After over 2 decades, the long awaited (or dreaded) new Ghostbusters film is finally in theaters. And based on the opening weekend numbers, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve seen it. And if you’ve seen it you probably have a definite opinion on it. Opinions we’ve witnessed so far have ranged from extremely good to impossibly bad.
My opinion is somewhere right in the middle. I didn’t have fun watching this movie and in general the movie fell flat. But what hurt the most was how much potential the new Ghostbusters had. I’m aware that I am someone who has never made an actual movie. And I’m about to Monday Morning Quarterback it. But I believe a lot of issues I had with the film could easily have been fixed with small changes.
First, let me break down what some of the issues for me were. This will get into Spoiler Land and it’s probably best not to read beyond this point if you haven’t seen the movie.
Okay. You have been warned.
Now not all of these issues are easy fixes. At one point, our heroes witness the main villain running off to destroy New York City during the mid-afternoon and but are not see again until some time at night when they finally jump into the Ecto-1 and tear onto the streets to catch him. Um. Hours and entire scenes have passed. How do you create a sense of urgency if the characters themselves don’t show any sense of urgency? When the police suspect that our heroes have just killed a man by throwing him from a window the scene ends with a series of Patrick Swayze references? There’s absolutely no resolution to this potential hurdle and it’s swept under the rug like so many potentially rich story beats in exchange for some witty dialogue. The movie ignores plot in lieu of potential laughs several times and the story and characters are worse off for it. I can list every offense but for the sake of this article I’m going to focus on the three major issues that most of the smaller issues stem from.
Issue #1: This movie does not exist in the same universe as the original two films yet is still very self conscious about it existing. This doesn’t bother everybody, but it definitely bothered me. By making this its own stand alone film, this go around has to retell the Ghostbusters origin story from scratch and spend a lot of energy doing it. It repeats beat by beat scenes from the original movie with very subtle “unique” twists. This isn’t a structural issue (because it worked great in the first film) but then the movie additionally is packed with cameos of the entire original cast as “jokes”. Only one or two of these cameos actually works but most of the time the extent of the joke is “look, it’s one of the people from the original movie… laugh now please.”
Issue #2: The relationships established between the 4 Ghostbusters are extremely rushed and don’t really change that much from there. Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wig) and Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) are former best friends. They stopped being best friends for… reasons? Erin re-enters Abby’s life to ask her to stop the publication of a book that they wrote years ago and discovers that she’s basically been replaced by Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon), an eccentric but brilliant inventor who only services the story to mumble weird asides and introduce interchangeably forgettable gadgets that will only be used once. After less than 10 minutes Abby and Erin are friends/business partners because they saw a ghost and their estranged relationship is almost never mentioned again. That is until the end of the film when Erin has to make the choice to potentially sacrifice herself for her friend…. except at that point it’s not much of a choice as they’ve been friends for 99.9% of the film. This isn’t a big character moment or choice as much as it’s a quick wrap up to a problem the Ghostbusters let happen in the first place when they sat for hours instead of chasing the bad guy down the street (not to mention letting him grow to the size of a skyscraper before actually zapping him). The final piece of the group comes in Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) who exclaims after joining the group and looking for a ghost down a hallway that she “thought she was joining a book group”. And this is after she witnessed a ghost at her subway job… twice.
Issue #3: For a movie that’s trying so hard to be different they literally have just created four female characters that are attempts at being direct duplicates of the original cast. This ends up being more of a disservice than anything and causes some weird character issues. If these are new characters, treat them as such.
For reference, here’s who represents who:
Abby is Ray
Erin is Peter
Holtzmann is Egon
Patty is Winston
The original film was a tale for one sarcastic guy and his 3 co-workers, all playing the straight man to an outlandish situation. Sure Ray, Egon and Winston have some hilarious lines… but every line is delivered with complete sincerity. They don’t have time for jokes, they’re here to catch ghosts and are firmly grounded in doing so. The audience has a place of perspective from which to watch the fantastic story play out.
This new movie has no straight man. The closest we have is Erin but even she is too goofy for her own good and is made less respectable in situations in which she mistakes windows for sliding doors. Holtzmann is too silly to be the “Egon”, which would be fine if they made her more of a 3-dimensional character than just a weird Egon. McKinnon’s performance is getting a lot of praise and it’s super deserved because it was a huge risk but it could have been so much more relatable if it had any depth or history to it. She’s the same unpredictable question mark at the end of the story as she is when Erin first meets her.
The most offensive issue comes in Patty as Winston. In the original film Winston was a man who didn’t believe in ghosts. He just needed a job. Some of the best moments in the original film was Winston being the normal guy coming to terms with lots of new information. In the remake, Patty discovers a ghost and calls the Ghostbusters for help. That’s perfectly fine. Then She asks to join the group. This is also fine. Then on their first mission with the team she’s mumbling to herself about “I thought this was gonna be a book club and now I’m fighting ghosts”. What?!? There is no other reason for this line to exist for this character beyond “She’s the Winston”. Even when the character is actually the most different from its male counterpart, they still write dialogue for her that’s more fitting for Winston. This is even more absurd based on the fact that just before this mission she got them a vehicle for the equipment and uniforms… TO CATCH GHOSTS! Why in the hell is this character unaware of what she signed up for after having dealt with one TWICE in the subway?
That in a nut-shell are my 3 major issues. And they’re big ones. The new Ghostbusters is a film that wants to make its own name for itself but can’t get out from under the shadow of the original.
So why not just accept that the original films existed in this universe and start from there? Why must every reboot be a remake?
Here’s my take on the first 20 minutes of the film that would quickly fix some of these issues. And remember, I’ve never made a movie, I’m just writing how marrying these two stories together could work and how it would fix a lot of issues.
Imagine if the new Ghostbusters film opened with the original commercial from the first Ghostbusters movie. The year is 1990 and we pull back to reveal a trio of girls having a sleepover. These girls are 10 year old Erin, Abby and their eccentric friend Jillian Spenlger. Yes, I’m turning Holtzmann into a relative of Egon because if you’re going to make her character a female equivalent him anyways let’s just make her a relative and have a reason why they share the same tendencies. The three of them are sharing ghost stories and maybe even make a reference to how cool it is that Jillian’s uncle is a Ghostbuster.
Suddenly weird things begin to happen in the house and they experience a real life ghost. The three are bonded by this scary moment and the credits roll.
We then jump to modern day New York.
The three remaining Ghostbusters are looking around their offices reminiscing about Egon (who has passed away) and discussing how the business has become a money pit. There hasn’t been a ghost in New York for over 20 years and their equipment is extremely dangerous after years of being inactive. On top of that, with no ghosts to bust they can barely afford the rent on the building.
It’s at this time that Jillian enters the firehouse. She has inherited Egon’s quarter of the business and actually wants to join the team.
Peter, Ray and Winston decide that Jillian could be the ultimate solution to the financial albatross that is The Ghostbusters and they do her one better. They’ll give her their shares as well and make her the sole owner. This is admittedly a crude trick but we can make sure that all three get something bad in return. There’s a joke in the current film where Patti, Abby and Holtzmann are attacked by a giant Stay Puft Marshmellow Man balloon that keeps them pinned down. Instead of that happening to the female Ghostbusters we could make it that Peter, Ray and Winston decide to ultimately help the girls out only to get trapped under the balloon and be rendered old and useless. The four female Ghostbusters simply pop the balloon and save them, clearly stating that they are the newer, better models (take that, internet trolls).
Jillian excitedly calls her friends Abby and Erin to join her so they can continue their ghost hunting excitement. But they have since all but forgotten their experience 25 years ago. Much like in Ghostbusters 2, the two try to convince Jillian that her uncle was a scam artist who tricked New York into believing in ghosts for profit. But the mystery of a ghost reappearance reinvigorates them when Jillian is asked to investigate the historical site from the beginning of the film.
From this point on we can start to introduce our villain, who should have ties to the history of the Ghostbusters, and pick up right where we meet Patty in the current film. Most of the movie can play out the same way from this point except the villain actually has weight beyond being a random angry kid from Reddit.
By making these changes you immediately tie the film to the original films that the current version is already self conscious of, except now the cameos serve a purpose beyond being gags. It also removes the 20 minutes of retelling how the Ghostbusters were formed and avoids some of the weird missing elements of Erin and Abby’s friendship.
Since the equipment is still old and beat up, it still allows us to keep some of the more entertaining segments of the girls “testing out Jillian’s equipment” but also allows us to bypass some of the more obnoxious elements of the film where everyone but the younger section of the audience (and since this is the first PG-13 Ghostbusters film don’t tell me that’s who it’s specifically aimed at) has heard this dialogue and seen this before.
At the end of the day, what’s done is done. The movie is out there and it’s a hit. There will definitely be a sequel and honestly that’s a good thing. The main cast has fantastic chemistry and I’d be more than thrilled to see what a sequel would be like now that the tedious work of reestablishing the Ghostbusters has been done. I just hope that they now take things in a new fresh direction rather than continuing to pay fan service to films that their audience already has on their shelves at home.