all. I disliked Afterlife all along, but I came to genuinely despise Afterlife only in its last twenty minutes.
For all that, I should like to end things on a positive note, to wit: Rob Simonsen's score does an excellent job of resuscitating Elmer Bernstein's themes from the original (even when this means an emotional mismatch between the story and the music), as well as being in general a very adept pastiche of the kind of music generally written for 1980s popcorn movies. So there's at least one sense in which this shameless nostalgia-humping turns into something aesthetically satisfying and pleasurable, thank God.
Reviews in this series
Ghostbusters (I. Reitman, 1984)
Ghostbusters II (I. Reitman, 1989)
Ghostbusters (Feig, 2016)
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (J. Reitman, 2021)
And that leaves the new Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which against the odds and by every standard I can think of is the worst movie of the four, and not by any close margin. This is possibly the single most pandering and witless example of a film whose entire strategy is to prey on the viewer's basest nostalgia from the last decade, a period during which that became one of the dominant forms of pop media; it is, I think, clearly the worst example that wasn't financed by the Walt Disney Company. It has no idea what it wants to do, or how it wants to do it; it's an attempt to extend the narrative of the 1984 film (and only the 1984 film; it's not that Ghostbusters II is explicitly countermanded in Afterlife, but it doesn't come up in passages of dialogue where it feels very strange that it doesn't come up) that sort of ruins it, and its uncertain strategy of taking the material in a new direction is crushed like a cockroach under the third act, which isn't so much "paying homage" to the climax of Ghostbusters '84 as it is "precisely restaging" it, down to some very specific shot choices. And even when it is trying be its own thing, Afterlife is never more creative than just grabbing onto chunks of Stranger Things, one of the ur-texts of or current nostalgia-saturated moment.
Things start in a promisingly mysterious mood, at night on a farm God knows where, where a man (Bob Gunton) whose frame looks close enough to the late Harold Ramis that you can see what they were going for gets filmed with a lot of edge lighting. So you can see what they were going for there, as well. A few supernatural goings-on later - one of which is a very direct nod to a scene from the original movie, and thus an early indication of what we need to be prepared for here - and he's dead. Perfect timing, too, since his estranged daughter Callie (Carrie Coon) and her two children - 15-year-old Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and 12-year-old Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) have just been evicted, which means that her unexpected inheritance of even as godawful a rundown old farmhouse as is waiting for them in Summerville, Oklahoma is helpful at this point in time. Cue about 45 minutes of looming foreshadowing, as the three of them situate themselves into what passes for the society of Summerville, and Phoebe in particular begins to investigate the strange activities plaguing the town, including daily earthquakes despite the geological impossibility of such a phenomenon. And then, cue the slow reveal, as coyly drawn-out as a striptease, in which Phoebe and Trevor find - goodness gracious! - an old ghost trap, and then - mercy me! - the dusty old ghostbusting vehicle Ecto 1 in a barn, and then - land sakes! - a proton pack. See, it turns out that Dead Grandpa was Egon Spengler, of the ghostbusters who were active in New York back in the 1980s. And I cannot fathom why the film holds that name back for so long, given the complete lack of effort it puts into hiding that fact in everything from the Ramis look-alike at the start to the Egon-like design of Phoebe's hair and glasses to the terrible and bizarre cameo of Annie Potts as Janine Melnitz, who shows up to hand Callie the keys and then just drifts away without providing any of the pages of exposition she would have had access to that could have accelerated our trip into the film's rising action by about 30 minutes.
Anyway, once Ghostbusters: Afterlife gets going, it's basically paying an extended game of "what if we did X?": what if the ghostbusters were children? What if they were operating in an Oklahoma farm town rather than New York City? What if this wasn't even a little bit a comedy, which gets to my overriding theory for why the 1984 film was good and none of the others are: you need to have Bill Murray being selfish and trying to destroy Dan Aykroyd's overworked mythology with his cynical sarcasm to make this work. In the first sequel, Murray was too bored to try, and the latter two films both suffer from taking the material basically at face value - so much so in this case that, again, it's really not even telling jokes. And this despite bringing in Paul Rudd as a science teacher and the only person in this universe who remembers how 36 years ago, the entire city of New York was almost completely overrun by the undead.
But yes, all those what ifs, and none of them are terribly compelling, though you can at times tell that director and co-writer Jason Reitman (son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two movies - making him at best the fourth most important authorial voice behind Aykroyd, Ramis, and Murray, but whatever, let it become a weird heirloom property) had some ideas and images he's been noodling around with for a while, hoping to give them cinematic life: the Ecto 1 racing through a wheat field is obviously one of these, for example. For the most part, the script he's written with Gil Kenan is full of "this had to happen for the plot to work" choices, and I'm not even sure that they all did have to happen: on the logic of the first movies, there's no reason for Egon and Ray Stanz (Aykroyd, whose cameo during a phone conversation is less bungled than Potts's, though it shows up at a very weird place in the story) to have had the split they have here, nor did anything in the '84 Ghostbusters seem to leave open the possibility that the danger from that movie was unresolved in the way Ghostbusters: Afterlife makes it out to be.
Anyways, it's a frustrating failure as a sequel, and it becomes an outright disgusting one in the last several minutes of its running time, but I will leave that horrible surprise unspoiled. Worse still, Afterlife is a failure on its own merits as a film, not least because it is so desperately hungry for all that nostalgia, enough that it races through a lot of explanations about what the hell is going on, to make more room for all those drawn-out, lingering sops to the old movie. It has a really lousy array of characters for us to cope with, for one thing: Callie, Trevor, and Phoebe seem hellbent on competing to see who can be the most off-putting, selfish, and needlessly meanspirited to the other two, and if Callie wins, this is in large part because Coon is giving such a weird, brittle performance. On paper, she's by far the best member of this cast, and she is recoiling from the script as only a gifted actor who is compelled to take unworthy roles in shitty scripts can be; the result is a performance that's unnervingly limber and naturalistic, given what the project is, and focused on playing all of the hardest, most unsympathetic parts of the character; hell, inventing new ways for the character to be unsympathetic. There's something gleefully toxic in her sarcasm that's both thrilling and extremely fucking weird for the mom in a nominally family-friendly effects-driven tentpole. Anyway, the family is a miserable trio of angular, off-putting SOBs, and that leaves Rudd's affable nerd and Celeste O'Connor's blank teenage love interest to do all of the work anchoring this in something appealing, while Logan Kim's work as the horrible, shrill little conspiracy geek Podcast, Phoebe's only friend, at least succeeds in bring to life an appalling bad character just as he was written.
Reitman's handle on his actors is bad, but his handle on his imagery is no better: Ghostbusters: Afterlife is full of cumbersome shots that seem to be driven at most by "that would be a neat angle, don't you think?" and at worst by a desperate hope that it might be possible to distract from the gruesomely pedestrian and sluggish writing by throwing some showy compositions in there. There is no feeling that this is a real world: at one point, Rudd enters a Wal-Mart (where we get just a firehose of product placement), and it is empty, just a completely barren, inhuman space that feels in no way like anything but a place that got emptied out so Movie Star Paul Rudd and a camera crew could shoot a movie there. And then Reitman completely fumbles the task of making the town, the ol' Spengler farm, and the ghostly mine on the outskirts function together in any kind of coherent physical layout, something that's vaguely itchy in the first hour and change and becomes so bad as to make the story almost incomprehensible as it races to the climax. And somehow, that climax really does make everything worse: first by listlessly replicating the original movie, and then by leaning into the nostalgia-baiting in the most tacky, shabbily-written, irritating material of a movie that has virtually no good material at all. I disliked Afterlife all along, but I came to genuinely despise Afterlife only in its last twenty minutes.
For all that, I should like to end things on a positive note, to wit: Rob Simonsen's score does an excellent job of resuscitating Elmer Bernstein's themes from the original (even when this means an emotional mismatch between the story and the music), as well as being in general a very adept pastiche of the kind of music generally written for 1980s popcorn movies. So there's at least one sense in which this shameless nostalgia-humping turns into something aesthetically satisfying and pleasurable, thank God.
Reviews in this series
Ghostbusters (I. Reitman, 1984)
Ghostbusters II (I. Reitman, 1989)
Ghostbusters (Feig, 2016)
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (J. Reitman, 2021)
