My brother-in-law is a massive Ghostbusters fan, which I find curious, as he was all of four years old when the original film was released. As for myself, I was in the key demographic for it: young enough to clamor for all the tie-in merchandise I could get, while old enough to understand what was happening in the scene where Dan Ackroyd dreams he receives oral gratification from a ghost.
Despite having fond memories of the picture, I wasn’t clamoring for any additional installments. Honestly, I’m a bit confused as to why so many people want sequels/prequels/whatever to the things they love. There’s only two basic directions an addition to a series can go in, and that is 1) do the exact same thing again or 2) go in an entirely new direction.
Ghostbusters 2 did the former and was instantly forgettable. But taking the other path is potentially more treacherous, given the extreme vitriol unleashed on an all-female spin took on the original in 2016. 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife tried to split the difference and my thoughts about it are…complicated.
I had zero interest in seeing this until my wife and I decided we would accompany her brother to see 2024’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. I definitely benefited from going in to the 2021 film with zero expectations.
The movie does not start out promising. Harold Ramis died in 2014, but here we have somebody who is obviously supposed to be him, except his face is always in shadow. His character has apparently relocated from the Big Apple to somewhere in the sticks, where we see him get killed by a ghost he fails to trap. Judging by the sounds the apparition had been making in a corn field, he is trying to apprehend the ghost of the music that used to accompany the THX logo. And, just by making a reference to the old THX logo, I realize again how goddamn old I am.
It turns out Ramis had a daughter (Carrie Coon), and this single mom comes to claim the house willed to her by the father who was absent from her life. She has brought in tow a precocious science nerd daughter (Mckenna Grace) and a son (Finn Wolfhard).
Grace is the breakout star here, in one of the very few occurrences of an established film franchise successfully handing the reins to a new generation. I completely believed her as a slightly socially-awkward, science-loving nerd. I laughed at most of her jokes, even though they are posited as lines not to be laughed at—lines like, “Why should you never trust atoms? Because they make up everything.” She is basically Ramis’s character if he had been a young teen girl.
But there’s one aspect of her character I found odd and that is how nonplussed she is to find herself interacting with a ghost. Given how thoroughly grounded she is in science, shouldn’t she be more startled by this than the average person? I mean, here is something that is outside the rules that form her entire mindset.
As for Wolfhard, I’m still trying to figure out what his character adds to the series. Let’s see, he gets the ol’ Ghostbusters ride (the ECTO-1) up and running, and he gets a crush on a local girl (Celeste O’Connor). That’s it. And doesn’t he weirdly look like Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, if he had been a girl and twice as ugly? I realize how cruel I’m being but, really, don’t you see that now?
Grace has a same-aged friend in Logan Kim, playing a character named Podcast. Care to hazard a guess at what his obsession is? I found him a bit annoying at first, but then he started to grow on me. That’s good, since it is obvious he is going to be a recurring character.
Paul Rudd is another new addition to the series, as a potential love interest for Coon and step-dad to Grace, with whom he shares a passion for science. I have never disliked Rudd in anything I’ve seen him in, but I also would never watch a film specifically because he was in it.
His science teacher has been closely monitoring seismic activity in the area, something for which Oklahoma isn’t well-known. Naturally, the source of the quakes will eventually be determined to be a portal to another dimension in an abandoned mine…and blah blah blah. It will also be revealed this mine was where the minerals were mined to make the support beams for the building in the original film where the climatic battle occurred. Just try and convince me that isn’t one hell of a reach to try to establish a tie between this film and the first.
One huge misstep in the film occurs in a scene where Rudd patronizes a Walmart which has to be the least busy of any of their locations anywhere and at any time of night. And yet, we somehow we hear screams of terror in the store. I was hoping it was simply interdimensional terrors lurking in the mist. Oh no, it was something far more horrific: these motherfucking mini Stay Puft men. These micro versions of the end boss from the first picture gleefully maim and obliterate themselves and each other, though not at a fast enough rate for me.
Big fans of the series will be especially happy with the soundtrack, which makes good use of the original Elmer Bernstein score for some of its cues. Fortunately, it doesn’t just reuse the Ray Parker, Jr. theme song ad nauseum. What was especially shocking to me were some of the needle drops. I wonder how many people were familiar with the Shirley Ellis track used prior to seeing the film. And, god forbid, but “Boredom” by The Buzzcocks was a great choice for the scene where Wolfhard goes joyriding in the newly reactivated ECTO-1.
All that said, I felt Ghostbusters: Afterlife was a trifle–a mildly enjoyable film that succeeds in taking the series in new directions, yet still feels completely unnecessary. There’s still too much slavish fidelity to the original for my liking. There’s a moment where Grace opens a locker containing the jumpsuits of the original stars, and I swear I heard a thousand nerds simultaneously get a boner. My feelings did not improve with an obligatory reunion of those heroes in the climax of this film. How can a new direction find its wings when it has to carry so much baggage from the past?
Dir: Jason Reitman
Starring Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, Mckenna Grace
Watched on blu-ray