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The Only Honest Review of Ghostbusters on the Web
9 years ago
There are a lot of reviews of the new Ghostbusters movie out there written by tedious Internet nerds determined not to like this movie because they have a vendetta against clickbait media think pieces. You can’t trust those reviews, because those plebians hate everything that’s unfamiliar because they don’t like having to think about things too deeply. There also are lots of positive reviews praising the comedy chops of the stars (true) as well as negative reviews criticizing the generally lackluster plot (also true). HOWEVER, there was ONE major glaring disappointment I had with the new Ghostbusters that I haven’t seen anyone mention.
As a kid, I was literally the biggest Ghostbusters nerd ever; there was a period in my life when I couldn’t even conceive of any other idea for a movie other than busting ghosts. Cuz it just makes soooo much sense! It’s such a natural idea! What other movie could you possibly make? So anyway, I was gaga for Ghostbusters throughout most of my childhood. My wife didn’t see the original film until she was an adult, and, while she enjoyed it, she doesn’t have the same affection for it that I do. So naturally we had very different perspectives on the new movie.
My wife really liked it. She liked that a lot of the things left unexplained in the 1984 movie (Why did they want to catch ghosts? Why was Gozar suddenly attacking now?) were explained in the remake. I’m less concerned with those details, so I wasn’t too upset that they were left open in the original. But in any case, I liked the new Ghostbusters too, generally. I’m happy to say that the trailers, which all made the film look terrible, were pretty misleading. It’s actually a pretty fun frothy summer comedy with a lot of good, solid character moments and genuine laughs. I had a lot of nitpicky problems with the movie, most of which boil down to the fact that it’s different than the original and, since I saw the original when I was 5, nothing will ever come close to matching it in my imagination. That said, if I had seen the remake when I was 5, maybe I would like it just as much as I currently like the 1984 Ghostbusters.
First, the good: The four leads are all great. It’s ironic that the all-female cast, the very thing that originally set off the idiot Internet shit storm that’s plagued this movie for months, is actually the best thing about it. All four leads have a great chemistry together and easily recreate the breezy banter that made the original so much fun. A lot of reviews finger Kate McKinnon’s Jillian Holtzman as best of the lot, but I honestly think she’s kinda weak. I gather she’s supposed to be the wacky one, but, apart from having weird hair and wearing goggles, she’s really not all that noticably wacky compared to her cohorts. I actually think that Leslie Jones’ Patty Tolan is the best. Jones had the thankless role of playing the straight man to three weirdos, but she ends up really owning the part and shining as the bewildered everyman. The trailer made it look like she was going to be the stereotypical sassy black woman who mostly shout OH HEELLLLL NO FEETS DON’T FAIL ME NOW and provide hilarious 'black people are different' style humor, but luckily all the embarrassing tone deaf Michael Bay-style lol ethnic shenanigans is pretty minimal. I’d venture to say that these new ghostbusters are much more developed characters than the originals. They have motivations and desires and backstories and everything. As opposed to the 1984 Ghostbusters, who were essentially just three random guys who decided to catch ghosts for no reason and a fourth guy who needed a paycheck.
Now the big disappointment. One of the things that I love about the original Ghostbusters is the lore. From Vinz Clortho rambling about the depths of the giant sloar to the Ghostbusters’ prison discussion about Ivo Shandor’s history to Egon’s off-hand references to Tobin’s Spirit Guide and the Spates Catalog, it always felt like Ghostbusters had a really deep and rich mythology bubbling right below the surface that the audience might not have been privy to but which really informed the tone of the film. (The Real Ghostbusters cartoon series really expanded on a lot of this, being one of the major reasons that series was so good.) The 2016 Ghostbusters doesn’t really have much of that. It’s pretty much going for pure comedy, so while the psuedo-science of the original film was internally consistent, the new movie rattles off jargon that’s clearly just supposed to be comical-sounding nonsense. When Ray Stantz talks about “full torso class 5 apparitions” in the 1984 Ghostbusters, you feel like he’s using real terminology that actually means something – even if it really is all just gobbedlygook. When Yates and Gilbert describe ghosts or proton pack technology, it’s all just funny-sounding gibberish that you’re not supposed to remember. It’s just fake words that sound funny. The “realness” of the 1984 movies owed a lot to crazy ol’ Dan Ackroyd believing that they were making a documentary, and that’s really missing here. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It doesn’t ruin the movie or anything, but it’s something that I missed.
It doesn’t help that the villain of the original was a Sumerian deity – something that fit perfectly into the Ghostbusters‘ deep mythos – while the new one just has a random guy who builds a machine to control ghosts. I guess they figured that the main draw of the film would be the interactions between the heroes, so they didn’t really need a compelling villain. But it still feels a little flat.
In general, though, it’s an enjoyable film. If you’re not a huge ‘84 Ghostbusters nerd, you’ll probably really enjoy this one. If you are a huge ‘84 Ghostbusters nerd, you’ll probably enjoy this one well enough if you can take it on its own merits.
PS.
There was another major difference between the two films, and this is more an observation about how the style of movie-making – and the general thrust of American culture – has changed since 1984. 1984 Ghostbusters is a very New York movie. It takes place in New York, but it’s also hard to think about the movie happening anyplace else. Obviously the climax takes place in a haunted skyscraper and the terror dogs are living gothic architecture gargoyles, but the film is also peppered with distinctly New York imagery – the subway, the public library, Medallian taxi cabs, hot dog stands, etc. Lenny feels like a quintessentially crabby New York mayor, and his brief meeting with Bishop Mike feels like a genuine glimpse into big city machine politics. Even the extras in crowd scenes feel like random New Yorkers pulled off the street. At the climax, when rational people should be running away from Spook Central, they’re all instead crowding around the most dangerous place in town to get a glimpse of their heroes (which feels like another New York thing, but honestly people anywhere would probably do that). Watching that crowd scene, you see groups of nuns and rabbis praying and again it really feels like it reflects the demographics of the city and that this is really what you’d see in a New York apocalypse as opposed to, say, a Baltimore or a Miami apocalypse.
2016 Ghostbusters is nominally set in New York, but it doesn’t make the city a character in its story. Despite a few distinct locations like Patty’s subway tunnel, this movie could take place in any city. In fact, while the original was mostly filmed in New York, 2016 Ghostbusters was mostly filmed in Massachusetts with Boston standing in for the Big Apple.
Again, this isn’t really a complaint, it’s just the way filmmaking is now. As our mass media culture makes the US (and the world) more homogenous, I think Americans are less interested in stories tied to place. In the 80s, a movie like Robocop WAS Detroit, Earth Girls Are Easy WAS Los Angeles, The Goonies WAS Astoria. Those places had unique histories and ambiences that meant those stories couldn’t be told anywhere else. Now that the country is becoming a loop of identical chain restaurants and big box retailers, the notion of a movie reflecting the reality of a single uniquely quirky location – rather a universal generic that everyone can identify with – seems kind of quaint and provincial.
As a kid, I was literally the biggest Ghostbusters nerd ever; there was a period in my life when I couldn’t even conceive of any other idea for a movie other than busting ghosts. Cuz it just makes soooo much sense! It’s such a natural idea! What other movie could you possibly make? So anyway, I was gaga for Ghostbusters throughout most of my childhood. My wife didn’t see the original film until she was an adult, and, while she enjoyed it, she doesn’t have the same affection for it that I do. So naturally we had very different perspectives on the new movie.
My wife really liked it. She liked that a lot of the things left unexplained in the 1984 movie (Why did they want to catch ghosts? Why was Gozar suddenly attacking now?) were explained in the remake. I’m less concerned with those details, so I wasn’t too upset that they were left open in the original. But in any case, I liked the new Ghostbusters too, generally. I’m happy to say that the trailers, which all made the film look terrible, were pretty misleading. It’s actually a pretty fun frothy summer comedy with a lot of good, solid character moments and genuine laughs. I had a lot of nitpicky problems with the movie, most of which boil down to the fact that it’s different than the original and, since I saw the original when I was 5, nothing will ever come close to matching it in my imagination. That said, if I had seen the remake when I was 5, maybe I would like it just as much as I currently like the 1984 Ghostbusters.
First, the good: The four leads are all great. It’s ironic that the all-female cast, the very thing that originally set off the idiot Internet shit storm that’s plagued this movie for months, is actually the best thing about it. All four leads have a great chemistry together and easily recreate the breezy banter that made the original so much fun. A lot of reviews finger Kate McKinnon’s Jillian Holtzman as best of the lot, but I honestly think she’s kinda weak. I gather she’s supposed to be the wacky one, but, apart from having weird hair and wearing goggles, she’s really not all that noticably wacky compared to her cohorts. I actually think that Leslie Jones’ Patty Tolan is the best. Jones had the thankless role of playing the straight man to three weirdos, but she ends up really owning the part and shining as the bewildered everyman. The trailer made it look like she was going to be the stereotypical sassy black woman who mostly shout OH HEELLLLL NO FEETS DON’T FAIL ME NOW and provide hilarious 'black people are different' style humor, but luckily all the embarrassing tone deaf Michael Bay-style lol ethnic shenanigans is pretty minimal. I’d venture to say that these new ghostbusters are much more developed characters than the originals. They have motivations and desires and backstories and everything. As opposed to the 1984 Ghostbusters, who were essentially just three random guys who decided to catch ghosts for no reason and a fourth guy who needed a paycheck.
Now the big disappointment. One of the things that I love about the original Ghostbusters is the lore. From Vinz Clortho rambling about the depths of the giant sloar to the Ghostbusters’ prison discussion about Ivo Shandor’s history to Egon’s off-hand references to Tobin’s Spirit Guide and the Spates Catalog, it always felt like Ghostbusters had a really deep and rich mythology bubbling right below the surface that the audience might not have been privy to but which really informed the tone of the film. (The Real Ghostbusters cartoon series really expanded on a lot of this, being one of the major reasons that series was so good.) The 2016 Ghostbusters doesn’t really have much of that. It’s pretty much going for pure comedy, so while the psuedo-science of the original film was internally consistent, the new movie rattles off jargon that’s clearly just supposed to be comical-sounding nonsense. When Ray Stantz talks about “full torso class 5 apparitions” in the 1984 Ghostbusters, you feel like he’s using real terminology that actually means something – even if it really is all just gobbedlygook. When Yates and Gilbert describe ghosts or proton pack technology, it’s all just funny-sounding gibberish that you’re not supposed to remember. It’s just fake words that sound funny. The “realness” of the 1984 movies owed a lot to crazy ol’ Dan Ackroyd believing that they were making a documentary, and that’s really missing here. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It doesn’t ruin the movie or anything, but it’s something that I missed.
It doesn’t help that the villain of the original was a Sumerian deity – something that fit perfectly into the Ghostbusters‘ deep mythos – while the new one just has a random guy who builds a machine to control ghosts. I guess they figured that the main draw of the film would be the interactions between the heroes, so they didn’t really need a compelling villain. But it still feels a little flat.
In general, though, it’s an enjoyable film. If you’re not a huge ‘84 Ghostbusters nerd, you’ll probably really enjoy this one. If you are a huge ‘84 Ghostbusters nerd, you’ll probably enjoy this one well enough if you can take it on its own merits.
PS.
There was another major difference between the two films, and this is more an observation about how the style of movie-making – and the general thrust of American culture – has changed since 1984. 1984 Ghostbusters is a very New York movie. It takes place in New York, but it’s also hard to think about the movie happening anyplace else. Obviously the climax takes place in a haunted skyscraper and the terror dogs are living gothic architecture gargoyles, but the film is also peppered with distinctly New York imagery – the subway, the public library, Medallian taxi cabs, hot dog stands, etc. Lenny feels like a quintessentially crabby New York mayor, and his brief meeting with Bishop Mike feels like a genuine glimpse into big city machine politics. Even the extras in crowd scenes feel like random New Yorkers pulled off the street. At the climax, when rational people should be running away from Spook Central, they’re all instead crowding around the most dangerous place in town to get a glimpse of their heroes (which feels like another New York thing, but honestly people anywhere would probably do that). Watching that crowd scene, you see groups of nuns and rabbis praying and again it really feels like it reflects the demographics of the city and that this is really what you’d see in a New York apocalypse as opposed to, say, a Baltimore or a Miami apocalypse.
2016 Ghostbusters is nominally set in New York, but it doesn’t make the city a character in its story. Despite a few distinct locations like Patty’s subway tunnel, this movie could take place in any city. In fact, while the original was mostly filmed in New York, 2016 Ghostbusters was mostly filmed in Massachusetts with Boston standing in for the Big Apple.
Again, this isn’t really a complaint, it’s just the way filmmaking is now. As our mass media culture makes the US (and the world) more homogenous, I think Americans are less interested in stories tied to place. In the 80s, a movie like Robocop WAS Detroit, Earth Girls Are Easy WAS Los Angeles, The Goonies WAS Astoria. Those places had unique histories and ambiences that meant those stories couldn’t be told anywhere else. Now that the country is becoming a loop of identical chain restaurants and big box retailers, the notion of a movie reflecting the reality of a single uniquely quirky location – rather a universal generic that everyone can identify with – seems kind of quaint and provincial.
Your critique is really spot-on. Personally I loved the originals and loved this, too, though it's not without its faults. It's enjoyable enough that I want to watch it again already and I rarely rewatch films while they're in theatres. And it was a relief that Jones' character shone as well as she did because holy shit, were the previews worrisome.
ALSO OMG NO MENTION OF KEVIN?
AND MICHAEL HAT
(Personally, I didn't buy all the flak it was getting because there have been a lot of reboots in the last few years, some amazing, some awful... There are always complainers because "muh nostalgia!", but when people complain more about a movie not even out yet than they ever did about the monstrosity that is the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you just know something's off...)
When will Michael Bay stop ruining everyone's childhoods?
Egon had already theorized about being able to capture a spiritual manifestation and contain it indefinitely, and Venkmann, consistent with his 'con-man' antics during the card reading scene, jumps on the idea of catching ghosts for profit; "The franchise rights alone will make us richer than our wildest dreams."
So each of them becomes a Ghostbuster for their own reasons:
Ray does it because he believes he will be helping humanity.
Egon does it so he can continue the research that was interrupted by the closing of the Parapsychology department.
Peter does it to 'pick up chicks,' like he was doing during the card-reading scene.
Come to think of it, Peter's on-campus actions might have led the university to find a 'budget crisis' to use to close the department.
The deep history and consistent tech and 'spirituality' were what really made the series for me: Ghostbusters 2 was a weaker film, but it was consistent with the first, and so I accepted the weak plot without complaint. (Godfather 2 is the weakest of the three Godfather movies, but it does what it needs to do do fulfill its part of the trilogy. Without 2, the letter written at the start of 3 would have come out of the blue and made no sense. With 2, the letter marks the change of Vito Corleone from mob boss and monster into tragic protagonist.) By removing the history, dumbing down the spirituality, and reducing the tech to literal technobabble, they have moved this movie into "Missable summer movie" fare for me.
Ray studied several religious texts in his youth (He's an atheist who knows the Bible backwards and forwards), and he saw disturbing paralelsbetween unrelated religions. He entered parapsychology to try and find the reasons for these 'universal story threads.' (Spoiler: he found some of the reasons; multidementional entities, such as Gozer the Gozarian, who he helped kick out of our world before he could do *TOO* much damage.)
Egon entered parasychology through a convoluted route: starting in physics, he discovered things that violated the physical laws, and trying to find the reasons led him into metaphysics. Metaphysics required a study in parapsychology to explain how human minds intereacted with the metaphysical.
Peter got involved because it was an 'under-served' field, and the lack of peer review allowed him to get away with unethical activities, such as 'cheating' the blind card reading experiments to flirt with grad students.
Besides, you don't need to go into the full history of the characters all the time. We went all the way to the third Indiana Jones movie before we learned what attracted him to Archaeology.
The 2016 Ghostbusters fleshes out its characters with a little more specific backstory than does the original, but that's not to say that the original characters were flat or boring or anything. They still worked perfectly for that movie.
The cartoon even dealt with the movie, in-universe: The cartoon is the 'real' world, and the movie is Hollywood's take on it. The cartoon even had an episode where they were visiting the movie set in order to bust a ghost that was keeping the crew from filming.
And there's something to be said about concise filmmaking; it helps to better control the pacing. As a counter-example, let us look at non-concise filmmaking. Peter Jackson's Kink Kong spend a fair amount of time giving us the backstory of one of the deckhands on the boat that was taking the team to Kong's island. When the boat drops the team off, it and the deckhand we were introduced to in detail are never seen again in the movie. That backstory was a waste of time and viewer attention, the deckhand's backstory added nothing to the overall movie, and only served to bad an already too-long remake.
That's why we have Tropes, so we can provide a lot on information quickly. A man walks into a room wearing a white lab coat and a stethoscope around his neck. We know right away that he is a medical doctor without needing him to even say anything, or for anyone to address him by title.
We get an establishing shot of an office with glass beakers filled with colored liquid in them. We know instantly that this is a scientist's office, and the telescope in the corner tell us that this is a professional astronomer. Yes, astronomers don't need to do chemistry in their office, but without the beakers, the telescope alone would tell us this is the office of someone who stargazes only as a hobby.
All the post release reviews seem to be saying the same thing, "Standing on its own, it's a good movie." Which makes it a standard for Paul Fieg; Spy, for example, is a good movie on its own, but as part of the James Bond Mythos, it does not fit. Fieg does a great job making comedies that satirize the main franchise, but are not part of the main franchise. GHostbusters 2016, aka Fiegbusters, is a good movie if you ignore the existing Ghostbusters universe, but due to the branding and promotion, it cannot 'stand alone,' it will always be a part of the larger Ghostbusters Universe, and will stand out as 'the part that does not fit.'
Since you say the trailers are misleading, I'd give it a chance when it comes on Red Box.
In general, I dislike reboots. I can understand when you remake Wizard of Oz in 1939, because the last version was in 1923 and a silent film. But nobody has seen any way to markedly improve on it since 1939, so there have been no remakes. Every Oz movie since has been a sequel or prequel or a gimmick (like the all-black one). What I don't like is when a subject is simply used up or you lose the star, like Spiderman, so you cynically start over again only five years later, though there's nothing new you can bring to the subject. That's what was going through my mind about this remake of Ghostbusters ... I wanted to extend the franchise, not just start over.
About half the movies made about things happening in the US are actually made in Toronto or Vancouver these days. They usually have to hide the newspaper boxes, replace licence plates and spread garbage around, but the match is close enough if you avoid filming landmarks such as the CN Tower or Toronto City Hall.
After we've done the comic, we can go to Hollywood.
I haven't seen the new one yet, but I will because the part where the lady exorcises a demon with a bitchslap is really funny to me.