The long-dead carcass of the original Ghostbusters has been reanimated for modern audiences in the fittingly titled Ghostbusters: Afterlife, an unabashedly maudlin and spiritually bankrupt sequel to the two 1980s movies that opens in Prague cinemas from January 6 after premiering in the states last November.
After divisive reaction to 2016’s female-led Ghostbusters reboot, you can feel Ghostbusters: Afterlife ticking off item after item on its fan-service checklist as it purportedly gives audiences what they really want. But this nostalgia-heavy update plays it safe and resurrects the spirit of the original film, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens fashion, to surprisingly detrimental effect.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife stars Carrie Coon as Callie Spengler, estranged daughter of Egon Spengler (played by Harold Ramis in the earlier movies, who is reanimated with CGI effects in this one), a single mother who moves her kids Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) from Chicago to her dad’s cabin in rural Summerville, Oklahoma after the old man kicks the bucket.
Callie wants nothing to do with her dad’s ghost-busting legacy, but the budding scientist Phoebe soon discovers the family’s new home is haunted. While Trevor strikes up something with Lucky Domingo (Celeste O’Connor), daughter of the local Sheriff (Bokeem Woodbine), and mom hits it off with teacher Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd), Phoebe and new pal Podcast (Logan Kim) get to the heart of the haunting.
Strangely, Ghostbusters: Afterlife doesn’t recreate the feel of the original classic, which was drenched in 1980s NYC atmosphere and Bill Murray sarcasm. Instead, it’s an entirely straight-faced and relentlessly nostalgic feature in a rural desert locale that evokes Steven Spielberg more than SNL, and especially nostalgia-heavy efforts like Super 8 and Stranger Things, which also featured Wolfhard.
Still, it’s at least initially well-structured by director Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman, who made the first two films, and well-performed with Coon, Wolfhard and Grace all creating empathetic characters with their own unique storylines, and an ingratiating Rudd doing his usual schtick and giving Afterlife its only sense of humor.
But that goodwill goes out the window as Ghostbusters: Afterlife tosses its leads aside to chase a story resurrected from the earlier movies. There’s Ecto-1. There’s the Proton Packs. There’s the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (here, mini-men). There’s Gozer. There’s Zuul. There’s Slimer. Oh no, wait… that blobby green ghost gobbling up everything in his path? That’s Muncher. See? It’s different.
There’s also the surviving members of the original film trotted out in front of the screen despite Ghostbusters: Afterlife clearly having no interest in them. Ray (Dan Aykroyd), Peter (Bill Murray), Winston (Ernie Hudson), Janine (Annie Potts), and Dana (Sigourney Weaver) are all treated with the same nostalgia-bait integrity as the other props from the earlier films. Didn’t these characters lead lives in the three decades since the last movie? Don’t they have agency beyond serving the plot of this one?
By the time the film trots out the ghost of Harold Ramis to join a teary-eyed procession of proton streams, Ghostbusters: Afterlife has crossed the line. After the reviled 2016 Ghostbusters movie, which is looking pretty good in comparison, the filmmakers here were so preoccupied in seeing how much fan service they could stuff into this movie, they never stopped to ask themselves if they should.
