I'm not going to bang on about global pandemics, the death of common sense in society or the generally abysmal way most people seem to want to treat each other; there's too much negativity knocking around at the minute and I don't want to contribute any more to it than I already have over the last 40 odd years. Don't get me wrong, I'll probably get bored of playing nice as soon as the next DC movie comes out or whatever god-awful shit-heap Netflix sees fit to throw at us next, but today is not that day. Today is somewhat of a celebration.
There are movies from our childhoods that just hit different. We all have them and they're never exactly the same for everyone. In today's musty cinematic world of remakes, reboots and other words with the suffix 're', it's all too seldom that one stands apart and actually manages to capture that dopamine hit of nostalgia that we were hoping for. Some of you got that from the new Star Wars movies and you know what? Fair play to you. The fact I think they're steaming turds is neither here nor there. If the hum of a lightsabre is enough to give you that fuzzy feeling then it doesn't matter who's wielding it or how terrible their dialogue/acting/plot holes are. I happily remember pretending my BMX was a Speeder Bike for many years past the time I probably should have stopped. Some of you might have got that from Indiana Jones, or Kevin Smith's He-Man or any number of franchises resurrected by Hollywood necromancers and jammed into our eyes and brain meats.
I got mine from Ghostbusters Afterlife.
Fair warning. There be spoilers in them thar hills. It's impossible to talk about what made this movie so damn great without dropping a few spoilers. I'll try and keep them limited and vague, but you should really just go and watch it. Put your big kid pants on and make your own minds up.
Let's address the terrible elephant in the room; I will not be addressing the terrible 2016 remake shaped elephant in the room because I already did a while back and the results were neither pretty enough nor relevant enough to go back on now. Suffice to say it was a very malnourished, pale and anaemic successor to the original and compared to Afterlife it's just... well to cram an unwarranted Metallica/Lovecraftian reference in here for no reason it's The Thing That Should Not Be.
Afterlife is a passing of the torch that has been years in development. Ghostbusters 3 should have been made years ago if not for a toxic concoction of bad script, actors falling out and Harold Ramis sadly passing away in 2014. Hence the whole focus shifted to how do you make a Ghostbusters movie without one of its four leads? Where in 2016 they chose to take too many steps away from what made the originals work, Afterlife chooses to keep it all related and finds clever and genuinely respectful ways to weave a story around the missing Egon. There are criticisms doing the rounds that it's just another clichéd "kids of the originals cast" plot, which is honestly a bit reductive and actually what else are you going to do? You bring the originals back and you get accused of re-treading the same old ground. You write in completely new (notice the avoidance of the word original here) characters and you get the misshapen turd-fest that Paul Feig foisted upon us. You can't avoid cliché nowadays, you may as well lean into it.
This is a family film in literally every sense of the word. Made by family (Ivan Reitman directed the originals and produced this one, directed by his son Jason who had a cameo in the second movie) and definitely aimed at a family audience, but very much centred around family as a concept. The trailer already tells us Egon has passed on, but the film is much deeper than just "we don't have the actor any longer, let's off the character". In fact it's the opposite; they focus on Egon and his estranged family and the reasons he abandoned everything and everyone to farm dirt in a rural town in Oklahoma. The kids could have been annoying and cutesy but actually feel like fleshed out, real people. Podcast is hilarious, and comes very close to stealing the show; thankfully everyone in the cast is so on point that nobody outshines anybody else. It's light-hearted but has emotional weight where it's needed; it's certainly not just a collection of poorly curated queef jokes and a standard "bad guy wants to rule/destroy the world" plot.
If you wanted to be less than generous, you could point out that there are a lot of Easter Eggs and cameos, but let's be real about it; it isn't Ready, Player One! (or Recognising Things from My Childhood: The Movie) and they aren't so egregious that it takes you out of the movie. Yes, Gozer, Zuul and Vinz Clortho are back, but don't mistake this for a re-hash of the plot from the first outing. It follows some of the same themes but is clever enough to avoid being exactly the same movie but with kids, and despite some of the critics unfairly labelling it 'sub-par Spielberg' it's fun, funny and eminently watchable. The Special effects are leaps and bounds ahead of the preceding movies, but you'd expect that. The ghosts are slick, the Terror Dogs are terrifying, the Mini-Staypuft Marshmallow men are cute and hilarious, everything is just perfect and balanced to serve the story, not overpower it. The way they've handled the absence of Ramis is at once touching, witty, smart and overall incredibly effective. You couldn't wish for a better job done.
Which brings me to the serious part.
I am easily man enough to admit that I was welling up at a whole bunch of points during this movie. I'm not one for sentiment; sad scenes rarely get to me, romantic gestures sail by with nary even a "by your leave". Heroism though. Oh boy. You get some true heroism on screen and I'm either whooping like a loon and clapping like a demented seal or leaking from the eyes like an anime character. Cap picking up Mjolnir? Forget about it. Same here; the final act is so chock full of God-damned heroes (old and new) being heroic I almost lost it. There's that one line from the end of the second trailer, just before the inevitable, (spoilerific), best God-damned entrance in the history of all cinema that's still giving me chills as I'm writing, 24 hours after the fact. Imagine all the best childhood memories of all your favourite heroes kicking all the ass and just being so God-damned cool about it and making you want to be them, desperately, unflinchingly wanting to be the hero and then imagine you've been waiting 30 years for that feeling to come back, even if you didn't know you've been waiting. 30 years of life just being life, throwing whatever horseshit you've had to endure at you, all the set-backs, all the hard times and loss we all face as grown adults, even before the world went to Hell in a handbasket last year. Think of all those awful remakes and reboots butchering our beloved franchises, handing out heaping dollops of disappointment and taking us further and further away from those moments of youthful, blissful ignorance; and then imagine suddenly everything is OK because the God-damned Ghostbusters are back.
"Have you missed us?" Yes Dr. Venkman. Yes we have.