Ghostbusters Afterlife

Callie (Carrie Coon) discovers that her estranged father has died just as she is being evicted from her home. Packing up her two young children, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (McKenna Grace) she heads to the small town where her father owned a farm but produced no crops. As Phoebe digs into her grandfather’s stuff she learns of his connection to the Ghostbusters and uncovers a haunting that might just destroy the world. 

For context, Afterlife exists in a world where the 1984 original film and its 1989 sequel exist but the 2016 reboot does not. This means that neither Trevor or Phoebe have any awareness of who or what the Ghostbusters are having been estranged from their grandfather and born twenty years after those films events. 

Afterlife starts first by laying out its new characters before beginning its slow reveal of equipment that fans will know and love. Callie feels abandoned by her father and has an aversion to science, whilst Trevor is a natural mechanic and Phoebe is a natural scientist. Both skills that will come in useful later as they discover the Ecto-1 and a proton pack respectively. We are also introduced to fun summer school teacher Mr. Grooberson (Paul Rudd), a constantly recording boy called Podcast (Logan Kim) and diner waitress Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) who will act as foils for Callie, Phoebe and Trevor respectively. 

As far as the main threat goes I will simply say that it very much plays off happenings in the original film and gives ample opportunity for callbacks. 

All in all I really enjoyed the majority of Ghostbusters Afterlife. It is an awful lot of fun and has some winning characters and good performances. McKenna Grace is the star of the show, eschewing her blonde hair for the dark black curls reminiscent of her character’s grandfather. At the age of fifteen she is not only ridiculously talented enough to lead this blockbuster she also wrote and performed the film’s theme “Haunted House”. Whilst elsewhere Carrie Coon yet again shows how underrated an actress she is and Paul Rudd delivers his affable comedy. Whilst the action set pieces are entertaining and the scares at the right level for a family movie. 

Overall it plays on 1980’s nostalgia rather well. Whilst it of course plays on the original films I also felt that it had moments reminiscent of The Goonies and Gremlins. Podcast seemed very reminiscent of The Goonies Data whilst the young group of children have the same winning charm as The Goonies. Whilst some of the moments of chaos, especially related to the Stay Puft marshmallow men seemed very much like Gremlins. 

My main gripe though is that I felt the fan service to the original films went to far in the finale. It will be interesting to see if the Ghostbusters fandom reacts in the same way to this as the Star Wars fandom did to The Force Awakens. Both films retread the plots of their original films, both feature characters who are immediately talented in their field of heroism and have cameos from returning stars. My issue here is purely because after creating some genuinely great characters they did not allow them to have full control over their own destiny. But I will not be losing any sleep over the fact that the ending slightly dulls an otherwise enjoyable film. 

Be sure to stick around for mid and end of credits scenes. I have a feeling co-writer and director Jason Reitman (son of the original’s director Ivan) has his eyes on more sequels.