At a bustling screening a few weeks ago, I found myself sat behind the Scottish chapter of the Ghostbusters society. Or maybe they were indeed a clan of genuine Glasgow ghostbusters – you suspect a high demand for spook management north of the border. They came suitably attired in brown boiler-suits with weathered logos, replica proton packs at their feet, a set of elaborate Ray Stanz goggles pulled up onto one pale brow: middle-aged men giggling like ten year olds. Then this was Ghostbusters: Afterlife we were about to see. Nostalgia hung in the air like the smell of popcorn. When Ivan and Jason Reitman were ushered in through a side door to introduce the film, they gasped and gripped one another’s wrists. Once the film was underway, they sat as silent as statues. The moment a ‘real’ proton pack was ignited with that wonderful, staticky hum resounding from state-of-the-art speakers, I saw the silhouette of hands raised in unison to wipe away unbidden tears.
Those of a certain age (likely those sat in front of me) have a version of the same memory. Mine? A damp evening in 1984, Gerrard’s Cross Canon, where Ghostbusters formed the second half of a sterling double bill with Gremlins. What subversive fun Hollywood granted us in those days. A gang of friends grinned through both, reliving madcap moments on our way home. Sure enough, ‘bustin made us feel good. Though the sneaking suspicion remained that Joe Dante had more cunning than Ivan Reitman. But I’ll park that particular debate here.
The original Ghostbusters, and its lesser but curious sequel, were very strange films. The set-up was neat enough: a gang of rusty scientists team-up to cleanse cynical Manhattan of an outbreak of ghosts. What emerged was a wise-cracking pest control; SNL-luminaries turned geeks piloting an FX adventure, while babbling spaced-out lingo. “Sir, what you had there is what we refer to as a focused, non-terminal, repeating phantasm or a class-five full-roaming vapor,” reports Dan Ackroyd’s Ray Stanz, chief source of peppery scientific dictums. Director Ivan Reitman’s instinct was for the snap of comedy not spectacle – it’s more trippy than epic – tuning the entire enterprise to Bill Murray’s irrepressibly off-beat frequency. Everything about the film felt slightly drunk.
That mischievous, goofball energy spoke to people. Still does. The memory maybe gleaming brighter than the rough-edged film. Hope springing eternal, it might return one day.
Well, heat ‘em up.
Some thoughts on a slacker franchise back from the dead…
GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE
Inevitably, Reitman Jr.’s new spin on the old tune is haunted by the past. That’s the point. A generation is returning hungry to feel good again. We ain’t ‘fraid of no ghost. But Ivan’s son, who prefaced the screening with tales of visiting the original set as a mite, is at pains to have it both ways - positioning his story as something younger and less urban, a sweeter jape with kids hanging out in diners, or lining up podcasts, that kind of jive. The iconography is kept largely to the margins. The humour is more circumspect. Paul Feig’s 2016 reboot was a reflexive gender-inverted play on the old guard. It had good gags, but was obvious, and swamped in unflattering CGI - it didn’t feel right. Reitman wisely resists the pull of the original supine tone. He doesn’t do groovy. Afterlife has one eye on the future. It’s a back to front experience. What you might be less certain about works, and what you’re hoping for works less well.
I should tread carefully, the release is still a week away and you’ll curse me for giving away its roiling secrets. And there are plenty, if none that are entirely unexpected.
This is a long-distance sequel: after a pre-credit burst of supernatural foreshadowing - something strange in the neighbourhood - with Rob Simonsen’s score sleekly entwining with Elmer Bernstein’s jazzy Halloween riffs from 1984 (there were more strands to the Ghostbusters aural effect than Ray Parker Jr.’s singalong), we meet the estranged daughter and grandchildren of one recently deceased ghostbuster (not necessarily a handicap). In a financial slump, the Spenglers have inherited and moved into the old-timer’s rundown house (not unlike that gabled residence in Psycho) in Summerville, Oklahoma. No one’s happy about this turn of events. The place is filled with weird junk and piles of books, the locals avoid it, and according to most maps Summerville is pretty much the middle of nowhere, lightyears from New York. As Reitman made clear to us, this was the story of a family. Which always have their ghosts.
It comes as no surprise that he’s good with casting. He’s got Juno, Up in the Air, Labor Day, and Young Adult to his name. Excellent people pictures. Real world dramas softly spoken. The unfailingly interesting Carrie Coon is delightful as Callie, the louche, scrappy mother (if anyone, she is channelling Venkman), who has long since let go of the past. But the film’s charm is McKenna Grace as her daughter Phoebe: science geek on the spectrum (a knowing reality check from the Jason Reitman school), brainy, bespectacled, and a collector of spores, molds, and fungus. Got the drift? She’s the protagonist more or less, confronted by the intriguing puzzle of secret labs beneath the barn, chess sets making opening moves by themselves, nearby mines (which is pure Scooby Doo) harbouring ancient ruins, and a set of old boiler-suits hung in a cabinet. She’s soon partnered by Logan Kim’s Podcast, a chirpy, gabbling classmate constantly adding to a litany of conspiracy theories. Ray Stanz Jr., anyone?
Phoebe’s fifteen-year-old brother, Trevor, is at that age (as in the age I saw Ghostbusters). He’s a teenager with an itch to find himself. Skinny and try-hard cool, Trevor is good with cars. Beneath dust sheets in the barn is the battered Ecto 1 (also at the heart of the marketing push), which he resurrects with some spiritual assistance. Finn Wolfhard has, in the parlance of grandmothers, shot up. He’s also a clever-clever choice. An appropriation of Stranger Things appropriation of Ghostbusters, creating an ironic feedback loop that readily crosses streams. Add Celeste O’Connor as a spiky but under-developed love interest named Lucky, and you complete a quartet of junior ghostbusters to face an evil bubbling away on cue down a mineshaft.
To one side, there is the always likeable Paul Rudd, who manages to bridge the two halves of the film’s sensibility: the old routines and the new dramedy. He’s crackpot seismologist Mr. Grooberson left teaching summer school, stultifying his dead end students with worn-out videos of eighties horrors like Cujo (a fine gag about the grip of old movies). Tellingly, he’s also a ghostbusters fanboy.
A tricky narrative issue confronting Reitman and co-screenwriter Gil Kenan was how to explain the established fact of ghosts and ghostbusters within their world. A quick Google search will unearth news clips (from the first film), but the events of New York are ancient history, the old gang out of business and scattered in disharmony. It has been so long without a haunting, the weird gets to be weird again. In other words, they fudge the issue.
The eighties connection is as much a style choice as backstory. As well as the plentitude of his father’s past, Reitman leans heavily into Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He’s a sucker for the Spielbergian glow - magic hour caressing fields of corn, kernels of bright light flitting through the air. The local mountain is flat-topped and full of surprises.
There are early flashes of wonder and silliness. Ecto 1 reveals an extendable gunner’s seat, upon which Phoebe bounces, trying to ensnare a plump, metal-chewing CG blob named Muncher, basically this season’s class-five full-roaming vapor (or Slimer), as her brother skids the antique ambulance around town. Suddenly, Reitman’s two toned approach runs true - a new generation of ghostbusters spreading cartoon havoc. Having an army of pocket-sized Marshmallow Men running riot in a Walmart, doffing their sugary locks to Gremlins, is another sly and pleasurable gesture. The supernatural was coming naturally. It was a key theme of old: that the chief desire of the risen is to disrupt the drudgery of modern living. The dead are still full of life.
I started to believe that Afterlife had pulled off an unexpected trick. To sing a fresh tune to the gallery. To use the whimsy of the originals as a current in a new, younger circuit. This was Ghostbusters without having to be Ghostbusters. Then Reitman loses his nerve.
Like my fellow nostalgists, I’m sure, I have mounted a perfect sequel in my head. Prising the old boys from retirement as Manhattan falls under the spell of another metaphysical broadside. Imagine the damnation that might pour out of Trump Tower. The ghosts in the machine of our infernal cellphones. Murray wearily rejoining his boyish pals at their ramshackle games. Satire-a-go-go.
Afterlife was always facing an identity crisis. And as the long-winded strands of apocalyptic prophecy and nostalgic necessity begin to knot together, Reitman gets spooked by his own film There’s a sudden rush to tick references off the list, deep and often needlessly specific call backs to a lightheaded mythos. Late entrances that needed more screen time perhaps than superstars were willing to give. With the exception of one wonderfully melancholy telephone call, the inevitable cameos aren’t folded in dramatically. They just happen. An opportunity to expand the repertoire of hauntings is missed. Rudd gets forgotten. The look congeals. In the end, it’s not much of a plot. I’m trying to be vague… The big moments have their charm. My Scots friends sighed and elbowed one another. But the film becomes cluttered with so many ghosts it loses its sense of purpose.
What Afterlife does handle beautifully is the absence of the late Harold Ramis. In fact, that is largely the point: a belated farewell to Egon Spengler.
And there are evident hopes of kicking off a new Ghostbusters universe from here - post-credit stings tee up possible directions. There’s certainly life in the old franchise yet.
Other thoughts
Cry Macho: it’s easy to look down on the latest Clint Eastwood movie, but at 91 he’s still such good company. This, I suppose, is a matter of nostalgia too. All the baggage of the old warrior (current instalment: former rodeo star, nothing much to live for, brim lowered for a nap) sent south of the border to retrieve an errant son for his former employer. The boy, Eduardo Minett, turns out to be amusingly teenaged - he’s irritatingly over-emotional about his situation. He also has an argumentative rooster named Macho. Bonds will form as they high-tail it for the border, albeit slowly. It’s slight tale, which often moves as gingerly as the old man. Important dramatic threads get forgotten. There’s a central romance that was written for a man twenty years younger - the script has been doing the circuit for decades. But there is such a whimsical note to the star’s nonagenarian persona, a wry bewilderment at the curious turns of the world and his place in it. The less the film does the more charming it becomes. And I’m a real sucker for the sight of that unmistakable face, looking like it was hewn from rock, grimacing into a distant desert vista.
After thoughts
With books to promote, I’ve been on the podcast trail. Frankly, I’ve been having a ball. I mean you get to talk about your obsessions without interruption. So I thought I would do a tally, if you were so inclined.
On The Coppolas: A Movie Dynasty
With Caged in: Coppola Connections
On Ridley Scott: A Retrospective
As part of the excellent Writers on Film series
On Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
With the very popular and highly personable Nerd of the Rings
On Guillermo del Toro: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work
With the fine folk at It's Del Toro Time!
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Furthermore, I’d love to hear your thoughts on Ghostbusters: Afterlife, or frankly anything of a movie slant.