Review: Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

Rated PG-13 for supernatural action and some suggestive references

Score: 3 out of 5

Recapturing the magic of the comedy classic Ghostbusters was always going to be a very tall order. That film was lightning in a bottle, as best evidenced when the original creative team and actors reunited five years later to make a sequel that was, by all accounts, not nearly as good. Paul Feig's remake in 2016 with an all-female team of Ghostbusters was a notoriously controversial film, but one that I maintain was still pretty decent, which seemed to me to be about where the high-water mark was for Ghostbusters sequels that tried to redo what worked in 1984.

So when it was announced that Ivan Reitman's son Jason, himself an accomplished filmmaker in his own right, was helming a new Ghostbusters movie, my ears perked up. Like Ivan, Jason also works with a lot of comedy, but the difference between father and son when it comes to their respective styles is like night and day. Where Ivan was anarchic and broad, Jason is more down-to-Earth and humanistic, having made his name with dramedies and satires like Thank You for Smoking, Juno, and Up in the Air. Right away, I knew that this would be a film that, while it would undoubtedly pay tribute to its predecessor, would certainly not try to copy its tone a third time; this would be its own beast. The marketing indicated as much, selling a film that felt less like Ghostbusters than it did Stranger Things with a Ghostbusters paint job, more an homage to the kids' adventure movies of the '80s than that decade's comedies.

And what did we ultimately get? Pretty much exactly the movie sold in the trailers, but also with an influence that I'm surprised at but honestly shouldn't be: Extreme Ghostbusters, the "next generation" Saturday morning cartoon spinoff from the '90s that was short-lived but well-received by fans and often considered, together with its '80s counterpart The Real Ghostbusters, the direction that the franchise should've gone in rather than Ghostbusters II. While rated PG-13 and featuring a cast led by kids and teenagers, this is a notably darker film than any other in the series, with the supernatural elements treated with a dose of actual horror to them, a much greater focus on the lore surrounding the supernatural within the Ghostbusters universe, and the humor being more character-driven than the broad and brash comedy of its predecessors. It was a direction that worked overall, and honestly, I found myself wishing that they'd stuck with it all the way through instead of making divergences into trying to imitate the classic Ivan Reitman style of humor, which worked on its own but often felt like it clashed with the rest of the movie's more down-to-Earth tone, as well as taken a few more risks with the story. That said, the 75% of this movie that I really enjoyed included nearly all of the important parts, and I suspect that both longtime fans and little kids will get a hell of a kick out of watching it.

Our new protagonists are Callie Spengler, the daughter of the former Ghostbuster Egon Spengler who's now struggling to make ends meet as a single mom in the city, and her two kids, her nerdy adolescent daughter Phoebe and her moody teenage son Trevor. On the verge of getting evicted, the Spenglers are thrown a lifeline when Egon passes away (actually him getting killed in one last fight with a ghost) and leaves them a run-down farmhouse in Summerville, Oklahoma, where he fled to without any explanation to live as a hermit. As the Spenglers settle down in their new home, Trevor gets a summer job at the diner and falls for a co-worker named Lucky, while the inquisitive Phoebe enrolls in summer school and befriends a nerdy boy who calls himself Podcast (guess what he does in his spare time) and the teacher/amateur seismologist Gary Grooberson who just screens old horror movies in his "class", both of whom geek out when they learn who Phoebe's grandfather is (and the latter of whom also strikes up a relationship with Callie). Phoebe also finds herself haunted at home by Egon's ghost, who leads her to all of the old ghost-hunting gear he had stored in and around the house... as well as evidence that there was a very good reason he moved to Summerville and abandoned everybody he knew. Specifically, Ivo Shandor, the architect and occultist who designed the skyscraper that served as a conduit to the spirit world in the 1984 film, owned a now-abandoned mine in Summerville where he sourced the selenium that he put into his tower's girders for its preternatural properties. And now, all the dark energy that accumulated at that mine all those years ago is ready to pour out into the world once more.

The things I liked about this film start with the cast, above all else young Mckenna Grace as Phoebe. Her similarities to Egon could've started and ended with her appearance, between her wire-rimmed glasses and her unruly hair, but Grace does a great job capturing her as somebody who is clearly Egon's granddaughter yet still her own person. It's heavily implied that she has high-functioning autism, yet the film doesn't just use this as an excuse to let Grace deliver a flat, emotionless performance; she's clearly affected by everything she encounters, even if it's in a different manner than kids her age normally are. The fact that she constantly had two entertaining supporting players by her side, Logan Kim's Podcast and Paul Rudd's Gary, made her scenes some of the best in the movie as she and her new friends uncover the secrets of both Summerville and the family that she knew little about until now. (Side note: giving a kid sidekick character the nickname "Podcast" is something that a film like The Goonies would've totally done if podcasting existed in the '80s. Smooth move, Jason Reitman.) I adored Phoebe here and the fact that she was clearly the protagonist, to the point where the film's divergences to focus on the other characters felt like rude interruptions. Carrie Coon was likable as Callie, but it's fairly easy to figure out where her romantic arc with Gary is going if you remember Dana and Louis from the original, and Finn Wolfhard and Celeste O'Connor as Trevor and Lucky felt wasted in a rather rote teen movie subplot, there just to round out the team of four Ghostbusters. (You couldn't have had the ghosts at least mess up the bullies?)

Behind the camera, Reitman goes full retro-Spielberg in the aesthetic of the film, making the most of its small-town Americana setting to lend it an atmosphere of wistful nostalgia. This informs the humor and tone of the film, less a madcap comedy and more a lighthearted "hangout" film full of characters who crack jokes between each other, some of them funnier than others. (A running gag is that Phoebe has a woeful sense of humor.) The presence of the supernatural is likewise given a much darker tone than it ever was before. Make no mistake, this is not a horror movie by any stretch, but even the goofier-looking ghosts like the Muncher (the new version of Slimer who eats metal) are presented as serious threats, and the meaner-looking ghosts are presented as outright monstrous, the notes of humor used less to sap their menace and more to underline how screwed somebody is. There is a scene here that calls back to a moment in the original where Peter encounters Dana after she's been possessed by Zuul, but whereas that scene played it for Bill Murray's brand of wiseass snark, the equivalent scene here felt like it was pulled out of a real supernatural horror movie. It felt like Reitman was influenced at least a bit not just by the Duffer Brothers but also by Sam Raimi in the scarier moments, not so much in his specific stylistic flourishes but in how he mixes horror and comedy while keeping things genuinely scary. And for somebody who's never done a movie this big or effects-heavy before, Reitman does a really good job with the action scenes, too, emphasizing the smaller-scale environs that the characters inhabit and bust ghosts in without reducing the scale of the threat they face.

Had the film stuck to this tone throughout, it would've easily been a knockout. It's ironic, then, that a film so deeply rooted in and informed by nostalgia is at its worst when it's consciously trying to pay tribute to the original, specifically in those moments where it not just making references but trying to imitate its tone. As I noted earlier, Jason Reitman as a filmmaker has very different sensibilities from his father Ivan, and you can tell as much when he's trying to replicate that broad, anarchic style, especially during certain later scenes where, without spoiling anything, the comparisons get unavoidable. The thing about the original is that it was a famously irreverent movie, a PG-13 version of any number of '80s "snobs vs. slobs" comedies where the heroes triumph over obnoxious jerks who get theirs in the end. When this film's more sentimental tone is mixed with that, it's like crossing the streams, a move that ends badly and leads to a sharp case of tonal whiplash as a Jason Reitman movie and an Ivan Reitman movie smack head-first into one another. It was in these moments where shades of a much worse version of this movie emerged, one that had a Stranger Things-style cast recycling 37-year-old jokes without understanding what made them work, all while engaging in nostalgia overload to paper over its faults and get older fans to forgive it.

The Bottom Line

While there were parts when it felt a bit unsure of what kind of movie it wanted to be, ultimately Ghostbusters: Afterlife was more or less the kind of movie it had to be: one made with clear love and affection for its predecessor that nonetheless mostly tries to be its own thing, and is at its best when it understands that. Check it out.