SPOILERS AHEAD! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.
Ghostbusters Afterlife is a sloppy affair. Gone are any semblance of this being a film for adults. Instead, this is Goonies for the 21st century. It owes more to that movie, ET, and The Karate Kid than it does to the original GB films. It’s no coincidence that one of the stars of Stranger Things was cast.
Back in the day when we only had one film and The Real Ghostbusters on TV, it was clear that the Ghostbusters had plenty of ghosts to bust. While I honestly don’t have any idea how dead people are supposed to change into the freakish creatures the guys bust, it was clear that there was more than enough paranormal activity to keep them in Twinkies and proton colliders for the foreseeable future..
Unfortunately, when it came to writing GB2, scribes Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis chose to use a loss of business as the main problem facing the Ghostbusters at the beginning of the film. This plot point was clearly designed to set the guys back to square one and recreate the building of their business in GB1, but it also hinted at a universe where the existence of bustable ghosts was tied to Gozer directly. Never mind that it’s a HUGE coincidence that the Ghostbusters started their business during the same year that Gozer showed up. The bigger problem is that once Gozer was defeated, there wasn’t much for the guys in the ECTO 1 to do in NYC. This concept conflicts directly with the existence of Vigo, but GB2 is kind of a mess.
So, GBA reveals that they guys went out of business after defeating Vigo, and Egon became obsessed with the possible return of Gozer. Clearly, there were no ghosts to bust in the interim. In fact, it seems there were precious few to bust in Summerville, OK before the events of the new film took place.
So now we’re supposedly in a timeline where, if post credit sequences are to be believed, Winston Zeddemore is funding a new GB franchise in the old firehouse. My question - WTF are they even going to do? I’m sure that they’ll come up with some trope to explain it, but the fact is that at the end of GBA the GB biz is as incapable of turning a profit as Ray’s Occult Book Store is.
I’d like to add that this whole retconned story is the result of the studio’s desire to create a film that reeks of fan service after the atrocity that was the 2016 GB reboot, now subtitled Answer the Call for some reason. Looking back on GB2016 almost six years later, reveals that the film had some good ideas - new Ghostbusters, new gadget designs, adult protagonists, semi-adult humor - but ruined the good choices with a desire to directly copy the story beats of the original film. I have no prob with an all-female GB team as long as they’re their own characters and the story is their own and not a carbon copy of the first movie. It would have also helped to tie it into the same universe as the first film in some way. I’m certain that Sony thinks the reason the picture failed is that it took too many chances, when, in fact, it took too few.
The trouble with GBA is that Reitman and Sony wanted to include all the things that fans remember most about the franchise. So we have Gozer, Terror Dogs, Mr. Stay Puft, ghost traps, proton packs…everything but a reason for their being there in the first place.
None of the characters knows anything about the tools they’ve found, and yet two children are capable of using a pack and trap to catch a ghost on their first try without having any idea what all the buttons and switches even do.
GBA is a fantasy for children who are GB fans. The young characters know more than the adults. The kids make choices and can be anywhere, anytime without the aid of an adult. The kids have instant knowledge when needed, such as the 15 year old who gets the ECTO 1 running with just a tiny bit of ghostly aid. It’s a fun children’s movie for the most part, but it doesn’t work as an adult comedy in the way that the original did. Don’t forget that Harold Ramis wrote Animal House, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes…the list goes on and on and they were all raunchy comedies. GB1 had a ghost giving Ray Stanz a blowjob, for crying out loud! While it had appeal to children, it wasn’t made FOR them in the way that the new film was.
The funny thing is that I sort of enjoyed it, if for no other reason than to see how Gil Keenan and Jason Reitman would write their way out of the decades-long gap between films. I also enjoyed seeing the sheen of 80s-era productions updated. I wish we’d only seen Ernie Hudson and not Dan and Bill this time around, because Dan is way too into it and Bill’s not into it enough. But I get involving them and the specter of Egon briefly at the climax of the film. I just think that the only way this franchise truly has legs is if the next film moves into an unknown future with new stories, new ideas, and new challenges for new Ghostbusters.