Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 3 (Ghostbusters 2016)

Look out, girls, I think some of those ghosts complained about
the new Star Wars movies, too!

Oh yeah. Now we can really jam again. I thought, going into this marathon, that this would put me in a real tricky position of wanting to critique it but being afraid to. It's no secret that the well of critiquing this movie has been thoroughly poisoned by some real unsavory characters. Needlessly clinging to nostalgia for the first one? Raging misogyny? It's all there. I was really wary, going in, that I'd have to play in that well. It's not a nice place to be in! Thank goodness that I don't have to. I'd seen this once before, and I thought it was just fine. Watching it here and now, in sequence with the movies it's a reboot of? It might be my favorite one. To the nostalgia crowd that might be blasphemy, but like I said on Day 1... I like Ghostbusters. I didn't love it, either in my youth or in my adulthood. That does not make it a bad movie or one I dislike, but it makes it something that can be surpassed. For me, Ghostbusters 2016 surpassed it for me. Why? Because I had the most fun watching this one. Compared to the others, it's got a unique energy to it that appealed to me. I'm going to talk about that energy now, and some other neat stuff. We shouldn't be here long.


Wait. We need a better name for this. Okay. From now on, I'll just call the 2016 reboot film "Ghostbusters" and I'll call the original movie "Ghostbusters '84". Okay? Okay. Why did I have more "fun" watching Ghostbusters than I did Ghostbusters '84? Easy answer. I found Ghostbusters to be the "funniest" one. I know how that sounds, but hear me out. Ghostbusters, the series, is at its heart about putting a bunch of comedians into an action comedy involving ghosts and the catching of said ghosts, yeah? So, the tone of the comedy is dependent on which comedians you have in the starring roles. The first ensemble foursome's comedy stylings and tone lend themselves more to a witty deadpan style of humor. Those two movies are amusing, but for me it wasn't laugh out loud funny. (That could also be due to the fact I've seen them both multiple times each, but I digress.) Ghostbusters, on the other hand, had me laughing out loud at several moments. McCarthy, McKinnon, Jones, and Wiig have a completely different set of comedy stylings and tone with this movie, and it's one that I actually enjoyed more in the moment. I have to give props to Chris Hemsworth as well; he plays an adorable dumbass and his humor plays well with the other girls. Oh yeah, and almost everyone from the first movie gets a cameo in this one except for Rick Moranis and Harold Ramis, who were retired and dead respectively. They're simple little affairs, but the funniest to me is Bill Murray's because of the grim ghoulishness in which the new movie bothers to have him come back to cameo just so a ghost can throw him out of a window. It's an unexpected bit of dark comedy and it just gets you. So yeah. Let's just take it that my... interesting tastes made it so that I found this movie to be the most fun and/or funniest out of the others, and get to the real crunchy stuff: the villain!


Oh, Rowan. You're a wild one. Rowan's not some ancient deity or spooky ghost. He's actually a dark mirror to the Ghostbusters themselves. No, I can't keep away from the goddamned mirror imagery, but Rowan has dozens of goddamned mirrors in his ghost reactor room so the movie's handing me this shit! Rowan is nothing more than Ivo Shandor from Ghostbusters '84 with the same technical know-how as the Ghostbusters. Recall why Ivo Shandor wanted to summon Gozer; he thought society was too sick to survive and wanted to summon a god to bring about the apocalypse. Rowan's much more of a petty MRA type, which is almost darkly comic considering what happened when the movie got announced, but he's not going to harness the power of a god. He wants to do it all himself, and to do it he's studied the book that two of the Ghostbusters wrote so he can conjure ghosts. Yeah. The mass of psychokinetic energy that usually makes the Ghostbusters busy isn't done by a supernatural entity. It's done by one dude with the same tech the Ghostbusters use! And he pulls it off, even becoming a ghost himself in the process as part of his grand plan to lead the other spirits to cause destruction or whatever. Oh, but then the fun begins. First of all, I want to mention the visual flair of this movie when all the ghosts are running wild through the city. I absolutely love how this movie looks and how bright and vibrant the colors are. The ghosts are all blue and green, and the Ghostbusters proton guns are a nice contrasting red. I'm no color theory person or visual analyist, but I know what I like and I really like this. Anyway. Fun. Rowan, being a dark mirror of the Ghostbusters, can harness their power even as a ghost. Witness how he steals their iconography for himself. Mr. Stay Puft shows up as a haunted Macy's Parade balloon. Slimer, the most iconic ghost of the series, steals Ecto-1! Rowan is absolutely imposing his will upon things extra-narratively at this point, and then he goes for the money shot. The giant things stomping through New York in Ghostbusters movies have gone through a back and forth. In Ghostbusters '84, it was an ancient god weaponizing a corporate mascot. In Ghostbusters 2, the Ghostbusters themselves used a monument as a beacon of positivity. Rowan pulls it right back to the original concept. Not only did we have the two biggest icons of Ghostbusters come back under his command... but Rowan transforms into the goddamned Ghostbusters logo ghost, grows giant, and stomps through the city. Dear god in heaven, he's weaponized the franchise itself! This is a level beyond the logo being both that of the film and the company. The only way to defeat him is with that iconography... so the Ghostbusters pull the same trick from the first movie, using their own car. Total protonic reversal. Bye bye, Rowan. Yeah. So, like I said. This is the most fun Ghostbusters movie to me! The other films have their merits, of course, and are incredibly entertaining... but if I just wanted to sit down and have a few laughs and have fun? I'd throw on this one. It's all a difference in humor, really. This is great, though. Really, I love it. Now, let's talk about something other than catching ghosts.