Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) Review

A woman with no money and two children moves into a derelict farmhouse in Oklahoma left to her by a father she had not spoken to in years. Her daughter finds equipment in the barn, works out what it does, and wants to use it.

The 4 is for a film with a genuinely good first hour and an ending that abandons it. The Oklahoma material is a small-town mystery with a twelve-year-old scientist at the center, and the last act is an assembly of references to a film released thirty-seven years earlier.

Mckenna Grace is the reason to watch it and the film keeps interrupting her to remind the audience of something else.

The First Hour Works

Phoebe is twelve, is friendless, does science, and delivers jokes with no expectation that anybody will laugh. Grace plays her without any of the precocity that role usually carries.

The town is well drawn. A summer school with one teacher, a diner, a mine, seismic activity nobody can explain, and a grandfather everybody in the area thought was strange.

Paul Rudd’s Gary is a seismologist teaching summer school who is genuinely interested in the earthquakes and is not written as a love interest first. His relationship with Phoebe is the film’s best thread, since they are the only two people in the county who find the data interesting.

The summer school scenes are also the film at its most relaxed. A teacher who has given up on the curriculum shows horror films to four bored children in an empty classroom, and the picture is content to let that be funny without connecting it to anything.

The discovery sequence is superb. A girl finds a proton pack, does not know what it is, works out the mechanism from first principles, and the film lets her be the one who figures it out instead of having somebody explain it.

The trap is the better version of the same idea. She does not know what it does, sets it off in a diner, and the film gets both a joke and a rule out of a single object without anybody delivering an explanation.

The Legacy Problem

Everything in the film’s second half is organized around reproducing the 1984 picture. The same antagonist, the same architecture, the same structure, and eventually the same characters arriving to resolve it.

That is the specific failure of a great many legacy sequels. A new set of characters is established, is made to work, and is then set aside so the original cast can perform the ending.

Phoebe spends the climax as a participant in somebody else’s reunion. She is present, she contributes, and the emotional weight of the final sequence belongs to people the audience has been watching since 1984.

The line she is given at the end makes it explicit. She says the thing the audience has been waiting to hear, and the film treats it as her moment while the framing of the shot makes perfectly clear that it belongs to a dead man who has been placed in the frame directly behind her.

The film’s own best material is the argument against its ending. A girl in Oklahoma discovering an abandoned technology and working out what happened to her grandfather is a complete story and it does not require Gozer.

Carrie Coon is the other casualty. She plays a woman who has been angry at her father for thirty years, arrives at his house, and is given a subplot about a summer school teacher instead of a scene about what he did to her.

The Digital Resurrection

Harold Ramis died in 2014 and the film ends with a digitally recreated version of him appearing to guide the characters through the final sequence.

It is well intentioned. Reitman has been clear that the film is about his father and about Ramis, the family cooperated, and the sequence is meant as a tribute. None of that resolves what it is, which is a photographic likeness of a dead man performing actions and expressions he did not perform.

The technique also does not work on its own terms. The face is visibly synthetic, the movement is approximate, and an audience spends the most emotionally loaded moment of the film assessing an effect.

What a tribute can do instead is leave the absence visible. The empty chair, the name on a wall, the equipment nobody has touched. The film has all of those and uses them well for ninety minutes before deciding they were not enough.

Nostalgia as Structure

The film is built to deliver recognition, and recognition is a weak substitute for either comedy or fear.

The original worked because it was funny, and it was funny because Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis were writing and improvising in a specific comic register that had nothing to do with ghosts. This film reproduces the equipment, the logo, the music, the architecture and the monster, and reproduces almost none of the humor.

That is the hardest thing to copy and the most important. A prop can be rebuilt, a comic sensibility cannot, and every legacy sequel that reproduces the objects while missing the tone demonstrates the same point.

The mini marshmallow sequence is the clearest example. It is a reference to a joke from 1984 delivered as a set piece, and it is neither frightening nor funny, because the original joke was about scale and this one is about recognition.

The Muncher is the same problem in a different direction. A new ghost is introduced, it eats metal, it is designed to sell toys, and it has no relationship to anything in the story. The original film’s ghosts were jokes about New York.

What It Was For

The 2016 film with a female cast was attacked online with a viciousness that was disproportionate and largely organized, and this film was positioned as a correction.

That context is part of why it exists and it is worth naming instead of avoiding. A studio responded to a campaign by making a film that emphasized continuity with the original at every opportunity. The result is a picture whose primary loyalty is to a previous film instead of to its own audience.

It also worked commercially. Around two hundred and four million dollars against a budget near seventy-five, and a sequel followed, which means the approach was validated.

What is lost is the film underneath. A small, specific, funny picture about a girl in Oklahoma with an abandoned technology and a dead grandfather is in here, and a great deal of money was spent covering it with someone else’s ending.

The sequel confirmed it. Frozen Empire moved the family to the New York firehouse, brought back the surviving original cast as regular characters, and left Phoebe with considerably less to do, which is the direction this film had already chosen.

Should you watch Ghostbusters: Afterlife?

Half of it. Watch the Oklahoma material for Mckenna Grace and Paul Rudd and a twelve-year-old working out what a proton pack does from first principles, and understand that the last twenty minutes will take all of it away from her.

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