"Everything you're doing is bad" 
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Yep, he was always a highlight and does well with it considering he was coming in to something where people very much saw it as Murrays showComment
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Movie 03 - Ghostbusters: Answer the Call
Belatedly retitled to distance confusion between the films title and the original film, the reboot isn't part of the mainline canon but it does represent the franchises biggest attempt at delivering something different from the original two films to date. Whatever side of the fence the viewer falls on, this films release directly impacted the decisions that followed so it has its own role to play in terms of the future of the franchise.
What elements of the reboot worked and how did it guide the franchise forward?Comment
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The experience of this movie can’t claim to be anything other than tainted from day one for the wrong reasons. We even had members here losing their nut over simply the announcement that it would star women, even before casting, never mind a trailer or anything. We had one in particular who then later, when the film opened, started their impressions by saying they went in with an open mind. Nope. Ranting that women replaced men and that women aren’t funny does not make for an open mind when you see the final product.
So unfortunately there is no doubt whatsoever that any version of this movie was tainted. That’s not to say it was the reason it didn’t work for you if you don’t like it - it’s just that messiness cannot be pulled apart from the movie and ended up becoming a part of every discussion of it, which sucked and shows just how far we still have to go.
For me, with one huge caveat, I really enjoyed the movie. It’s a comedy based on Ghostbusters but is different in tone and it’s sillier and much more obvious in its comedy. That worked for me. I felt most of the main characters were great but it was actually Chris Hemsworth who stole the show and, honestly, the Mike Hat bit is still one of the places I have laughed loudest in a cinema. I missed the next few minutes because I was laughing so hard at that bit. It entertained me and that’s what I needed. Also it should be mentioned that the 3D presentation is particularly lovely.
The huge caveat is in not actually following the first movies. It’s still so hard to see why they didn’t do that. It doesn’t seem like the movie would have needed to be all that different. And the cameos made that worse because they were cringeworthy. They were just an awkward reminder of the original movie. Had this same movie been a sequel rather than remake, I feel it would have been so much better.Comment
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That's one of the reasons I steered the question on the film to focus on its positive attributes even if they end up being somewhat backhanded in a way in the end. For example, the director of Afterlife has commented on how he see's ATC as having paved the way for the cast of Afterlife and whether genuine praise or not I do think there's a lot of truth in that. Had the reboot not existed then I think the casting of Grace in the lead role of the latest film would have been a lightning rod of its own and having already gone through that media storm a lot less attention came to the newer film.
The trouble with the comedy GB angle as well is that for many GB always was a comedy so it puts the reboot in the slot of being something for no-one, whilst the furore was one aspect of it Sony should have seen the writing on the wall when they made the stupendous mistake of issuing that first trailer that referred to the original film and insinuated there would be a connection between the two.
The stories about McCarthy liking the idea of leaning into something closer to an adaptation of The Real Ghostbusters was always something that was interesting and given the tone of the reboot would have probably made more sense in terms of reinterpreting the property (especially given the popularity of the cartoon). It's actually quite hard to talk about it without straying into negative terms because the film to me is just fundamentally conceptually bad, Feig was just such an obvious mistake for the property and his decisions were immediately obvious and matched what we have. I don't rate a single one of the four leads for various reasons and a lot ties in to the film because they're much better in things outside the film too. Whether seen positively or not though I don't for one second believe that Afterlife or any direct continuation would exist at all without the reboot and in a way it's one of the most important additions to the franchise because it galvanised life back into the film arm of the property, re-engaged the cast and creators, showed a financial and conceptual direction forward too.Comment
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Regardless of how it turned out and even, for me, the misstep of it being a reboot rather than sequel, I do feel it’s a huge shame we didn’t get a sequel because the film came with way too much baggage and much of that could have been discarded in a second film. It could be its own thing on its own terms. The first one didn’t get that chance.Comment
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What was interesting is that it felt like if there had been a sequel we could have potentially ended up with the film most removed from the whole Gozer etc stuff and then that post-credits sequence hits and suggests they were planning to plow right back down that rabbit holeComment
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For some reason this film became the cross to hang 'women replacing men' effigy. That's wrong, but it definitely can't be used as a shield to defend this film. Men or women, this film is ****.
It's badly written, badly acted and utterly baseless.Comment
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Movie 04 - Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Just three years after the release of the reboot attempt (when you brush aside the lengthy COVID delay the film endured to release), this film tasked itself with erasing the reboot from public consciousness, re-establishing the original canon, reigniting the plot and characters after a thirty year absence and creating a way in which the franchise could continue into the future. The result is a film that, for all the speculation about children helming it in future, is mostly focused on presenting a film that closes the franchise as it currently exists as a trilogy with one clear strand left open as to how future films would come about narratively and their intent beyond what this film covers.
How well did Afterlife do in following up on films from three decades ago, addressing the position the franchise was in post-reboot and in setting up a future?Comment
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Hah, yeah, funnily enough I came in here to say the same thing. Honestly think they should've just set it in the same universe. Maybe picked a different city. It was set ~25 years later after all.Originally posted by Dogg Thang View Post
Criminally though I didn't find it all that funny, when it seemed to be going for more of a straight-up comedy vibe than the original movie. And that surprised me, because one of the characters, Melissa McCarthy, I absolutely love and find hilarious in other roles (the movie SPY was one of my favourite comedies of recent years! Recommend this if you haven't seen it). I've been told the Director's Cut is much better? I might track that down.
I just kept schtum at the time of release though, because there was no way around that point to say this online without being called a misogynist who claims women aren't funny etc., though admittedly that was mainly in response to an avalanche of pricks online who seemed personally offended that the movie even existed.
Not quite as "am I in the ****ing Twilight Zone?!" as the response to Netflix She-Ra but just as tiresome.Comment
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The Director's Cut isn't much different but the key changes in it are without question much worse than the theatrical cut such as putting the awful dance routine section back into the film. I've seen it raised, correctly, before that one of the key mistakes the film makes is trying to have all four leads be the comedy character and in the end it means none of them are.
WW84 was torn apart but I found Wiig much better in that let alone other things, similar for McCarthy both who come across very flat in the film. Jones' role is just not the best and whilst McKinnon seems to get the most praise I find her cringey in it. It's not even her but how the character is set up, she's not funny in any way instead just hanging around acting odd as a way to inject some character into the group and it makes several moments just cringey. Hemsworth comes across best in terms of comedic delivery which is both credit to him and also a clear reflection of the failures elsewhere. There are some good moments with his character but it's also a role in need of severe editing, as the film goes on the character unspools a lot but that's kind of the film all over.
I'm going to get all the 4K releases of the franchise and the reboot is the first one I've ordered as it's easy to get hold of. The kids like it, the film is very colourful and its lighter tone makes it easy for them to engage with in a way that out of the entire franchise only Afterlife has managed to do for them. There are one or two interesting ideas in there too such as the idea of civilians engaging with or summoning spirits and also military involvement in Ghostbuster tech and operations, but I'd never have trusted a sequel to the reboot to have been interested in exploring those ideas given the amount of screen time focused on flipping the bird and soup.Comment
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Admittedly Ghostbusters was always a difficult story to follow-up, because it's built on a premise - that the world has a brush with the supernatural where it's categorically proven, beyond any doubt, in front of the eyes of millions of people, live in-person and on-TV, that ghosts, hauntings - that these are real and that life-after-death provably exists.Originally posted by Neon Ignition View Post
I half-expect Afterlife (which I haven't seen) to work on a modern, antivax-style premise like Don't Look Up where people, confronted with that truth, rejected it and years later, things have gone back to normal and those who "believe" in the true events of movies 1&2 are seen as crackpots. But that would seem a bit of a cop-out given the sheer scale of the events in the older movies. There are people in 2021 who don't believe the official story of 9/11 but you won't find many who still believe the towers are still there.Comment
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Afterlife kind of side steps the issue. Because the cast is quite small you effectively have the mother who actively avoids discussing it for her own reasons, the kids who don't know about it (but it's played like you say, that your avg 10yr old isn't aware of major world events within our lifetime because they haven't happened in theirs) and Rudd who can't believe the kids don't know about it. There are only small indicators about the wider world's knowledge but they suggest it is both common knowledge they exist and that some still think it was a hoax.Comment
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For Afterlife I think one of the most critical things it gets right is that it recognises and embraces the tone and spirit of the original two films. The reboot has made the Incel Warrior fanbase argument a very easy one to fall into and you'll often get comments like 'Well Ghostbusters isn't something like Star Wars' when it comes to its pop cultural relevance but I think that's one of the areas the reboot misjudged things. I think in some ways the situation around Ghostbusters actually is like Star Wars.
Fans got a trilogy with Star Wars that then sustained itself on merchandising, novelisations etc and fan love for 16 years before another film was made. It then did the same for 10 years till the newer films started to come out. Now, there's no comparing the size of the fanbase between the two properties but I think when Ghostbusters is lumped in as just being an 80's comedy it does a disservice to how important it is to its fans. It's a franchise that had one hit film, a less well considered sequel and then a 27 year gap till the reboot - 32 years till it received an actual sequel. During that entire time it remained culturally relevant, referenced, merchandised etc and all without new media being made. Though much of that rests on the original film that isn't something that happens to many properties, and not enough thought went into that on the first pass.
It's glaringly obvious from the opening five seconds as to how much closer Afterlife is to the older films and it immediately makes it more engaging and shows that it still works in a modern context too. I think it's a good bubble film too, in that I don't see a clear valid path for GB4 to be more of the same of Afterlife, it effectively needs a new cast next time and that should help to maintain some sense of freshness going into another film even though the flow of events is continuous from one film to the next.Comment
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Well I finally saw Afterlife and, overall, I really loved it. The characters are great and it’s a really fun movie. Like the first trailer I remember seeing, the tone is very different so I find myself completely disagreeing with NI’s post above - this movie felt really different tonally for me for about 75% of the movie. Definitely more Stranger Things inspired in my opinion and with a more dramatic tone. Like, Rick Moranis’ character bottom line would not have fit in most of this movie. The characters from the original are tonally entirely different, in my view.
So this movie mostly offered something different and it really worked for me. As it got closer to the end, I do feel it leaned on the original too much and it’s where I could see where criticisms of relying on nostalgia come from. Mostly, I don’t feel the movie did. But it’s precisely because it felt different that I think it stood out when we got into certain elements later in the movie. I went with it but I can see where the criticisms came from.
Not sure the ending quite paid off in the way they wanted it to, at least just for my own watching experience. But I still really enjoyed the movie and, overall, I thought it was great.
On the post-credits sequence…
Oh, I cringed when they called a character ‘Podcast’ because he has a podcast. Yikes. Still, I loved that character.Last edited by Dogg Thang; 14-01-2022, 23:04.Comment
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