Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) Review
4/10
A woman with no money and two children moves into a derelict farmhouse in Oklahoma left to her by a father she hadn’t 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 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.
For an hour I liked this film a lot, and then the ending wrecked it. Watching a studio build a sharp, strange little movie around a twelve-year-old and then shove her aside for a reunion felt like a bait and switch. The 4 is my irritation with that choice, and it’s aimed squarely at the people who made it.
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’s interested in the earthquakes and isn’t written as a love interest first. His relationship with Phoebe is the film’s best thread, since they’re the only two people in the county who find the data interesting. Rudd and Grace are the best thing in the picture, and I’d happily have watched a whole film of the two of them puzzling over earthquake data. Their scenes have a dry, odd humor the rest of the movie never finds again.
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, doesn’t 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 doesn’t 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.
A child protagonist who’s competent instead of charming is worth far more. Phoebe solves things, and the film doesn’t ask the audience to find her adorable for doing it. Let them be strange. Precocity is an adult’s idea of a clever child. Discovery beats explanation. A character who works out what an object does, on screen, teaches the audience the rules and establishes the character at the same time. Give the adult and the child the same interest. A relationship built on a shared curiosity is more durable than one built on guardianship.
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’s the failure of a great many legacy sequels. A sequel establishes a new set of characters, makes them work, and then sets them aside so the original cast can perform the ending. Phoebe spends the climax as a participant in somebody else’s reunion. She’s present, she contributes, and the emotional weight of the final sequence belongs to people the audience has been watching since 1984.
The line she’s 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.
That shot is where the film loses me for good. Phoebe deserved that ending, and the movie hands it to somebody else’s ghost. It’s a cheap move wearing a tribute’s clothes. 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 doesn’t 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’s 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. That’s a photographic likeness of a dead man performing actions and expressions he didn’t perform.
The technique also doesn’t 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.
I found the Ramis sequence uncomfortable to sit through. Whatever blessing the family gave, I spent that moment studying a synthetic face, and I resent the film for turning its emotional peak into an effects test.
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 weren’t enough.
Absence is more powerful than reconstruction. A character who’s gone, referred to and never shown, occupies more space in a reader’s mind than any depiction. The instinct to bring them back is an instinct to resolve something the reader was handling perfectly well.
A tribute that requires technology to work is usually a tribute to the technology. Ask what the gesture would be if the resources didn’t exist. Watch for the moment your reader stops feeling and starts evaluating. Anything that draws attention to its own construction at the emotional peak has cost you the scene.
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 comic tone 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’s the hardest thing to copy and the most important. A prop can be rebuilt, a comic sensibility can’t, and every legacy sequel that reproduces the objects while missing the tone shows the same point.
The mini marshmallow sequence is the clearest example. It’s a reference to a joke from 1984 delivered as a set piece, and it’s neither frightening nor funny, because the original joke was about scale and this one is about recognition.
The Muncher is the same problem from another direction.
The film introduces a new ghost, it eats metal, it’s designed to sell toys, and it has no relationship to anything in the story. I found it about as frightening as the toy it was built to become. 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’s 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. That means the approach was validated.
What’s 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. That’s the direction this film had already chosen.
A work whose primary loyalty is to a previous work can’t serve a new reader. Every reference is an instruction to think about something else. The test is whether somebody with no knowledge of the original would follow the emotional logic of your ending. Here they wouldn’t.
Reproducing objects is easy and reproducing a sensibility isn’t. If you’re continuing something, identify the tone before you identify the props. Being made in response to a controversy is a poor foundation. The audience for the argument is smaller than the audience for a good film, and the argument dates faster.
Should you watch Ghostbusters: Afterlife?
Half of it. Watch the Oklahoma material for Mckenna Grace, Paul Rudd and a twelve-year-old working out what a proton pack does from first principles, and know that the last twenty minutes take all of it away from her. That’s why it gets a 4 from me. There’s a good small film buried under somebody else’s ending by a studio that trusted nostalgia more than its own new cast, and I’m still annoyed about what got thrown away.
