The Ghostbusters: Afterlife Review that I Don’t Have a Funny Title For.
So then… Ghostbusters: Afterlife is kind of a weird film. That’s not necessarily a criticism, just an observation. The reason it’s weird, by the way, is that the tone and vibe of what appears on screen don’t really gel with the accepted position of the film within our current cultural context. Let me try and explain what I mean… over the course of several interminable fucking paragraphs…
… Starting with this one! You see, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was partially situated (or perceived to be situated) as an apology for the woeful, peacocking, point-missing gender-flipped reboot of 2016, which sucked out the wit and replaced it with the laziest possible slapstick, offered no meaningful additions to the canon and acted like it was special and deserved praise just because it had gifted its main characters with vaginas (incidentally, it’s worth pointing out again that the jokes from the original Ghostbusters only fully land if the main cast are paragons of failed masculinity, so a straight-forward gender-flip is comedically dumb as well as insultingly pandering). Understandably, its flagrant disrespect for the source material caused… some backlash, and all attempts to mischaracterise that backlash as mere sexism in the media just kinda failed. Turns out that when it comes to Ghostbusters, people are really fucking good at digging their heels in and refusing to budge for some reason. When the Ghostbusters: Afterlife trailer dropped and included a reference to how there hadn’t been a ghost sighting for thirty years, it was clearly intended to symbolically wipe the slate clean and make it as though 2016 never happened- the closest thing Hollywood ever gets to just saying ‘sorry- we fucked up’. Considering the context, one would therefore expect certain things from Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Things such as a grandiose scale that builds on the more epic elements of the original; a larger cast of important characters; a newer, worse threat; more plot-lines to make the story feel denser with granular particularity. But Ghostbusters: Afterlife eschews the idea of going bigger and building on the mythic status that its predecessor assured for itself in the popular culture. Instead, it goes smaller: its threat is a known quantity and therefore feels more contained and minor; its goals and motivations are more personal and straightforward; even the physical geography of the film is confined to one small town out in the middle of nowhere. The weird thing is… it sorta works.
Don’t get me wrong. I would have loved a grand-scale epic building on the original, but what we get instead is, in many ways, a lot more honest. Most of it’s just a hang-out film with funny dialogue and likeable characters (personal favourite line: “Science is punk rock! Science is the safety pin through the nipple of academia!”). Then Zuul (Zhul? Zule? I just realised I’ve never actually seen it written down) starts making their presence felt and shit goes south just spectacularly enough to necessitate the new cast teaming up with the original Ghostbusters to save the day. A lot of the plot concerns the current cast uncovering their family connection to said original Ghostbusters and getting over their feelings of abandonment and isolation, finding their feet in the world and generally just doing human drama while ghosts happen in the background. There aren’t really a huge number of sterling new ghost designs and we don’t even get a final boss fight in which Zuul (that’s the spelling I’m going for) takes on the form of a capital-D Destroyer, because they get their arse kicked by the combined powers of friendship and science before that point. And that’s kind of it, really. There’s a couple of cool cameos, including one designed to send off a beloved but sadly now-deceased actor from the original. Contrast and compare to the first Ghostbusters which kept adding plot-threads like it had a quota to meet. There was the early days of supernatural research among the team and how it lead to the founding of the Ghostbusters as a business; their expulsion from academia; the fairly one-sided love affair between Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver (and yes, I’m aware they weren’t just playing themselves, but how many other opportunities am I going to have to type those words); the idea that disparate end-of-the-world prophecies might actually be converging on a specific event; the rivalry between the Ghostbusters and a petty bureaucrat intent on shutting them down despite not understanding the science of what they do; the rising and falling fortunes of their business itself; the mini-arc of Sigourney Weaver’s nerdy, love-struck next door neighbour; and about a dozen other things that I’ve forgotten about since I last watched the film. Afterlife is really just the main plot, the character’s finding their feet and a couple of love-interest subplots. So why does it work? Why doesn’t it feel like a cop-out? Well, in order to answer that question, we need to talk- tangentially- about my favourite videogame critic Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw.
You see, Yahtzee once said something very smart about videogames that I feel also applies to films. According this very smart man, there are two types of games: the kind made because someone wanted to make a lot of money and the kind made because someone thought it would be a lovely thing to play. Films can be similarly categorised: ones made to make money and ones made because they would be lovely to watch. Ghostbusters: Afterlife falls into the second category pretty firmly. Don’t get me wrong, the studio and its parent corp wouldn’t have greenlit the project if they didn’t think they were going to make a metric fuck-ton of cash, but the director, writers, cast and crew are clearly another matter. Everyone involved clearly has a deep and abiding love for the source material and they wanted to make a film that paid homage to it while simultaneously introducing the world and concept to a new generation. It was made with respect and palpable joy. It doesn’t try to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle that was the vibe of the original, but is clearly proud to be associated with it while also laying the groundwork for new stories. You can practically feel the torch being passed on with absolute and complete sincerity. Of course, none of this would help if it was just a badly-scripted, badly-directed film, but it isn’t: it’s funny, well-paced, well-characterised and the stakes feel significant enough that you can get invested. Consequently, the sincerity of it serves to elevate it from ‘good’ to ‘really, really, really good’.
Is it a perfect film? No. It makes missteps and not all of the ensemble cast are equally well-characterised (although I did enjoy the fact that our P.O.V character shakes out to be an obviously-but-unacknowledgedly autistic girl. She also gets my second favourite line in the film, in response to discussions about the soul: “I’m pretty sure we’re all just sort of meat-puppets”). But it doesn’t need to be a perfect film, because it’s not trying to symbolically replace the original in the same way that, say, the 2016 shitshow did. It’s just a nice film set in a universe that we can all agree is interesting and compelling.
I’ve talked a lot about loveliness and niceness in this blog, which probably sounds weird coming from me. I am, after all, a self-professed towering bell-end with a spectacular and long-cherished contempt for humankind. However, my cynicism and general bastardry are the result of people proving to me, time and time again, that they aren’t nice, aren’t lovely and aren’t to be trusted… and also, worst of all, that they’re broadly talentless. I want to be proved wrong. I want people to show me they’re capable of better effort; a want media artefacts that are truly, genuinely, sincerely sweet and demonstrate- in a non-saccharine way- that humanity has a heart buried somewhere under all its selfishness, stupidity and bullshit. Ghostbusters: Afterlife isn’t a monument to human kind’s potential, obviously: it’s a very silly movie in which Bull Murray comes out of retirement to shoot an evil ghost-queen with a laser. But it is proof that a lot of people are willing to knuckle down and genuinely try to bring something nice into the world basically just because they really liked its antecedent. And that’s a hopeful thing.
Which brings me onto my final, non-Ghostbuster-y point: Merry Xmas.
