I heard that this movie was set in the same universe as the earlier ones before I saw it, but I looked carefully and saw no sign of that. For one thing, people would not have been as skeptical of the existence of ghosts as they were in this film.
Blame that on the marketing people; one of the trailers implied it was sequel to the original movie.
Did anyone else think that the villain resembled John Belushi?
Yes, I wondered if that was just a wild coincidence.
Loved it. Way better than I expected to. Especially Holtzmann.
The 1984 original has an absolutely dreadful protagonist played by an actor who’s phoning it in, is uncomfortably sexist, largely disconnects the key events of the third act (Peck’s interference in blowing up the containment unit doesn’t really have anything to do with Gozer’s plan to return) and has a thousand other problems. Anyone who thinks it’s a wonderful masterwork hasn’t watched it in awhile.
I think I have complained elsewhere that the original movie would not hold up to the level of nitpicking that the new one is receiving. When did this start? When did it become impossible for fans not to destroy what they love, approaching every new instantiation with bitter animus? Fanimus.
Actually, the documentary about Ghostbusters fans on Netflix does generally feature the happy side, which was heartening to see, even if it was almost certainly intentional that people who weren’t enthusiastic about the new movie didn’t get any screen time.
I was thinking more of Rob Schneider.
Somewhere around the time we decided that ‘amazing’ and ‘awful’ were the only two things a movie could be.
If a perfectly fine, but not excellent, movie is not to your pleasure then picking it apart is the only way to justify calling it a trash fire.
Within the movie - there is one line about how things get forgotten over time - I took that as a direct hint at the happenings of the original movie - that they were ‘far enough back’* that most poeple had forgotten.
Secondly, the authorities were much less dismissive - they believed them - just wanted them to not cause a panic.
*Kinda like the Jedi in a new hope.
In the real world, it’s only been thirty years, and the events of those movies are so extraordinary (a fifty-foot tall marshmallow man? the Statue of Liberty walking down Fifth Avenue?), I can’t imagine that people forgot. Plus, as I said, the skepticism would not be there.
That’s the downside of reboots.
The upside is that they have a built-in fan-base, they don’t have to go out and create a new one.
The downside is that the built-in fan-base will be hyper-critical, and have an automatic tendency to compare the reboot with the original - and if isn’t better, to be vocally disappointed.
So at least since then; what have you been doing the past 15 years?
Did no one like Ghostbusters II except me? I loved it, better than the original in fact!
Yeah, but eventually they got to be bigger assholes than me. That’s where I draw the line.
I recently saw it again, and I forgive it for being inferior. It’s actually got a lot of funny bits and it was nice to visit the characters again. That business with an animated Statue of Liberty giving all of New York the big happy makes my jaw ache with the need for sarcasm. But after decades I have revisited the issue and I’m glad Ghostbusters II exists. Especially as the 2009 video game makes its plot developments important to the overal Ivo Shandor storyline.
Yeah, that makes about as much sense how War of the Worlds (the TV series) had the general public suffer from mass amnesia about the “Martian” invasion (w/ WWII levels of destruction) that happened 35 years prior in the move.
Just imagine INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE having gone the same route.
“Your father was a great pilot, the first man to bring down one of the aliens.”
“One of the what, now?”
“Aliens. He punched one out, said ‘Welcome to Earth’.”
“Does not ring a bell.”
“They blew up the White House!”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Really?”
“No.”
First, it’s not a new installment in the series, it’s intended as a replacement for the original movie. It does not function as a movie about a post-Ghostbusters world - Wiig’s character wouldn’t be thrown out of her job for believing in the paranormal in the world established by the original, where the city cheered the Ghostbusters on as they went to fight Gozer the Gozerian. The movie wants to have its cake and eat it too - it keeps taking things from the original to try to play on your nostalgia but refuses to conform to the needs of being a Ghostbusters sequel. Even the style of comedy is wrong for the series - the story of the original does not need to be enjoyed ironically, and works as a serious movie about intelligent, witty people in a weird situation. The new one is Melissa McCarthy starring as Melissa McCarthy in a Ghostbusters costume.
Second, the creators of the original movie didn’t try to sell it with “If you don’t like this movie you’re a communist and you hate small business!” Marketing as a substitute for a quality product is bad enough when your marketing strategy is not “Stir up bigotry!”
The word I used was instantiation. It means the making of an instance, or an instance that has been made. It’s range of meanings overlap but little with the word you used, installment.
The new Ghostbusters doesn’t not replace the old one any more than the old Hercules TV show replaced the ancient mythology of Hercules. Nor did the Disney movie called Hercules replace the TV Show or the actual ancient legends. They exist along side the older instantiations. All continue to be available to be enjoyed or reviled on their own merits as you see fit. Nothing has been replaced.
And then, unless you’re going to argue against including Ghostbusters II in the cannon, they were sued out of existence and reviled as frauds in spite of the finale of Ghostbusters.
It was never intended to be a sequel. It was intended as a variation of the theme of Ghostbusters. That is permitted. The entirety of our culture for as long as we have records consists of creating variations on what has come before.
The style of comedy from the second movie was different from the style of comedy in the first movie. The style of comedy in the beloved cartoon was different from the style of comedy in the movies. The style of comedy in the cult classic West End Games RPG is different from the style of comedy in either the movies or the cartoon. Yes, they are using a different style of comedy. I’m certain other people are bitching, on the contrary, that the new movie leans too much on aping the comedy of the first one. We’re all living in a world of comedy created by the original Ghostbusters. We’re allowed to vary it from there.
I’ll let you in on a secret. The original featured Bill Murray just being fucking Bill Murray in a Ghostbusters costume.
The film-makers didn’t make it about sexism. Sexists did. The film-makers had to cope with weirdly shrill attacks from piping dickholes with undisguised pathological sexual animus.
I have to say, though, that I’m feeling a bit grateful to the abovementioned piping dickholes at present. Because I just saw the movie and really enjoyed it, and I probably would not have gone to see it if the whole sexist/racist hatefest hadn’t made it something of a matter of principle.
I’m not a big fan of scary movies even with comedy thrown in, and I remember finding the original Ghostbusters scary in parts back when it was released, even though I also enjoyed it (but not so much that I bothered to see any of the sequels). But while watching the movie tonight, I suddenly remembered that I was thinking the exact same thing about it that I’d thought while watching the original and had forgotten about: “This is fun and different, instead of being just a movie like all the other movies”.
So, well done MRAs and racists for making such a fuss about a movie that I might not otherwise have seen but am very glad I did! (Now that I think of it, the same thing happened with Mad Max: Fury Road, which since I never saw any other of the Mad Max movies wouldn’t even have pinged my must-see radar if it hadn’t been for a bunch of internet trolls saying EWWWW GIRRRRRRLLLLLZ, but that one turned out to be very good too! :))