Ghostbusters: Afterlife
The Ghostbusters Franchise Is Alive and Well in this Modern Redux
My son Jack and I decided for Thanksgiving this year, we would travel to Providence for our favorite Indian food and go see Ghostbusters: Afterlife. It had been advertised on the web for months after a delay in release due to Covid in 2020. If you were a young child in the 80s, the movie Ghostbusters was everywhere. The soundtrack played endlessly on the radio, kids played with Ghostbusters toys, and dressing up as a Ghostbuster for Halloween was all the rage. I had an informal canon of movies I enjoyed as a child I had Jack watch with me when he was little, so my son was very aware of the Ghostbusters hype (even if he found parts of it to be a tad misogynist from a Gen Z perspective). We were excited about a sequel that brought back some of the characters I had loved growing up, but also featured some contemporary young stars as well. The cast really stretched across generations: The teenage son Trevor was played by Finn Wolfhard, of Stranger Things fame which was another show we had enjoyed watching together. Paul Rudd plays Gary Grooberson, who had once played the hot older brother in Clueless (who, for reasons unknown to mortals, looks exactly the same), Annie Potts who I remembered from the original but who also plays a feisty Texas grandmother in Young Sheldon which Jack could identify with, her costar McKenna Grace on Young Sheldon plays the sister Phoebe. The mother was played by Carrie Coon who was a main character in the Leftovers, another favorite contemporary series of ours. Of course, there was a lot of excitement over iconic Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, Dan Akroyd, and Ernie Hudson from the original reprising their roles from the original 1984 film. Harold Ramis, who played Spengler in the original, had died in 2014. They managed to honor his memory in the plot and even have a “ghostly” visit with him during the film.
Set 32 years after the events of the Ghostbusters sequel, the story opens with a single mom named Callie and her two teenage children, Trevor and Phoebe, being forced to move to a sleepy small-town Summerville, Oklahoma from Chicago. Callie’s father is Egon Spengler, an estranged original Ghostbuster who had moved out to the middle of nowhere to a rundown farmhouse and considered the local town kook. Callie’s own life is not together as her children point out, and the move to the strange house that had encapsulated Spengler’s madness is a last resort. Of course, the farmhouse has some additional, uninvited spectral guests that Callie did not anticipate moving in with.
The children deal with the move in their own way. Phoebe enrolls in a summer science class taught by Gary. She meets Podcast, a local boy about her age who is constantly making, as his name implies, Podcasts. He is a fan of her grandfather and the Ghostbusters and is obsessed with otherworldly phenomena. Teaming up with the teacher Grooberson who also shares interest in scientifically testing the paranormal, they investigate some of the items left behind in the farmhouse by her famous grandfather, and hijinks ensue.
Trevor is less concerned with science and more concerned with girls. When stopping at a local carhop restaurant, he becomes enamored with the beautiful, local girl named Lucky. Trevor decides to get a summer job at the restaurant, presumably to be closer to her. She introduces him to the local kids, who take him to a local teenage hangout in the mines which has some secrets of its own and is connected to the work his grandfather had been doing.
The film is very well acted and plays upon the same intergenerational nostalgia my teenage son and I chose it for. While some of the sequences are reliant more on special effects than plot, it succeeds in the way that it captures the same mood of the 1984 film and frames it in a modern (and, as my son pointed out, less sexist) light. The reunion of the main characters comes towards the end of the movie, which is a wise decision, because the anticipation does build to see how they will play into this plot. We also are treated to some scenes of old adversaries in more modern settings with better special effects than the original that are really fun and fresh. I hadn’t expected much from this movie and was pleasantly surprised. This movie successfully pandered to many generations and kept the Ghostbusters legacy alive.
