Jason Reitman builds a nifty bridge across the generations in the endearing sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
Jason Reitman builds a nifty bridge across the generations in the endearing sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
W hen I first heard about Ghostbusters: Afterlife, it didn’t sound like a great idea to me. The project smelled like a double dose of desperation on the part of Sony — a flailing studio in urgent need of finding blockbuster value in its vault — and on the part of slick marketing teams who like to imagine they can create “buzz” by imitating the last thing that had it. Since I’d long since lost interest in both Ghostbusters and Stranger Things, combining the two didn’t sound exciting. Moreover, the 2016 remake Ghostbusters turned out to be the Hillary Clinton of blockbusters. In retrospect, it feels like the one and only film of the Hillary Clinton era in American history: I am Woman, hear me . . . blame sexism for my collapse.
I was increasingly surprised, then, as Ghostbusters: Afterlife started fairly well and then got better as it went along. For the most part, it’s a winsome, endearing summer movie for November, a cunningly engineered generational bridge. Taking elements of the original story and recycling them into a new shape, the movie at first seems to be a stark departure from the original: Where once we had wisecracking men in their thirties in New York City, we now have ordinary kids in the country. A posh apartment building on Central Park West is out; an Oklahoma mountain range is in. The new movie is both fresh and familiar, which is exactly the combination you need to revive and restore a dormant piece of “IP” — intellectual property, the currency that defines Hollywood today.
When Ivan Reitman was directing the first Ghostbusters, his son Jason was a six-year-old running around on the set. Now Jason has co-written and directed Afterlife as a disguised sequel. A harried single mom (Carrie Coon) is being evicted from the apartment where she is raising her teen son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard, the lead in Stranger Things) and her tween daughter Phoebe (McKenna Grace) when she learns that her father has died and left her a woebegone shack in rural Oklahoma. Lacking other options, she moves the family into this haunted house, which is decorated in crazy-old-coot style with warnings about the impending apocalypse posted everywhere. It turns out that this mom is the sole heir of Ghostbuster Egon Spengler (the late Harold Ramis, who nevertheless makes an appearance here).
The Ghostbusters have long since broken up and gone into other lines of work, but Egon retained the gang’s old equipment and its famous white Cadillac Fleetwood hearse. And, unlike the others, he was still chasing ghosts when he died.
Phoebe, a budding scientist who has to explain everything to her dimwit older brother, is the lead here, and Grace underplays her with a pleasing deadpan instead of the usual surfeit of child-actor smugness. (Her sidekick, though, a budding podcaster who calls himself Podcast, is played by Logan Kim with more swagger than sincerity.) Through Grace’s eyes, and with the help of a seismologist (Paul Rudd) who happens to teach her at summer school, we discover the secrets of her grandfather’s shack. The old nutjob turned out to be right about a lot of things. Fortunately, he left his grandchildren the tools to fight a resumed war with the fearsome spirit Gozer and his henchmen, Zuul and Vinz Clortho.
Jason Reitman built his career doing character studies such as Up in the Air and Juno, and so he was an inspired choice to take the franchise in a slightly new direction. Rather than trying to find another Bill Murray — though the surviving stars of the original movie turn up in an amusing cameo — he nudges the story away from the fratty comic energy of the 1984 movie and toward a more soulful feel in which the laughs are incidental. Rudd, with his patented aw-shucks delivery, gets most of them, but the dry-as-dust Grace scores as well. Coon, however, has no comic flair whatsoever and was a poor choice to play the mom.
A running joke about retro jokes (“What do you call a fish with no eyes? Fsssssh”) is exactly the kind of old-yet-new idea that makes the movie work. And there’s a hilarious use of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that’s like a crazy comic homage to Gremlins, which was released the same day as Ghostbusters (June 8, 1984; Ghostbusters won the box-office weekend by $13.6 million to $12.5 million.)
The way Afterlife takes its time to establish its characters and setting before hitting us with a bajillion dollars’ worth of special effects enhances the Eighties feel, and the parallel between what’s happening onscreen and offscreen gives the movie a warm, human aspect that is often notable by its absence from today’s blockbusters. Reitman is paying tribute to his dad just as the young folks in the movie are forming bonds with their departed grandpa, whose spirit infuses his left-behind gadgets and helps steer the kids in the right direction. It’s fun to see Phoebe learning to fire a Proton Stream at a rascally ghost: Who says the next generation can’t master basic life skills?
On the strength of Stranger Things and Ready Player One, maybe the Gen X dream that our successors might take an interest in our culture isn’t so farfetched. On the other hand, it’s possible Ghostbusters: Afterlife will attract only audiences old enough to remember Gary Hart, New Coke, and Members Only jackets. If so, that’ll be a shame.
