[timun]

Originally Posted by djsFlames

Interested to hear some verdicts on Ghostbusters.

It's crazy that even local scenery isn't quite enough to motivate me to the theater.

I liked it a lot. Certainly not a grand slam like the original '84 movie, or even a home run at all really, but... a solid triple, if the baseball analogy makes sense to you.

Originally Posted by Engine09

Ghostbusters was great fun, who the hell would give it a bad review? Who gives a ####, it's Ghostbusters, just go see it and have fun.

Having seen it for myself, I'm also completely baffled by the bad reviews. I don't get it at all. Out of curiosity I went back and looked at some of the critical responses to the 2016 reboot, and I'm flabbergasted that many (if not most!) critics seemed to have preferred that turkey.

To me Ghostbusters: Afterlife had a solid premise that tied back to the plot of the original film and kept a lot of the tone of its predecessors, which personally I thought was key to its success. The one thing about the 2016 remake movie that I absolutely could not get past was that frankly, I didn't think it was funny. At all. It eschewed the dry wit of the original film and replaced it with slapstick, none of which landed for me. The original—which I'll freely admit is one of my favourite movies of all time—was hilarious to me because of the blend of the actors playing it seriously while filling their performances with a ton of very dry remarks. There're more funny lines in the opening scenes of the '84 movie than in the entirety of the 2016 remake. I know some of them don't land for some people, but lines like "Listen! Do you smell something?" get me giggling.

So, insofar as the 2016 remake went slapstick and did not take itself seriously whatsoever, I thought the tone of Afterlife was spot on by doing the opposite. I can see why some critics were put off by it being too reverential, but I thought it had a decent blend of callbacks/fan service and new material that fit in with the style of the original movies.

Where I think Afterlife may fall flat is that if you haven't seen the original movie you're really not going to understand the plot. I think that's where many of the critics who don't like it are finding fault with it, which is... fair, I guess. If you don't remember who Ivo Shandor is and Ray remarking that Dana Barrett's apartment building was built with selenium in its structure, you're going to be somewhat lost. You're not going to understand the motivations of one of the main characters, and how the setting in small-town Alberta Oklahoma has anything to do with anything. Without a background in who Gozer is, who The Keymaster and Gatekeeper are and why they're important and what they're trying to do, you're really not going to get it because the movie spends essentially no time giving the audience any background exposition about this.

With respect to probably the most controversial thing about the movie, something which I've found many of the critics take great exception to:

Spoiler!

I understand why some people may be perturbed by the likeness of Harold Ramis being brought to digital 'life', and may think it's in poor taste to use the likeness of a dead man in the way they did, but I honestly thought it was very, very respectful. In a world where movies like the Star Wars movies used likenesses of Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing, I thought the effect of "bringing Egon back" was well done from a technical standpoint, helped by not bringing him back as a flesh and blood character (which I think would have been in very poor taste).

I contrast this with the 2016 remake, which I honestly thought was far more ghoulish in how it used the surviving cast of the original movies. Watching Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd go through the motions in cameo roles in that movie was far, far, far more crass and undignified than making a CGI spectre out of Harold Ramis to me.

Having Aykroyd, Hudson and Murray alongside Ramis's "ghost" appear at the climax was a little schmaltzy, but the twenty seconds or so of time spent on the surviving cast saying how much they missed Spengler and how sorry they were for how everything went down was very touching to me. Of course they're all actors being paid to play roles, but it honestly felt like the actors themselves wistfully apologizing to Ramis for having foregone doing something like this movie while he was still alive.

That aside, I thought Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon were good, Finn Wolfhard was okay but needs to do projects that aren't horror or supernatural science fiction because he's on the verge of being typecast and never getting out of these roles as an adult, and McKenna Grace steals the show. She was excellent; a real star in the making.