Let It Die: Ghostbusters
https://lebeauleblog.com/2019/01/22/let-it-die-ghostbusters/
When I was growing up, Ghostbusters was a funny movie with state-of-the-art special effects. Somehow in the last thirty-odd years it has become a lightning rod for angry debates and a whole lot of ugliness. If you’d have asked me what my favorite movie was when I was thirteen, I probably would have picked the supernatural comedy. But now I say, it’s time to let Ghostbusters die.share
Last week, Jason Reitman (son of Ivan, the director of Ghostbusters and its sequel) announced that he was going to make a follow-up to his dad’s movies. The new movie would ignore the existence of Paul Feig’s controversial remake from two years ago. That movie rankled fanboys by daring to imagine a team of female Ghostbusters.
Say what you will about the remake. I personally thought it was all right. Melissa McCarthy turned in a surprisingly restrained performance which doesn’t generate nearly as many laughs as Bill Murray did in the original. But taken on its own, it wasn’t half bad.
That said, it’s darn near impossible to watch the 2016 Ghostbusters without drawing comparisons to the original. Not only does the new movie hit all of the same story beats as the first movie, the original cast keeps showing up in cameos. Every few minutes, Feig offers up some form of fan service to remind us that this is Ghostbusters we’re watching.
But it almost didn’t matter how good or bad Feig’s Ghostbusters was. An extremely vocal group of fans (I would argue a minority of fans) declared the remake dead on arrival the minute it was announced. They didn’t want new Ghostbusters and they sure as hell didn’t want a bunch of girls.
Retroactively, a lot of these guys will complain that they are being painted unfairly as sexists. But I can’t think of another way to frame that conversation when fans were complaining about a movie that hadn’t even been made yet. And their objections almost always came back to the gender issue.
Most Ghostbusters fans would have preferred a reunion of the original cast instead of a new team. I get that. But that was never going to happen. Despite decades of prodding from Dan Aykroyd and probably every studio executive who could track him down, Bill Murray was a consistent hold-out.
Murray cited the 1989 sequel, Ghostbusters 2, as a reason for his reluctance. And he’s not wrong. I know there are a lot of people out there who grew up loving the second movie, but it’s a very weak copy of the original. Murray does what he can to liven things up, but clearly the magic was gone.
Comedy is hard. You can’t really predict what will be funny until the joke has been told. A lot of the appeal of the original Ghostbusters was the loose, improvisational tone. The movie slows down a lot any time it focuses on the special effects. Watching it today, it’s easy to get bored during some of the laugh-free lulls.
The sequel and remake made the mistake of upping the ante on all that ghost stuff. Big special effects require planning, structure and repetition to get all the visual components right. These things are anathema to comedy. It’s why so few special effects-heavy comedies are actually funny.
For every Ghostbusters or Men in Black, there’s an Evolution (Reitman trying and failing to recapture the Ghostbusters magic again) or RIPD (the less said the better). Or for that matter, there’s Ghostbusters 2 and Men in Black II (I will argue Men in Black 3 is pretty good.) When these movies work, they are little miracles. Sequels and remakes are almost sure to fail.
Hopes for a third movie featuring the original cast officially ended with the passing of co-writer and star, Harold Ramis. Ramis had been working with Dan Aykroyd and Ivan Reitman on a script for a third movie. Murray would only commit if he was killed off at the beginning of the new movie, but Reitman insists the script was shaping up to be very funny.
The 2016 movie, while not great, at least attempted to do something worthwhile by giving some talented comediennes (still underutilized in 2019) a potential franchise and giving young girls (a perpetually under-served demographic) some cinematic role models who could be funny and kick a little ass.
And man, did that make people mad!
Over two years later, I’m still not sure why that is. There’s no doubt that toxic fandom played a big part in sinking Feig’s well-intentioned remake. Fans of the boy Ghostbusters cried loudly that the new movie (not yet filmed) would ruin their childhoods.
This will always be a losing argument. But it’s especially poor when applied to Ghostbusters, a franchise that consisted of one good movie and a really lackluster sequel. But these fans don’t see it that way. I’m generalizing here, but for the most part I believe the following description to be accurate.