Figured this might warrant its own thread. Or it might not. Who knows.
Anyway, out today in the UK and I saw it this afternoon. Overall, I’d say it’s pretty good.
Spoilers below.
It sort of does the opposite of Ghostbusters 2 in a lot of ways. Where that copied a lot of the general story beats with a different plot, this essentially rehashes part of the core plot from the first movie into a new story, right down to people becoming Terror Dogs to summon Gozer with sex. That does make it a little unsatisfying toward then end when basically it all boils down to Gozer, only in weird Euro-model form, as the world ending threat. It feels a little like it needed to go a step beyond that or have it go somewhere new, but it doesn’t particularly.
The other difference to GB2 is musically. GB2 dropped all the Bernstein score from the original and went all in for of-the-moment pop music. This does the opposite and spends most of its time playing around with Bernstein with little other music. It’s consciously playing around with the history of the series.
Overall, the film generally gets the balance right on the legacy of its predecessors. I had tempered my expectations a little because some of the bits in the trailers of the trap and Ecto 1 being found made me worry it was going to be too reverent of the originals. But it’s not really. Paul Rudd’s character is the only one who really knows/cares much about the Ghostbusters. It’s really more about character, about Phoebe finding a part of herself in learning about her grandfather and that worked for me. I thought Phoebe was great, Podcast too, and they were characters that easily could have turned out terribly. The brother and his love interest felt less successful and a bit sketched in, but they worked well enough. I’m not convinced the timeline works right for Egon having grandkids- it really seems to rely on him having an unmentioned secret family through at least GB2 and possibly the original, which is a bit of a stretch. To be honest, it doesn’t feel like a choice anyone would have made for Egon if not for Ramis’s death.
And speaking of Egon, there’s CGI ghost Harold Ramis, which… is a little creepy, I’ll be honest. I guess if his family is ok with it, I’m on board and it’s kind of inescapable given the story and the franchise, but it did feel a slightly dodgy move. I think keeping him silent added to that. Would it have been less respectful to have Maurice LeMarche come in and at least do one line at the end? I don’t know.
It feels like they’ve left the door open for more sequels – without this one feeling incomplete – and I think if they kept the same production team I’d be up for that.
