Rating: 2 hours, 4 minutes
Runtime: PG-13
Director: Jason Reitman
Quick Impressions:
“Now I remember how long two hours is!” my six-year-old declared as Ghostbusters: Afterlife ended. My husband who had the dubious honor of sitting next to him looked ready for the sweet release of the impending apocalypse. Unlike our other son and daughter (both rabid cinephiles), our youngest has never been much of a movie fan. (He only likes the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. Recently he told me in excitement, “There’s a new Clifford movie coming out. That might be good to see.” I got so excited, but days later when I asked him if he still wanted to see it, he replied in confusion, “What are you talking about?”
“Remember when you told us there was a new Clifford movie?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Well do you still want to see it?”
As bemused as I was, he explained, “I don’t want to see it! I was just recommending it. I happened to hear about it, and I thought you might be interested. You’re the one who likes movies!”)
I still thought that maybe being in school had matured him, so we coaxed him to the theater with the promise of an Icee. Next time we get the delusional idea to go a movie as a whole family, we’ll bring along a ghost trap for him!
The rest of the family are huge fans of the original Ghostbusters. It takes forever to agree on something to watch as a group around here, but everybody loves Ghostbusters. The only movie we compromise on more often is Clue. I’ve liked Ghostbusters since I saw it in the theater with my parents back in 1984, and I find new things to appreciate in it all the time. What I love best is the interplay between Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver, but I’m also drawn to Jeanine’s largely unsuccessful attempts to engage Egon. It’s a movie that makes me laugh every time I watch it. Plus I like ghosts.
Back in 1989, I also loved Ghostbusters II and immediately declared it much funnier than the original (which I can now only attribute to the combined effects of recency bias, being ten years old, and loving it when my grandpa spontaneously whisked me off to the movies). We hardly ever watch that one these days (though I do love Egon’s experiment in the beginning).
We also liked the 2016 Ghostbusters, despite all the stress it generated. (Somehow not liking it became tantamount to hating women and the entire cast. Meanwhile, if you did like it, you had to be lying.) It’s nowhere near as strong as the original (and I kept laughing the most at Chris Hemsworth, which is frustrating since the movie is supposed to be showcasing the female stars), but we do own that one, and start-to-finish, I think it’s a stronger film than Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
This movie does finish strong, though, with a big, nostalgic finale that packs such an emotional punch that you want to forgive the rest of the movie for all its many shortcomings.
The Good:
This movie is funny. I’m tempted to say that it’s not as funny as it wants to be, but perhaps others will find it funnier than I do. It was the weirdest thing. We laughed here and there, but below us from somewhere unseen, large bursts of hysterical laughter kept erupting unsettlingly. Somebody down there really loved Ghostbusters: Afterlife. A lot of somebodies. (I always sit in the very back row if possible, so we couldn’t see the rest of the audience, but a large number of people kept laughing out loud consistently.)
“Does this movie have a laugh track?” I whispered to my daughter, who was as bemused about the situation as I was. (I mean we liked it. But I only laughed out loud once, very, very late in the film at an interaction between Podcast (Logan Kim) and a person he is meeting for the first time. At this moment of my life, that interaction really resonated with me and amused me far more than it should have.)
We remain unsure why that large group of people laughed out loud so often (and applauded at the end). (Maybe it was the cast in disguise?) We did enjoy watching the movie, though.
Early on, I think I liked it much more than my daughter (who was sitting next to me). She kept complaining, “These are all just stock movie characters. And is Finn Wolfhard just in it so that Finn Wolfhard can be in it?”
I can confirm that Finn Wolfhard is just in it so that Finn Wolfhard can be in it. But hey guess what? Finn Wolfhard’s in it! (Good news, Stranger Things fans!)
I liked the early parts of the film. The beginning reminded me a bit of The Lost Boys (which was our older son’s go-to movie choice back when he was six). As the film continued, the atmosphere started to remind me of 80s teen movies, especially when Finn Wolfhard was in it. To my untrained eye, Wolfhard’s scenes all appeared to take place in a teen movie from the 1980s. I kept thinking of The Outsiders, in particular. Then I realized that Ghostbusters: Afterlife is set in Oklahoma, so all the hints of S.E. Hinton made a kind of sense. (My daughter found Trevor’s storyline useless. But this must be taken with a grain of salt since she usually doesn’t like movie romances, and he’s the one awkwardly having a crush on a girl who works at a diner. She’s right. Trevor’s scenes don’t do much to progress the plot, but that enthusiastic group of people sitting below us seemed very invested in Finn Wolfhard, no matter what he was or wasn’t doing. (Maybe it was the Wolfhard family in disguise?) (My own kids don’t particularly get his appeal, even though both my eighteen-year-old son and twelve-year-old daughter are huge Stranger Things fans.) (My daughter is way more interested in Maya Hawke, and last time I talked with him about it, my son was basically just annoyed and baffled that so many people he went to school with had a crush on Finn Wolfhard.)
The dynamic between the mom and the kids in the early scenes did make me smile because it reminded me of our own family banter. I’ve vaguely liked Carrie Coon for a while, and I find her quite engaging as the mom, funny, sympathetic, and sad in a way that makes the movie more watchable. Also excellent is Mckenna Grace as Phoebe, the most hardworking character in the movie.
At one point, one character says encouragingly, “Phoebe will find something,” and my daughter observed, “Phoebe’s doing all the work,” then joked melodramatically, “She’s holding the family together, living and dead!”
All advances in the plot do depend solely on Phoebe (to an almost ridiculous degree, but I’ll get back to that later). Even at moments when the script seems a little weak, Mckenna Grace has a compelling earnestness that keeps us watching her. (Plus, she really is the only one doing anything to advance the plot. Nothing would happen without her.)
Also adorable is Phoebe’s lab partner Podcast. When Logan Kim introduced himself as “Podcast,” and my daughter rolled her eyes (hard), I really, really didn’t want to like the character. I mean, my daughter has a point. Like everyone else, Podcast does seem like a paint-by-numbers misfit you might find lurking in any movie (or even on an episode of Stranger Things!). But Kim makes him so plucky and likeable. To my daughter’s point, we have seen a lot of characters like this before. Watching Kim’s performance, though, I couldn’t help but think, “Yes, but the actor is too young to know that.” The character is familiar to us but not as familiar to the actor playing him, so there’s something fresh in his portrayal. (And for some reason, the way he dressed reminded me of stuff friends of mine wore when I was his age. Is that look coming back in style for people who are not stylish?)
Paul Rudd is a very welcome presence as the terrible science teacher, Mr. Grooberson. At first his character bothered me (for like ten seconds) as I thought, “If these kids struggle so much with science that they have to take summer school, shouldn’t he try to teach them something?” How much seismic research can he really be getting done while the class zones out in front of 80s horror movies? However, Rudd’s commitment to the character quickly won me over. My daughter seemed to find his awkward conversations with Coon too cringe-inducing for her liking, but their encounters broadly appealed to me. (For me, their awkward jokes were sort of hit-or-miss.)
It’s fun to see the original ghostbusting equipment and accessories again. Rob Simonsen’s score is also often evocative of the music in the 1984 film. There’s something wonderfully atmospheric about the movie’s visuals, too. As we watch, we always feel that we’re waiting for something momentous to happen.
Waiting, and waiting, and waiting…
Best Scene:
This is an odd movie because my favorite part happened during the credits. There’s a mid-credits sequence and a post-credits scene, both of which really got our attention. (One nice thing about the mid-credits scene is that not only is it a nice, nostalgic reminder of the original Ghostbusters, but it’s also a reminder of another similar mid-credits cameo in the 2016 Ghostbusters.) The post-credits scene, meanwhile, had my daughter and I joking, “Wow, the Starbucks franchises in New York have really gone downhill.” (If you take what a character says earlier on the phone at face value, then the very last moments of the movie don’t make much sense.)
I also liked Phoebe’s first day in science class. I was reluctantly won over by the choice of movie and the enthusiasm of Podcast. I also liked the way Phoebe delivers her first joke to Mr. Grooberson.
Another wonderful moment comes when Carrie Coon discovers what’s hidden down in the basement.
Best Scene Visually:
There was only one part in this entire movie my son liked at all—the scene in Walmart when Paul Rudd finds something unexpected in the marshmallow aisle. My daughter found this scene increasingly disturbing. To be honest, when it began, I thought it made almost no sense. The more demented and unsettling the behavior of these little strangers became, however, the more the scene won me over. Whoever dreamed this up and put it together seemed to take genuine demented glee in it. I’m not sure that it works very well within the context of the movie, but it’s still one of the most memorable sequences of the film.
Another memorable visual is that chess board. (My daughter joked, “Imagine waking up, and the first thing you notice is that one chess piece might have moved!”) Ghost chess often comes up in my fantasies, though, so the unlikeliness of this bothered me less.
Best Action Sequence:
I don’t like most of the action sequences in this movie. They should feel exciting, but somehow, they leave me a little flat.
What I really like is the moment when Carrie Coon gets to say a line to her kids that I say to my kids (or they say to me) all the time. We’re just tweaking a line from the original Ghostbusters. Now it’s an actual line in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. This is one of our most oft-quoted movie lines. The next time I say it, I’m going to start panting and jump out the window.
Funniest Moment:
I laughed out loud exactly once, as I mentioned. I’m not convinced a laugh was merited, frankly, but I found one late exchange genuinely funny in a way I had not expected. It just suddenly seemed very relatable to me.
I also like Phoebe’s one phone call from the police station. It wasn’t funny to me as I watched it, but later when I began to think back on it, I gradually found it amusing. Since she doesn’t reveal her identity until the end of the call, the material the person on the other end chooses to disclose is kind of comical. There’s a winning absurdity to the situation that is in keeping with the character of the speaker.
The Negatives:
The middle of the movie is so slow. This seems like a worse offense than it is because the beginning is also quite slow. Now personally, I like a nice, slow, measured setting of the stage. There’s no point in rushing into action. (Jurassic Park has the right kind of pacing for me.) The problem is, once a movie takes it’s sweet time setting everything up like that, then something worthwhile has to happen. If instead, the story just continues at that pace setting more and more things up forever, the audience starts to fall asleep.
“I don’t remember any boring parts,” said my dad who slept through the middle of the movie. (Perhaps that says more about the comfortable reclining seats than the film itself, but I’m not convinced. He awoke with a start and wondered, disoriented, why I was lying next to him in bed!)
Once the first two hours of the movie have been slow, it doesn’t necessarily matter how great the last four minutes are. This movie needs to get going a little faster. It doesn’t help that only one character is actively doing things to advance the plot. As my daughter observed (comically, but accurately) Phoebe is doing everything herself. Essentially, her actions are the plot. There is one person helping her, but he doesn’t appear in the movie until the very end. What Phoebe does is the movie. Unfortunately, Phoebe is not the only character in the movie. The rest of them are taking up time by being on screen, too, but (unless they are with Phoebe at the time) their actions aren’t leading us anywhere.
“I really do think Finn Wolfhard is just in it to be Finn Wolfhard,” my daughter maintained at the end of the film, and I couldn’t disagree with her.
In the original Ghostbusters, nobody is just hanging around that way. I liked Celeste O’Connor as Lucky, the girl Wolfhard’s Trevor has a crush on. Still if you cut Trevor and all his activities out of the film, almost nothing would change. The only significant thing he does is drive the car. (Unlike my kids, I have nothing against Finn Wolfhard, but I can’t help imagining how taut the film’s mid-section could be if Trevor carried out more significant actions. Most of the time, he’s just kind of drifting around.)
And my daughter is right about something else, too. There is a stale feeling to so much of what we see in the film. As the credits rolled and we discussed some things we did like about the movie, she said, “I wish everyone wasn’t just a trope, though.”
We get some stock characters (saved from being unwatchable by charismatic actors and occasionally snappy dialogue). And we also get a bunch of Ghostbusters-type scenarios, but it’s really nothing we haven’t seen before—which is intentional, I realize. It’s like we’re being told nonstop, “Remember this? Remember this? Remember this?” And of course, we remember! That’s why we bought a ticket in the first place! We’ve seen it all before, but that was New York, this is Oklahoma!
That’s another thing. The actual story underpinning all of these bizarre events is pretty compelling. There’s a reason we’re in Oklahoma. This could be explored further, though. I think the movie doesn’t spend enough time on things that are interesting and devotes far too much time to Trevor sorting frozen hamburger patties in the cold. The Ivo Shandor storyline is fairly compelling. (Why put J.K. Simmons in the movie for such a short time, though?) What’s been going on with the other Ghostbusters sounds pretty interesting, too. I wish we spent more time exploring that and revisiting some of the old characters (or at least brought them into the movie sooner!). I know they’re rebooting the franchise as well as continuing it, but to me, one of the most compelling moments is a brief scene that appears to be an outtake from the original Ghostbusters. (Granted, maybe it’s just that I like Ghostbusters, and I’m getting older. My daughter is twelve, though, and she had absolutely no investment in Finn Wolfhard’s character. I would have rather spent more time with anybody from the original film.) (Despite how it may sound, my intent is not to bash Wolfhard. His character just needs more interesting things to do. He can have a crush and still advance the plot.)
I also found that I got bored of the new setting pretty quickly. I love haunted houses (and that mine was an absolutely great idea), but so much of this movie was just driving around through a sparsely populated town in Oklahoma. It didn’t even feel like a real town in Oklahoma to me (though I’m torn because I did keep thinking of The Outsiders). I used to live in Oklahoma, and it looked nothing like that (except for that diner. That looked like something you’d find in Oklahoma). When I lived in Edmond as a child (near Oklahoma City), the dirt was red, like clay. My mother always complained about the trouble she had washing it out of my clothes, and the elephants at the zoo were red, too, because they’d rolled in that dirt. This didn’t look like Oklahoma to me (though, granted, I did not live in every inch of the state simultaneously. Somewhere in Oklahoma might look this way).
More than anything, I wish the film had kept more secrets from us. Since the very first teaser, it was completely obvious who these kids were. (I’m not saying the filmmakers tried to keep their identity a secret and failed. I just wish that they had tried to keep their identity more of a secret from the audience. I wish there were some mystery for us, not just for them.)
The ending of the movie is good. (I was skeptical at first. At one critical moment, I had just whispered to my daughter, “Isn’t this just like the ending of Star Wars? She’s all the Ghostbusters,” when I was forced to withdraw my complaint. It’s not that the comparison wasn’t apt. But the movie then became rather touching, so I no longer cared about its lack of originality. I just wish the whole movie were the ending.
I also wish the next Ghostbusters movie would be a sequel to both this film and the 2016 movie. Does that make sense? No. But after watching the Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer before the film, I’m convinced that anything is possible.
Overall:
We’ve been waiting to see this new Ghostbusters movie for what feels like forever, and it is a much more touching tribute to Harold Ramis than I expected, even though I went in knowing the basic premise. If you’re looking for something fun to do with the family over Thanksgiving, you could do worse than taking your kids to Ghostbusters: Afterlife! (You could take my kid! That would be a real mistake, trust me, because he doesn’t like sitting through movies. He did think all the little marshmallow men were cute, though!)