Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 1 (Ghostbusters Afterlife)

It is once again October, and it is once again time for SPOOKY MONTH! Welcome, one and all, to Sixteen More Screams For Halloween, the marathon where we say something about something spooky and do that sixteen times because 31 is too many these days. Boy, did I pick a whopper for the introductory one. I'm writing this shit at like 7 in the morning because I got shit to do this morning and need to bang out the writing. So, in a slightly groggy state, let's see if I can shake off the sleepies and be coherent against this movie. I can sum up the hot water I found myself in by firing it up in a sentence: I liked the 2016 Ghostbusters movie. I am in the minority on that opinion, and the majority revolted so much that this movie was made, a panicked pull of the reverse lever to go back and do a proper Ghostbuster movie which plays off of the old stuff and is steeped in old Ghostbuster continuity reference and reverence. For quite some time I built it up in my head as an affront to my ideology, another feather in the cap of nostalgia baiting reference culture, right up there with Doctor Who circa 2020 to right now or The Rise Of Skywalker.

Having both actually watched the thing and given some reappraisals to the 2016 film, I find that both of them are flawed... but in the opposite manner. The 2016 film has what I find to be a vibrant and fun filling, but its framework plays it a little too safe in following the playbook of the big beats from the original. By contrast then, Afterlife has its very own framework that's built around the theme of family legacy and daddy issues, Jason Reitman putting a lot of himself into the movie there. It's the filling which is the problem, though. Where 2016 had what I found to be vibrant and fun stuff, Afterlife is just kind of a middling slog that fills its time with a bunch of continuity references to the first movie. People like to call these sort of things "Easter eggs", but do you know what happens when you eat too many of those on Easter Sunday? You get a tummyache and throw up.

On seemingly every level of conscious and subconscious thought this movie is broadcasting a "REMEMBER THAT 1984 MOVIE YOU LIKED?" message to you. It isn't just the obvious shit like the plot being about the same three or four monsters from the first movie returned. It isn't even all the little sight gags and stuff that are things from the movie that make anyone who wore the VHS up do the DiCaprio pointing meme. What really drove me, believe it or not, was the musical score... because half of it is just Elmer Bernstein's score from the first movie. Someone like me can't take a mental affront like that from every side. I get it, some dumb movie from 1984 existed and you built your whole identity on it. Jesus Christ. I could almost sum up the entire movie in the scene that introduces Paul Rudd, a summer school science teacher who just opens class with "You know what, kids? Fuck it, neither of us want to learn anything about anything here so let's just watch old movies from the 80's all day.". 

There's almost something there with Egon's granddaughter taking on the torch and getting it passed down to her in the climax, which also doubles as a sad farewell to the late Harold Ramis, but I really don't know. On the one hand, I could be real mean and make a point about those Ghostbusters fans only accepting a girl Ghostbuster when it's steeped in continuity and legacy, like hiding medicine for your dog in a piece of cheese. Did I just compare raving Ghostbusters superfans to dogs? No, that would only be if I were real mean. On the other hand, one of the next generation kids in this movie is a teenaged black girl. I briefly pondered why certain people didn't kick up more of a fuss about that before remembering that in the climax her big moment is failing to contain Gozer in a beam and getting turned into one of those terror dogs. Ah. 

Besides, any torch passing is utterly muted by the post-credits, which is basically "oh no the old Ghostbuster containment system in New York might break and let more ghosts out". Any sequel isn't going to focus on the new generation of Ghostbusting kids. It'll be half and half again, focused on these old people because they're the guys you remember from your worn-out VHS tape. Besides, if this movie was Jason Reitman working his own issues with his dad into the story? Now Ivan Reitman's dead, so who knows what kind of movie will be made out of that grief. I didn't really like this one, though. It's not the worst movie ever, it's just kind of mediocre. It bored me a little, and a Ghostbuster film shouldn't do that. More to the point, I'm ideologically opposed to all that reference shit and the fact that this is a course correction after a movie I kinda liked which nobody else did, so I took it a little personal.

And, one last complaint to lead us into next time, but there aren't any wild new ghosts! It's all the old shit again!! There's like one new ghost and he's only in the movie for two seconds! Even if you didn't like the movie, you gotta give the 2016 one some props for having cool and colorful ghost designs. They're visually stimulating and also kind of original. There's a nostalgia trip for all you worn-out VHS heads. Remember when Ghostbusters did original shit? You were there, and we will go to there next time.