Ghostbusters: Afterlife

The boom of nostalgia-driven movies over the past decade or so have, for me, been exhausting. It's not that I don't love things from when Iwas younger, but the way in which these nostalgia-driven movies have approached it have fallen into one of two traps. On one hand, you have properties that approach nostalgia like a Robot Chicken sketch or a Family Guy cutaway gag: an omnidirectional vomiting of references and cameos with no context or appreciation or understanding of why these things are beloved. Stranger Things and Ready Player One both spend an inordinate amount of time doing this, tossing references to dozens if not hundreds of things so you see it and go "I REMEMBER THAT!" and get the warm fuzzies. It's lazy emotional manipulation, because it requires no investment and no exploration. It just tugs at your heartstrings through vacuous reference. The other is the more focused, but equally as terrible, focused remembrance, where a movie seems to exist to be a mirror to a previous movie. Great examples are Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, and the 2018 Halloween reboot (and, in a different way, virtually every Disney live-action remake). These movies build themselves around recreating plot elements, characters, shots, and sequences that are similar or downright copy what happened in their predecessor. They don't require you to have emotional investment; instead, they require you to fill in the blanks they left with "OH MY GOD THAT'S JUST LIKE THAT ONE SCENE" nostalgia. They are the movie equivalent of putting on a baseball hat and sunglasses and pretending to be a different person. They're nothing more than a director screaming at you "I'VE SEEN THIS MOVIE AND I REALLY LOVE IT AND DON'T YOU WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN?". Both of these are manipulative garbage. They don't produce anything new; they depend on what happened before to prop up their rickety, bare-bones, shell of a movie. They want to appeal to you not on their own terms but on the backs of other movies, in the hopes nostalgia will blind you to what is really in front of you: nothing substantial at all. Ghostbusters: Afterlife manages to thread the needle between these two by doing three very deft things: one, easter eggs and references are given contextual value when needed, and otherwise not drawn attention to when they aren't. A great example of this is early on, when the family gets to the "dirt farm" and there's a seven foot high tall stack of books in the living room. Cute callback. It wasn't a major plot point in the original, and here, it's not treated any different. But it was also a harbinger in the original of the paranormal activity the Ghostbusters would encounter leading up to Gozer, and that's precisely what it is here too. Secondly, it frames the "oh, wow!" references and moments through the eyes of the kids. Ghost traps and Ecto-1 are items from the original, but it's not like there was a cool car chase scene in the original, and traps are traps. But the kids barely know of the events of the original, if at all (the main character, Phoebe, doesn't), and Gary (Paul Rudd's character) is someone who would've been a kid when the events of the original happened. So we see these items not through our eyes, but through theirs; either someone acting as our proxy, seeing these items from something that happened almost 40 years ago, or from kids with no knowledge or emotional tie to it. It's not an item of nostalgia to them; it's a mystery. And the most important way they thread the needle is by NOT REPEATING THE FRAMEWORK OF GHOSTBUSTERS. What makes Ghostbusters work -- the interplay between the characters, the humor, the chemistry -- could not be duplicated. It didn't work with a different cast in 2016, and it didn't even work when they had the SAME cast in 1989. That original movie was borne of a million, unique circumstances that could not be duplicated in any way. So, Jason Reitman ... didn't. He didn't force the actors to be a "Venkman" or a "Ray". He didn't go for the same group-of-buddies structure. He didn't even set it in a big city. By setting it in a small town, with a cast mainly of kids, it helps Afterlife stand on its own. It isn't trying to be the original. It's tied to the original, but it in no way wants to be it. It wants to be its own thing, and in being its own thing, it shines in so many ways, because it doesn't carry the weight of trying to fit the original's mold. The direction is impeccable here. Jason Reitman sets the tone so perfectly, marrying canny shot selection with liberal use of the original score (and some new variations on it too). But he also knows when to do something different, like the car chase through the middle of town. There is an energy to that that you can't find in the original, because the original has nothing as high-octane as a car chase. The story is a total love letter to the original and to its fans, while also being its own thing. it manages to blend a journey of youthful self-discovery, the weight of legacy, and the pain of sacrifice, into one strong story that will pull at your heartstrings on its own merits., not just through nostalgia. Trust me, you will spend the last five minutes holding back tears. Trust me. And anchoring all of this is the radiant, transcendent beauty of an actor that is McKenna Grace. Good GOD this young lady is gonna be a star. She imbues Phoebe with an adorable quirkiness that never feels put upon or drawn too large. She's a nerd, she doesn't even fit in with her own family, and she's emotionally shut down because of it. Her growth and evolution is a marvel to behold, and in the hands of a lesser actor, would've felt forced. But McKenna Grace is talented beyond her years. I cannot wait to see what she does next. There's some small niggling flaws in the movie. Finn Wolfhard's character gets a raw deal, as his romance story kinda fizzles out and goes nowhere. I don't feel like Paul Rudd gets enough time to really connect with his character (there's no such thing as too much Paul Rudd in a movie). The CGI of the mini-Stay-Puft guys is kinda dodgy. If there's one big flaw that does knock it down a peg, it's that the third act is the Keymaster/Gatekeeper/Gozer thing all over again. It's done in a slightly different way, and that's nice, and Olivia Wilde does a great job in the Gozer suit, and the finale is different, but in the end, we have seen Gozer before. It isn't bad, it won't make you check out of the movie. You might just feel like, for the rest of the movie feeling so fresh, re-doing Gozer seems like a punt. But the whole here is greater than the sum of the parts, and this whole is amazing. For years, we all wanted another Ghostbusters adventure. We wanted the guys back together. We all forget that we got that in 1989, and it just wasn't quite right. Jason Reitman saw this. He knew just getting the band back together wasn't the right thing to do. The sequel that we all wanted isn't the sequel that we got. But the sequel we got is the sequel we NEEDED. It remembers without replicating. It uses references as seasoning, not as structural support. If there is one thing it does borrow heavily and unapologetically from the original: it is FUN.