Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

[Edgy MD]

A single mom at the end of her rope takes her high school-aged son and middle school-aged daughter to live in a rundown farmhouse she has just inherited from the father she never knew. When the two kids start finding old ghostbusting shit in the basement and shed, things get freaky, and busting ensues.

[Fman99]

Fucking reboots should fucking die

[smg58]

Perhaps overly sentimental towards the original, but there was quite a bit to like about it.

[Edgy MD]

The pluses and minuses of reboots is a big part of why this exists. Hugely divergent opinions about the last attempt to jumpstart the franchise is a big part of why this film exists.

Reportage about opposition to the 2016 Ghostbusters was all about misogyny. And while I have no doubt that some haters just resent women, that's not the reason the film didn't gain the hoped-for traction. In making it a reboot, instead of a sequel, the viewer couldn't engage with the new film without letting the old film go. The two didn't (and apparently couldn't) exist in the same universe.

Lost in all the goofy controversy was that the film was kind of good, had the tone almost perfect, and it wouldn't have taken a great effort in terms of adjusting on the fly to make it more sequel-y and less reboot-y.

So this film exists as almost an apology, returning us to the timeline in which Egon, Peter, Ray, and Winston long ago vanquished a spectral assault on New York in the eighties. Unfortunately, despite bending over backwards to re-attain the audience's good will, even bringing in Ivan Reitman's son to direct, the original tone is what they fail to find. Instead, we get a Disney-ish Escape from Witch Mountain kind of soft-core juvenile supernatural horror in which the unsupervised kids take up the fight right under parents' noses, as parents are off concerning themselves with God knows what. It's a joyous fantasy to a tweenage mind, but in the age of 24-hour supervision, the plausibility of such stories becomes tougher to pull off.

The thing is, as far a science and supernatural speculation go, the Ghostubsters franchise is about as stupid as possible. If you don't get the comic tone right, you kind of don't really have a movie. And they don't. The re-use of The Sta-Puff Marshmallow Guy has all the joy of suits sitting around a boardroom table insisting that the money won't be there if they don't work the Marshmallow into the script. It's really unsettling garbage and has nothing to do with the rest of the alleged plot. Including the wonderfully named young actor Finn Wolfhard also feels like a corporate synergy move, with Finn already linked to the brand by him and his co-stars dressing as Ghostbusters in Stranger Things' season two.

What this attempt at redeeming the franchise seems to not have realized is that they also needed to redeem the joyous but misbegotten 2016 installment as well. And if they cared enough, they'd have found a way to retroactively incorporate the apparently separate timelines into one story.

If they did, they would have gotten the kaching! they longed for. But they bypassed that, going straight for the kaching! without doing the deeper thinking and the emotional reasoning. And they, and we, and the GB brand are all poorer for it.

[Frayed Knot]

I was only 'Meh' on the original so have never been even slightly tempted by the existence of sequels, remakes, re-boots, re-castings, re-imaginings, etc.

[Fman99]

The original is still funny to me - it came out when I was 11 years old and much of the humor I think was aimed right at me. Everything afterwards, including GBII, was and is garbage.

I suffered through "Coming 2 America" because my family wanted to watch it. It stunk. You cannot recapture a funny feeling or vibe from 30 years ago. Sorry. Give me a new story, new characters, something funny that I haven't seen before.

[Frayed Knot]

The original is still funny to me - it came out when I was 11 years old and much of the humor I think was aimed right at me. Everything afterwards, including GBII, was and is garbage.

Yeah, I was older and then, for whatever reason, didn't wind up seeing it until more than a few years after its initial release ... hence my assessment of 'Meh'.

I also, for the most part, shun sequels and remakes almost by reflex.
If I didn't like the flick in the first place then there's no point in diving into the sequel. And sequels to movies I did like are often merely pale imitations that were made simply because
there was too much money in it for them Not to make one. They're also as likely as not to leave me with a lesser opinion of the original. I'd retain better memories of 'ROCKY' for
instance -- a movie that came out while I was a teenager and so was almost genetically pre-programmed to like -- had there never been a Rocky II, III, IV, ... XV111, etc.

[Willets Point]

I liked it. Had a warm, Spielbergian "kids delve into mysteries" feel to it with a strong performance by McKenna Grace, crossed with a tribute to the original cast (who are in the movie a whole lot less than I expected). I also liked the 2016 version, which was bigger on laughs, whereas Afterlife is more of charming family film. But I agree with Edgy that the 2016 version would've been better if it was just the same Ghostbusters business 30 years later and the original crew had retired and now everyone who worked there was a woman. Maybe they could've had one of the four just starting on the job when the film begins to serve as a point-of-view character. Anyway, Ghostbusters 2016 and Ghostbusters 2021 are a whole lot more fun and entertaining than that piece of crap Ghostbusters 2.