Good Morning Friends! I have been flailing around a bit game wise. My brain still wants me to be playing New World, but my frustration levels are to the point where that seems like a very anger filled proposition. Since I don’t have a lot of gaming discussion this morning I thought I would talk a bit about Ghostbusters Afterlife the continuation of the original Ghostbusters movies and by reference I guess the cartoon series. I have some thoughts about the movie but first I think we need to get something out of the way.
There has been a lot of vitriol about the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, and this post is not going to be bashing that movie. I wrote my thoughts in August of 2016 and was probably less generous than I would be today if I wrote a similar post about it. As that movie has aged I have actually liked it considerably more, especially as I have come to realize that they are completely different products. Ghostbusters 2016 is far more the “Scooby Doo” interpretation of Ghostbusters, and it works and is carried in large part by the phenomenal comedians in each of the roles. I love Scooby Doo and I think Ghostbusters works in this more over the top interpretation.
If the 2016 movie is Scooby Doo, the original movie is more akin to Pop Cthulhu. There are some deeply serious and scary things going on, with some really interesting lore pulled from eldritch tomes of knowledge… that gets watered down by the comedic performances taking place when confronted by what would otherwise be deep horror. The tone is just different and as a kid it made me want to read Tobin’s Spirit Guide, Spates Catalog, and even the Necronomicon. What pulled me in was the universe filled with possibilities and the general cosmology of Ghostbusters, that thankfully was fleshed out and continued in “The Real Ghostbusters” cartoon series on Saturday mornings.
We’ve seen so much necromancy involving trying to resurrect a popular movie series from my childhood… aka the 80s. So many of them fall short of what my general goals for this sort of movie are. Essentially I am looking for it to do the following things:
- Pay Homage to the Original Material
- Connect the New Material to the Original Story
- Set Up a New Generation of Characters
- Introduce a new Threat that is a Call to Action
- Pass the Baton from the Old Generation to the New Generation
- Give the Old Generation a Meaningful Send Off
This is Phoebe, she serves as our point of view character for most of the movie. I’m going to be pretty shallow on plot points because I don’t really want to dive into spoilers nor do I really feel like I need to. Shocking to no one and largely explained in the trailer… Phoebe is the Grand Daughter of Egon Spengler. Like Egon she is a science head and genius and also very clearly on the spectrum, which is lightly touched upon but not really treated as some magical power like too many shows seem to. Essentially the family is destitute and when Egon passes, he leaves them his home and land in the middle of nowhere… aka Oklahoma. I know that this was filmed in Canada, but based on the look of things and knowing my state I am guessing it would be somewhere around Weatherford.
One of the things that this movie does extremely well is it blends the feeling of the original Ghostbusters with that of a coming of age adventure like The Goonies. You care about the kids that are largely the ones driving the plot forward and the adults that care about them. These take the form of the form of the Mom played by Carrie Coon and a Seismologist played by Paul Rudd. Rudd’s character is very reminiscent of Science Teacher from Gremlins or the later derivative character from Stranger Things. The story felt more real to me as an Oklahoman because the plot as discussed in the trailer centers around this small town being impacted by random earthquakes every single day. We went through a similar cluster of earthquakes largely blamed upon the fracking industry, and the movie does a good job of latching onto this unknown and turning it into something darker.
This bit is going to be a little bit spoilery so you might want to skip it if you are bothered by such things. So there are also some plot holes that I am a bit confused by. In the original Ghostbusters Ray Stantz accidentally chose the form of “Gozer the Destructor” by thinking of his childhood love of Stay Puft Marshmallows. Per lore each time Gozer manifests a new form is chosen… so when Gozer manifested in 1984 you have a Giant Marshmallow Man. So why exactly would packages of tiny marshmallows be turned into tiny Stay Puft Men? I mean it makes for some cute and disturbing scenes, but also makes no real sense in the grand scheme of things. The only thing I can think is that since the Original Ghostbusters effectively kept Gozer from coming into the world… maybe they just got a stay of execution or some such?
Much like The Force Awakens feels like a remix of A New Hope, in some ways this movie feels like a remix of the original Ghostbusters film. There are a lot of plot points that follow a similar pattern, but do so in a fresh enough way that they feel like an event happening again and less a remake of the earlier film. The big payoff for me personally is how neatly everything fits into the larger narrative of the Ghostbusters universe and a continuation of the mythology set up in that first film. Lore is one of those things that I just eat up and part of the reason why I dove so heavily into games like Destiny and even more recently New World. I like the world I am experiencing to make sense within the context of the film and it to feel like the events are part of something larger than the narrow view port that I see on the screen. Afterlife pays off in this aspect in spades.
Afterlife is also a movie that resolves itself pretty cleanly. There are no obvious dangling plot threads that feel cheap if not continued in a sequel. However there is enough meat left on the bones that if they wanted to create a new series of movies involving these characters that it would totally make sense and be welcome. Ultimately I guess the performance of the film will determine if this is the final chapter of a beloved story, or the start of something new. I am on board either way and would honestly love to see more of the characters in the future.
The only real regret I have about the movie is that you don’t really get a good action shot of the new cast of characters AS the new Ghostbusters. For me at least I had two characters that I absolutely fell in love with in the form of Phoebe and “Podcast”, but Trevor and Lucky don’t really have a lot of plot development other than “romantic interests”. I guess we get to briefly see that Trevor is a bit of a mechanic, but it feels like maybe some of the more specific character development for them was maybe left on the cutting room floor. That said I am completely on board with a brand new series of movies surrounding these characters and their new adventures resurrecting the Ghostbusters.
If you ever loved Ghostbusters, then I highly suggest you watch this new entry in the series. If you love the 80s “horror comedy” tropes like Lost Boys, then I also highly suggest you watch this film. If you were deeply passionate about the 2016 Ghostbusters Reboot, then I still suggest you watch this film because it spends zero time disparaging that movie and is a really enjoyable ride even if you don’t care much about the classical Ghostbusters. On a personal level, this is pretty much as close to a perfect resurrection of a franchise has seen and ultimately checks off all of the boxes on my list of requirements for a good outing in an old series.