Summary
A joyful film that transports us back a few decades in all the best ways, building something new while shamelessly appealing to our nostalgia bones (and other related organs).
It’s late 1984 and I’m seeing Ghostbusters for the first time. It was in a twin cinema in the eastern suburbs of Sydney that no longer exists. I remember the experience so vividly: the carpet in the lobby, the location of the concession stand and the seats in the theatre. I wanted to see it again right away (and I did). In many ways, it was one of the formative moments of my moviegoing life.
It’s a nostalgia that director and co-writer Jason Reitman relies on in GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE, the first canonical sequel to 1989’s Ghostbusters II. It opens with a ‘dirt farmer’ racing through a field with a ghost trap, dying in the attempt to capture something big. Shortly after, his estranged daughter Callie (Connie Coon) and grandchildren Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) move to the small town to inherit his assortment of ephemera.
Yet this is no normal small town. Wracked by daily earthquakes, something is clearly amiss. Together with summer teacher Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) and new friends Podcast (Logan Kim) and Lucky (Celeste O’Connor), they discover that there is something brewing at the abandoned Shandor Mining Company. If that name sounds at all familiar, then you can probably guess what’s coming down the dimensional cross rip. When the kids discover that their grandfather was a Ghostbuster, and get hold of his equipment, it’s up to them to serve all of the town’s supernatural elimination needs.
Let’s be clear about the Stay Puft sized elephant in the room. The 2016 Ghostbusters: Answer the Call was fun, funky and funny in its own right. We could spend an article twice this length debating the many reasons it failed to connect with audiences, not least of which was a specific strain of toxic fandom unwilling to accept change. (For the record, we called it a “straight-up joyous…celebration of its own legacy” at the time). So Reitman takes the safer path, the same one chosen by J.J. Abrams in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This is to say that he and co-writer Gil Kenan fill the picture with dozens of Easter eggs and callbacks, from symmetrical book-stacking (just like the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947) to the big bad.
Which could have veered this dangerously close to a mere nostalgia fest, something avoided by carefully building up the lore and backstories for the new characters in the first half. Off the back of playing younger versions of Tonya Harding, Carole Danvers and Daphne Blake, young actor Grace us the real breakout star as the budding Ghostbuster. Rudd provides a solid amount of trademark levity in a film filled with visual gags and one-liners in equal measure.
More than anything, Reitman and Kenan make this a joyful experience, completely recognising that this is the film that children (of all ages) would want to see. The whole Stranger Things by way of The Goonies vibe this gives off, from exploring forgotten ruins to finding a gunner seat in the ECTO-1, are precisely the kind of kid-friendly fantasies that appealed to us the first time out. There’s a base pleasure in hearing a proton pack fire up for the first time, or wholesale phrases from Elmer Bernstein in Rob Simonsen’s excellent score. I’d lying if I didn’t get choked up by the emotional ending.
Sure, there are some loosely connected plot threads, some shameless pandering and a climax that quite literally steps in out of the blue. Certain elements, including the tiny Stay Puft creatures, are unquestionably designed with commercial interests in mind. Yet it’s also the kind of ride that you want to get on again almost immediately so as not to lose the feelings that it leaves you with. It came, it saw, it kicked some ass.
2021 | USA | DIRECTOR: Jason Reitman | WRITERS: Jason Reitman, Gil Kenan | CAST: Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, Paul Rudd, Logan Kim, Celeste O’Connor, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Sigourney Weaver | DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 125 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 19 November 2021 (USA), 1 January 2022 (AUS)
