Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021, directed by Jason Reitman) is two thirds of a good movie. That two thirds of a film are better than any comparable running time in any other Ghostbusters film, including the original item. This should not be a surprise. Jason Reitman is a better director than his father ever was, and is a better director than Paul Feig. He's better at blocking his scenes, better at writing dialogue, and better at working with actors, particularly young actors. Since the lead characters in the film (rather than in the credits) are kids, this gets value from its director that the other films never demanded. Better still, the first two acts of Ghostbusters: Afterlife don't play like any previous film in the series, either. Part of this comes from moving the film out of New York and out into the sticks. Part of it comes from a cast of characters who are drastically different character types than what you find in the other films. It's only when the film decides that a paying audience demands what the original item provided that the film gets itself into trouble. Big trouble.
The story follows the fortunes of Callie and her children, Trevor and Phoebe. Callie is a single mom who has been evicted from her New York apartment in spite of receiving word that her estranged father has passed away and left her his farm in Oklahoma. The landlord is unmoved and soon the family is transplanted to Summerville, Oklahoma, where they roll up the streets at night. Her father, it seems, was a bit of a crank. Trevor, for his part, spots a girl who takes his fancy at the local drive-in (straight out of the 1950s), prompting him to apply for a job in order to ingratiate himself. The girl is Lucky, and she's on to him from the get go. Phoebe for her part is a prodigy, interested in science and engineering. She is consigned to summer school under the aegis of Mr. Grooberson, who is a seismologist slumming as a teacher. The seismology surrounding Summerville is decidedly odd, which Phoebe immediately notices. In class she is befriended by a kid calling himself "Podcast" because he has a podcast; he immediately takes a shine to her. Meanwhile, Phoebe starts to discover strange devices left around the house by her grandfather, and inexplicable manifestations. She begins to play chess with what appears to be a ghost. She also discovers a ghost trap, like the ones used in an apocalyptic event in New York City in 1984. Mr. Grooberson recognizes the trap, at first thinking it's a replica. When he discovers that it's real, he helps the kids open it. What's inside the trap makes a bee-line to the abandoned selenium mine inside the mountain nearby, and soon, strange apparitions are on the loose. Trevor, meanwhile, discovers a Cadillac hearse in the barn, and gets it running. Phoebe's ghost leads her to her grandfather's lair, where she finds weapons for busting ghosts and hints that her grandfather was expecting the end of the world....
Ghostbusters: Afterlife starts strong. It has a cast of likeable and well-defined characters who seem like real-ish people and who interact like real-ish people. The family dynamics between Callie and her children has a ring of truth to it. She's been burned by men--starting with her father--and it makes her jaded as a parent. Both Trevor and Phoebe seem like good enough kids, who don't know the knife's edge their family walks until they've fallen off of it. The relationships in this film are loving but strained by the situation in which they've all landed, and grow naturally out of what we know of their family history and their economic predicament. If Phoebe seems less like a real kid and more like a movie kid, it's a side-effect of the part she's been slotted to play. She's a prodigy, traits inherited from her (very eccentric) grandfather. It's not really a secret that her grandfather was Ghostbuster Egon Spengler even though his name isn't mentioned until later in the movie, nor during the film's prologue when he meets his fate while combating the film's big bad. The movie plays like both Egon and Phoebe are some variety of autistic, though the film wisely never uses that word. Phoebe is the film's true protagonist and Mckenna Grace shoulders the film with admirable poise. She gives as nuanced a performance as you get from a character with a limited emotional register, one drastically different from any of the other roles she's played up to this film. Carrie Coon as Camille demonstrates that Coon, like Judy Greer before her, is an actress who is going to be consistently wasted in "mom" parts going forward. She's salty about her history with men, loves her kids even if she doesn't understand them, and is still willing to take a chance on her daughter's cute teacher. Finn Wolfhard provides the early part of the film with a pop culture touchstone as an alum of Stranger Things, which offers the template for the "kids investigating paranormal goings-on." He's aged into angsty teenage parts here. His romance with Lucky (Celeste O'Connor) is charming and awkward by turns, even after Lucky has been recruited as a Ghostbuster. Logan Kim as Podcast seems the most like a movie character rather than a real kid, but not so overtly that it breaks the spell of the film.
The locations the filmmakers have chosen are an epic vision of the heartland that barely exists in real life. They've filmed it with an eye toward majestic landscapes and god light such that some passages seem like refugees from a luminist painting or from a Terence Malick film. It stops just short of corny. The intrusion of special effects sequences on this American idyll (though filmed in Alberta--Reitman IS a Canadian after all) heightens some of the film's fantasy elements, like they're taking notes from Ray Bradbury. It attempts to generate the same kind of youthful awe in the face of discovery, and in the face of the fantastic and terrifying. There are worse literary models. Some of this is even subtle. "Summerville" is a nice nod to the Sumerian threat under the Selenium mine. Even the first intrusions of the franchise's baggage aren't destructive. They're initially framed as props and YouTube clips culled from the 1984 film (Ghostbusters II seems not to have happened in this film's timeline). Even the first appearance by one of the original film's Ghostbusters is of a piece. Phoebe calls the phone number of the original Ghostbusters hotline and gets an embittered Ray Stantz on the phone, who is as estranged from Egon Spengler as his family. All of this works. The film gathers itself a pretty good head of steam before it craps the bed in the third act.
And let me tell you, it craps the bed in epic agony of defeat ski-jumper fashion.
The point where it starts to go sour is when it abandons the new characters and chooses instead to stroke the audience's nostalgia for the first film. It does not make the "mistake" of the Paul Feig version from 2016. It gives the audience EXACTLY the same story one finds in the 1984 film featuring EXACTLY the same characters, including a ghoulish recreation of the late Harold Ramis as the ghost of Egon Spengler. I dunno. Maybe this is necessary, given that this is a film that does something similar to the 2016 film, in so far as it provides primarily female protagonists, casts a non-binary actor in a prominent part, and is mostly about family dysfunction rather than proton packs and ectoplasm. Maybe it thinks it's smuggling all of this under the aegis of bringing back the "real" Ghostbusters for one last go-round. I think this blows up in the movie's face, though, because it suggests that Phoebe isn't up to her family legacy, that she's not capable of being the hero without the guiding hand of her grandfather (literally, as it so happens). Given the character the film establishes early on, this seems like a betrayal, and not just of Phoebe and the actor who portrays her, but of girls generally. I can't help but look on this as a capitulation to the whiny shitgoblins on the internet who tried to torpedo the previous film because, I don't know, cooties I guess. The whole meta-narrative surrounding this film and its predecessor is a bunch of toxic spew. When this film ignores all that in its first couple of acts, it's fine. When it addresses it, when it indulges in gross fan service, it faceplants.
There's no compelling reason for any of these characters to be in the film, other than maybe Ray Stanz and his bitterness. Venkman and Winston don't really have any strong character moments or opportunity to do much of anything except show up like some deus ex machina to show the new punks how it's done. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I'm not INTERESTED in those characters at this point. I don't care that Venkman is somehow still with Dana Barrett or that Winston used his experience as a Ghostbusters to become a business tycoon. I'm marginally interested in Janine's relationship to Egon and how she is somehow NOT related to Callie and her kids because, Jesus, how did THAT not happen? But the rest? I'd rather watch Phoebe and Trevor and their friends. The movie neglects them once the OG Ghostbusters take over the film. It's bad drama even if it's shrewd pandering. This film also makes the mistake that the Superman films make by focusing on one single arch-enemy (Lex Luthor, Gozer) at the expense of something new. Superman STILL hasn't faced Braniac or The Parasite on the big screen and this film suggests that the Ghostbusters will be fighting Gozer for the rest of eternity. Alas.
You should take all of this with a grain of salt, by the way. I've made no secret of the fact that I don't really like the original characters. Peter Venkman in particular is one of those anti-establishment assholes so beloved by the National Lampoon crowd who is only a hero because the movie designates him as such. I didn't love the 2016 film, either, though I like it more than the 1984 film (Ghostbusters 2 remains the nadir of the franchise, even given my complaints about this film). The new characters this film provides are a refreshing change. They're likeable. You could build a franchise around them, assuming you trusted them more than the makers of this film do. I worry that the Marvel-style post-credits scene portends a future in which the new characters exist only to shepherd the geriatric old characters back into the franchise. This reminds me a bit of the J. J. Abrams Star Wars films in this regard. It didn't work out so well for them, either.
I wrote most of this the day before the news of Ivan Reitman's death appeared. I hesitated to post this lest I be accused of bad taste. Ghostbusters, for good or for ill, is the film for which Reitman is best remembered, and it might seem like I'm pissing on that legacy. I don't have any animus toward Reitman and I wish his family and friends all the best in their time of grief. For myself, I do like some of Reitman's films. I think Dave is a gem and I like two of the three films he made with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Plus, germane to my own interests, Reitman was the producer of David Cronenberg's first two films. His legacy as a Canadian filmmaker is secure even if I don't think any of his films are world-beaters. There's no shame in that. "Fun" isn't highly valued in some film spaces, but it's something that Reitman valued and delivered to an audience. There's a kind of nobility in that. Vale.
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