Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
Ghost Corpse
Before the Sony logo had finished appearing on-screen, I knew I was screwed.
In Ivan Reitman’s groundbreaking 1984 horror-comedy, Ghostbusters, Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) inspects the apartment of “would-be girlfriend” Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver), who believes her place is haunted. While she’s not looking, he rattles some piano keys, striking a tune that is at once playful and eerie—but which fails to register with Ms. Barrett. It’s one of a dozen fun details in a scene that establishes a classic love/loathe character dynamic.
When those same notes played in advance of the studio logos for 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, it became clear that I was in for a very different kind of movie.
The problems with this film are so numerous that I could pack every gripe, nitpick, and affront to Ghostbusters fans into another “list review”.
In fact, I think I will.
Before we get into some very spoiler-heavy critiques, I’ll lay out Afterlife’s basic premise. There’s no way to honestly review this film—and to advocate your staying far, far away from it—without digging into how director Jason Reitman (son of Ivan) has so thoroughly missed the mark.
Years after the Ghostbusters saved New York (twice) from conquest-hungry demons, the team disbanded and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) absconded to a run-down farm in Oklahoma with most of their spook-hunting gear. Afterlife opens with an elderly Egon unsuccessfully battling an unseen force. A week later, his estranged daughter, Callie (Carrie Coon), moves into the farmhouse with her science-obsessed pre-teen daughter, Phoebe (McKenna Grace), and awkward, grumpy fifteen-year-old son, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard). No one in the family has any connection to Egon or the Ghostbusters, or even seems to be aware of the near-apocalypses of 1984 and 1989.
They get a crash course, though, when an abandoned mine on the outskirts of town begins vomiting up strange apparitions and terror dogs, heralding the return of OG baddie Gozer (played here by an uncredited Olivia Wilde). Phoebe, Trevor, and new friends Podcast (Logan Kim) and Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) must join forces to save the world—without the benefit of adult supervision or driver’s licenses.
You may have heard Afterlife be compared (favorably or unfavorably) to the Netflix series Stranger Things. It’s an accurate assertion, even beyond the presence of series star Wolfhard. Whereas the first two Ghostbusters films (and even the 2016 female-led reboot) were movies about adults that appealed to all ages and demographics, Afterlife is a kids’ movie that may actively turn off grownups who were hoping for something resembling advancement in the franchise.
Remember how hyped everyone was to see a Darth Vader origin story until they realized George Lucas was going all the way back to third grade?
Yeah, it’s like that.
The movie is two hours of lame YA melodrama, intentionally cheesy jokes, and so many callbacks to the original Ghostbusters that I expect ERs the world over will be flooded opening week with blunt-force head injuries.
I could’ve written the film off as just another cynical brand-recognition cash grab if it had just been a near-beat-for-beat retread of GB84. But the problems run much deeper and are far uglier than run-of-the-mill lack of imagination.
1. The Egon Problem
Remember, we’re firmly in spoiler territory now, so if you don’t want to know how Reitman and co-writers Gil Kenan and Dan Akyroyd (!) utterly defame one of your childhood heroes, I urge you to come back later.
Did you hear a mental record scratch when I referred to “Egon’s estranged daughter” a moment ago? Yes, it’s true. Before Egon Spengler died, he was a deadbeat. Not only did he have a kid, he also abandoned her for decades. Worse than that, we find out later in the movie (thanks to a date scrawled on a notecard) that Callie was alive during the events of the first Ghostbusters movie.
This kicks open several doors of incredulity. First, did anything about the rambunctious young trio of Venkman, Spengler, and Stantz (Aykroyd) suggest that they were attached to anyone but each other—let alone that one of them might be a father? Watching Ramis’ wonderfully dry-and-wry performance, did it occur to you to think, “This guy is so wrapped up in collecting spores, molds, and fungus that he would neglect his daughter and the mother of his child”?
That’s an intriguing plot for a movie (think A Beautiful Mind with ghosts), but it’s not in the DNA of Ghostbusters—yet it’s the driving force behind Afterlife. Callie never got over being abandoned by Dad, and she perpetuates the cycle of distance and callousness with her own children. Not to fear, everything turns out okay in the end (more on that later).
It may seem an odd point to get hung up on, but the film presents this information early on and then refuses to acknowledge the underlying problems that affect decades of series lore. Imagine a scene from Mister Rogers Neighborhood in which Mr. McFeely swings by the house and says, “Gee, Fred, I haven’t been this excited about a trip to The Land of Make-Believe since we got on the jury for King Friday’s sexual assault trial! Look! Here comes Trolley!”
You’d sit through the rest of the episode gobsmacked and horrified—no matter how cute that lovable, huggable Daniel Tiger is.
This utter abandonment of his family also implicates Egon’s friends and co-workers. Are we really to believe that Ray, Peter, Winston (Ernie Hudson), and Janine (Annie Potts) allowed Egon to so thoroughly shirk his responsibilities that they didn’t relentlessly give him shit for not being in Callie’s life? Remember, they’d worked together for a decade, during which she was very much alive. They’d go on to know each other for almost another thirty years, despite being estranged.
Callie seems to have grown up not knowing that her dad was a Ghostbuster—you know, one of the most famous people on the planet. This suggests that either the mom went through extraordinary lengths to shelter her daughter; the Ghostbusters never reached out to the mom and Callie to offer support (emotional, if not financial); and/or Egon’s obsession with the coming third apocalyptic event was so great that he never attempted to speak to his own kid—despite keeping a massive collage of photos and notes about her in his lab. If those came from Callie’s mother, had they colluded to keep him out of her life, or was mom so desperate for some kind of response that she mailed him constant reminders to which he never responded?
I really want to move on from this point (as do you, I’m sure), but I’ll raise one more elephant in this ever-expanding room of questions: Did Dana Barrett not have an opinion on this situation? At the end of Ghostbusters 2, when it’s implied that she would live happily ever after with Peter Venkman as the father-figure to her young son, Oscar, did she ever sidle up to Egon and say, “Now that you’ve saved the world from pink slime and Evil Painting Guy, maybe you should check in on your daughter”?
Yes, gang, this is the subsystem that runs in the back of my brain whenever I watch movies.
2. The Manhattan-sized Memory Hole
Ghostbusters 2 doesn’t come close to being the greatest sequel ever made, but it triumphs over Afterlife in a very important way. It dabbles in familiar elements from the first film (at times a little too much) while also expanding on the meaning of the original story. After the Ghostbusters put Gozer back in the metaphysical bottle, the supernatural phenomena on which they’d built a successful mini-empire on dries up—leaving Peter to hustle books on TV talk shows and Ray and Winston to dance at kids’ birthday parties. In the half-decade since saving the world, many people have come to believe the whole thing was a hoax. It’s a bit of a stretch, considering the fact that several buildings were demolished by a Marshmallow Man whose burnt innards would have offered plenty of forensic evidence, but let’s move past that for a second.
After the second attack in New York, in which the Statue of Liberty marched down the street to Jackie Wilson’s “Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher and Higher”, the idea of keeping the lid on paranormal activity becomes downright laughable.
This event would have shocked, amazed, and awakened people the world over—and would likely have put them on guard against any signs of evil resurgent. Imagine a version of the 9/11 terror attacks in which it was proven that Satan himself had piloted each of the planes.
Such an event might have led to the dismantling of world religions; the birth of new ones; massive attempts on the part of lunatics to resurrect more evil spirits; and the formation of a Men in Black-style* supra governmental agency for keeping tabs on global ghosts.
Instead, we’re asked to believe that Gozer was a one-and-done threat to our existence (despite all I’ve written about Ghostbusters 2, Afterlife goes out of its way to forget it happened—unless you pay attention to some minor dialogue about the timeline). No other demons or deities from anywhere else on the planet found a way to break through to our reality in nearly a half-century.
Imagine a sequel in which the original Ghostbusters had to contend with out-of-control multi-national Ghostbuster organizations, all vying for dominance while the world plunged straight into Hell. Instead, we get a gender-swapped Young Sheldon (aka Phoebe) hanging out with friend-zoned Ray Stantz Jr. (aka Podcast) and Paul Rudd (aka Paul Rudd) for an hour.
3. Podcast is a Terrible Fanboy.
Podcast introduces himself to Phoebe as the host of a podcast focusing on occult and paranormal activity (“and the occasional restaurant review”; I loved that line). Despite having done dozens (possibly hundreds) of shows on strange phenomena, HE’D NEVER HEARD OF THE EVENTS FROM THE FIRST TWO GHOSTBUSTERS MOVIES!
When Phoebe brings a ghost trap to science class (she’d found the contraption hidden in her grandpa’s house), Podcast clearly has no idea what it is. Their dopey teacher, Mr. Rudd,** on the other hand, recognizes the device instantly and begins to school the kids on what happened in New York in the 1980s.
Again, in a world where tourists can probably snap pictures of fossilized Marshmallow Man entrails in the Smithsonian, I’m supposed to believe that a kid whose entire life has been devoted to studying weird phenomena has never heard of the Ghostbusters?
4. The Walled-off Phoebe Bridge
Much has been made of McKenna Grace’s turn as Phoebe, and I won’t take anything away from the young actress here; she does a great job with some not-so-great material. As a character, Phoebe is super-serious, monotone (aside from the occasional enthusiastic outburst), obsessed with science, and unable to understand humor aside from the formulaic construction of jokes.
Watching Afterlife, I couldn’t help but think that many of the same people who are heaping praise on her are the same elitists who never watched more than a few minutes of The Big Bang Theory (or, more precisely, its spinoff, Young Sheldon). Had they been more familiar with the series, they likely would have recognized this character as an archetype instead of something remarkable. Again, Grace is solid in the role, but I’d literally watched a variation of this character exploring similar ideas and awkward social scenarios on TV for more than a decade—often with much more intelligent scripts (note I said “intelligent”; not necessarily funny).
5. Not So Fast, Trolls!
This may be difficult to accept, but not everyone who dislikes Paul Feig’s 2016 Ghostbusters reboot is a sexist troll. Like Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it’s possible to enjoy the film while also understanding why its propping up of the female characters at the expense of the male characters might rub some people the wrong way (it’s not enough, for example, that the quartet of lady Ghostbusters goes up against a guy who’s summoned evil spirits: said guy must also be a fat, basement-dwelling misogynist with a grudge).
Because absolutely everything online must be discussed in political terms nowadays, there has been a new drawing of lines in the fandom (or at least the discourse) about how Reitman and company have “buried” Feig’s film (which, in fairness, failed rather spectacularly on release) in order to serve up a movie that would appeal to old-school Ghostbusters fans—i.e. those who wanted to see Peter et al back in action.
To some folks’ chagrin, Reitman has split the difference, placing Phoebe and Callie front and center, while relegating Podcast to the lovesick sidekick and giving Trevor little to do other than be a pillow-lipped Gen-Z heartthrob whose default modes are “Pout” and “Panic”. The film’s climax literally boils down to Phoebe, Callie, and Lucky squaring off against Gozer in a cornfield, while the boys sit in the Ecto-1 battling short-circuited equipment and CGI Marshmallow Minis. When the original Ghostbusters do come shambling out of the shadows, they come off as the contractually obligated septuagenarian actors they are—no longer Venkman, Stantz, and Zeddemore, but merely Murray, Aykroyd, and Hudson.
To be clear, I’m a fan of Feig’s Ghostbusters. I just find it funny that the people clamoring for a “real” sequel have been handed a female-centric (or at least female-tilted) movie anyway. I also acknowledge that, in essence, Ghostbusters 2016 is just as much a retread as Afterlife, from character archetypes to story beats.
But you only get one of those passes from me in the span of a half-decade. If the goal is to differentiate a new movie from what some perceived as a bad copy of the original, you don’t succeed by making another bad copy of the original.
6. About That “Touching” Ending…
Standing alongside the original Ghostbusters in that cornfield, joining proton streams in order to defeat Gozer (yet again) is the transparent, glowing form of everybody’s favorite deadbeat dad, Egon Spengler. He’d manifested in various points of the film as disembodied energy, taking over lamps and moving chess pieces in order to guide Phoebe and Callie to the truth about the coming apocalypse (in scenes, I might add, that do not at any point involve the characters freaking the fuck out that a ghost has apparently taken a keen interest in them; they treat this poltergeist like a supernatural Siri).
In the Ghostbusters’ darkest hour, Egon manifests, does the demon-expelling deed, and has emotional interactions with his family. Two problems with this, one story-based, the other a matter of personal taste:
Narratively, neither the ghost’s nor the family’s reactions make any sense. It has been established that spirits can talk in the Ghostbusters universe, yet Egon doesn’t say a word to Callie, Phoebe, or Trevor. He just smiles and hugs them and disappears. No apologies; no explanation of why saving the world was so important when he couldn’t be bothered to connect with the people he should naturally be the most invested in saving (which is consistent, at least, with the way he lived apparently).
For their part, daughter and grandkids don’t appear to have any grievances against Papa Egon, despite the fact that his selfishness and myopia were the poison that rotted this branch of the Spengler family tree.
Make no mistake: this is a rotten family. When Callie and Paul Rudd go on a mid-day date, she rolls her eyes at his enthusiastic science talk and then whines about not being connected with her daughter. I couldn’t help but wonder if the relationship might have been stronger had Callie known where Phoebe was most of the time, instead of constantly wandering in from the kitchen with a bewildered look on her face when her twelve-year-old brings home strangers—or when summoned to the town lock-up to bail both kids out of jail for having destroyed half of Main Street with a nuclear flame-thrower while driving without a license in a car that was not registered to them.
Incidentally, during Calie and Paul’s dim sum date, Phoebe and Podcast were uncovering a nest of paranormal activity at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft, after wrapping up some proton-pack target practice. I won’t even get into the wholly ridiculous notion that Phoebe could aim one of those proton rifles at a room full of police officers and simply walk out free and clear—just because Mom assured the cops she’d “handle this at home”.
Back on the subject of Egon: I’ve seen a lot of gooey affection toward the CGI Harold Ramis that appears at the end of Ghostbusters: Afterlife. I don’t get it. Sure, it’s pretty amazing to see a convincing Ramis ghost, aged-up with the same wily hair and knowing grin. But it also raises the (ahem) specter of an ethics argument surrounding using digital likenesses of dead actors in new movies. It’s one thing to repurpose Humphrey Bogart footage in a Pepsi commercial, but what about resurrecting Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story? Or Harold Ramis for this movie?
How far are we from a new romantic comedy starring Brittany Murphy and Heath Ledger?
Not far enough.
But will anyone even care that the deceased performers might roll over in their graves even as the estates of said performers roll in dough?
To my mind, Feig’s Ghostbusters paid the perfect tribute to Ramis, when his likeness appeared on the bust of a statue at the beginning of that film. It was a cheeky, off-kilter reveal that fit precisely the disposition of the icon to which it paid tribute. The Afterlife climax feels attention-desperate and borderline necrophilic.
7. A Different Kind of Legacy
Instead of doling out lowest common denominator references to remind age-old fans of things they probably already conjure up on a regular basis (“Don’t cross the streams!” “Are you a god?” “I’m a scientist!”), why not pay a real tribute to the original Ghostbusters by reminding everyone of what made it a worldwide phenomenon?
It was not only a showcase for some of the era’s brightest comedic talents, it was also a smartly written movie about adults that incorporated horror and sci-fi elements into a mainstream comedy in ways few had thought possible. Aided by cutting-edge special effects, Ghostbusters invited us to imagine how everyday people might join forces to combat the undead—while also underscoring what’s so remarkable about the living.
The Ghostbusters went from charlatans to media darlings to accused eco-terrorists to symbols of citywide (and national, possibly global) unity in the course of one perfectly scripted hour-and-forty-five-minute movie. When Peter Venkman says, “See you on the other side, Ray”, there’s a conviction on the part of all four men involved that they would not (in fact, could not) come back from their streams-crossing suicide mission. It’s a stirring moment of heroism, the following minutes of which could not have been predicted by even the most astute film buff in 1984.
Afterlife is so uninterested in regular people that the “in town” scenes look like they were written to occur during lockdown. The climax of GB84 regularly bounced between the action taking place atop a haunted highrise and the millions of street spectators looking on in hope and terror as the world around them fell into bedlam. This lame-ass sequel wraps things up in a barren field with a handful of main characters screaming and delivering sleepy, Xeroxed quips. For a movie that took decades to put together, Afterlife plays like the equally tired The House with A Clock in Its Walls with Ghostbusters branding sloppily applied to a shoot-the-first-draft sensibility.
As with the 2016 reboot, a “Ghost Corps” logo pops up ahead of Afterlife, insinuating that this will be part of a widening franchise (assuming it does well enough to warrant a sequel). Instead of being a cause for celebration, I keep thinking about how much I don’t want to see any more of this particular franchise. As with The Terminator, The Transformers, Alien, Star Wars, Star Trek, and the myriad other series from my youth that Hollywood won’t stop reviving and bastardizing like Dr. Frankenstein from the Hammer films, I’ve come to terms with the fact that when it comes to pantheon movies, “dead” isn’t just better—it’s the only way to truly live.
*Anyone under the age of 30 can substitute S.H.I.E.L.D. in that reference.
**Yes, Paul Rudd plays a character named Mr. Grooberson, but that’s a technicality.
For more thoughts on Ghostbusters: Afterlife, check out Ian’s conversation with David Fowlie of Keeping it Reel!
