Ghostbusters: Afterlife | Review
To understand the problems with Ghostbusters: Afterlife, look no further than its promotional posters. It looks like an uber-serious action-adventure, but then you see the cartoonish franchise logo and start to question what exactly the tone of this movie is. And that’s what the movie ends up being—tonally inconsistent.
Afterlife is set 30 years after the original films (ignoring the 2016 all-women reboot that got trashed by toxic fans, resulting in its stars receiving harassment and death threats), following single mother Callie (Carrie Coon, Gone Girl) and her two kids, teen Trevor (Finn Wolfhard, Stranger Things) and pre-teen Phoebe (Mckenna Grace, Captain Marvel), as they relocate to Oklahoma to go through the remnants of Callie’s recently-deceased-and-estranged father’s dilapidated farm house. Quickly, strange things start happening, like daily earthquakes (in Oklahoma?). It doesn’t take long before the kids discover their late grandfather was a Ghostbuster and, thus, a new generation of Ghostbusters is born.
Paul Rudd as science teacher Gary Grooberson and Carrie Coon as Callie
Okay, so, first of all, I usually don’t have a problem with suspending my disbelief when watching movies but there are two creative decisions that left me scratching my head. The first is the kids not knowing what Ghostbusters are or that ghosts exist. I don’t understand how anyone in the world of Ghostbusters can not know about the Ghostbusters. Wouldn’t the realization that ghosts are real, and the men who fought them, be, like, a big deal? And, secondly, Callie’s father (one of the original four Ghostbusters) died alone and was estranged from the other three Ghostbusters because the others didn’t believe him about another supernatural threat. Having been through two films with these characters, it doesn’t make sense to me that they wouldn’t believe this threat. But these two factors needed to exist, no matter how contrived, in order for the rest of this film’s story to work.
This is a legacyquel that seeks to honor the original films, while also imparting a new path forward. It’s a tribute on multiple levels: writer/director Jason Reitman (Juno & Up in the Air) made Afterlife to honor his father, Ivan Reitman, the director of the original films; it’s intended to be a proper sendoff to the late Harold Ramis, the co-writer of the original films who also starred as Egon Spengler; and it’s supposed to “hand the movie back to the fans,” as Reitman once said in an interview. The first two work well enough, but the third causes a lot of problems.
Lucky (Celeste O’Connor), Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), Podcast (Logan Kim), and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace)
Afterlife is a reminder of the poor state of Hollywood filmmaking right now, where nostalgia reigns supreme. Look at what happened with the new Star Wars trilogy, which ended with the worst film in the franchise, one that simply rehashed bits and pieces from the previous films. You can see it in the upcoming Spider-Man or The Flash films, which supposedly bring back Tobey MaGuire and Andrew Garfield’s respective Spider-Men and Michael Keaton’s Batman. The worst parts about nostalgia-driven filmmaking is it results in films that feel purely fan service and emotionally hollow.
To its credit, Afterlife does try to offer something new by reframing it as a family story, focusing on kids as the leads, and resetting the story in Middle America instead of NYC. As written by Reitman and Gil Kenan (Poltergeist), the first half of the film, maybe 2/3rds, feels like a coming-of-age flick like the ones from the 80s or anything from Spielberg. But it becomes a chore anytime the film reminds us this is a Ghostbusters movie, so there needs to be jokes (most of which don’t work), and re-introducing things we’ve already seen from the previous films, like proton packs, ghost traps, or Ecto-1. And the third act is especially egregious when it succumbs to callbacks and fan service. A great sequel offers new and refreshing ideas (look at The Last Jedi), but Afterlife simply rehashes iconic imagery from the original films instead of dreaming up its own. Instead of Slimer, we get a similar-looking Muncher (voiced by Josh Gad). Instead of the gigantic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, we get miniature versions of him (officially called “Mini-Pufts”). There’s even an unnatural moment when a character asks “Who you gonna call?” and I wanted to groan out loud.
Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), Podcast (Logan Kim), and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard)
Look, I don’t think this franchise is for me. I watched all of the Ghostbusters films (including the 2016 reboot) leading up to Afterlife’s release because I hadn’t seen any of them before, and I was open-minded. I thought they’d be dumb fun, but what I found, instead, was just boring and lackluster comedies. I don’t understand how these films became the phenomenon that they were (are?), but I would never take away anything from fans who did grow up with the films and truly do enjoy them. And I will admit, despite how critical I am of the film’s fan service, it does feature a truly touching moment in the third act that honors Harold Ramis (the woman sitting next to me literally grasped her heart, as if trying hard not to cry). Even I almost got choked up and I don’t care about this franchise at all.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a really-well acted film—Coon and Grace are fantastic, as always, and newcomer Logan Kim is a scene-stealer as Phoebe’s precocious new friend—but it struggles to be its own thing or even justify its existence. Four films in and I still haven’t seen a good Ghostbusters movie. I think it’s time for the franchise to stay dead.
