What Ghostbusters: Afterlife lacks in originality it makes up with an adventurous and fun spirit, not to mention a surprisingly heartfelt story at its core.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a story about family. It is also a story driven by fan service. After the disastrous 2016 reboot, it makes sense to try and rekindle that magic that made the Ghostbusters such a pop culture phenom, and there is a lot to love in the comfy confines that this fourth entry in the Ghostbusters franchise offers.
Directed by Jason Reitman (Young Adult), the son of original Ghostbuster director Ivan Reitman, Ghostbusters: Afterlife very much speaks to the little kid in every Ghostbusters fan who wanted to strap on their own proton-pack and hunt down pesky spirits.
The conduit here is 12-year-old Phoebe (McKenna Grace), a highly intelligent young girl with a love for science, who along with her teenage brother Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) is whisked away to small town Oklahoma when their single mother Callie (Carrie Coon) inherits a downtrodden dirt farm from her late estranged father. Unbeknownst to Phoebe and Trevor, their grandfather is none other than Ghostbuster Egon Spengler (the late great Harold Ramis), which they come to realise when the ghosts of the past resurface with apocalyptic intentions.
Reitman successfully merges Ghostbuster mythology with the kid’s adventure movies of the 1980s to make for a fun and entertaining watch, dripping with nostalgia yet done so with the right amount of call-backs to the original film that links generations young and old who would love nothing more than to tear up the town in the Ecto-1 while on the chase for some ghosts.
The “busting” scenes are especially fun, Reitman adding new gadget additions to the beloved classic Ghostbuster tools of the trade, which a new group of young Ghostbusters-in-training take to with the right amount of aloof enthusiasm. These sequences blend well with surprisingly tender moments of emotion in which heartbreak, grief, and broken bonds are brought to the fore as families – blood and fraternal – must come together to save a world being torn apart.
The cast are all excellent in their roles. McKenna Grace is a standout as the films lead, portraying the bookish intelligence and social awkwardness of Phoebe with an easy-going charm and without the annoyance that these characters can bring. Paul Rudd brings that regular guy goofball charm of his to the role of a man-child scientist, and young Logan Kim steals scenes as an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist named Podcast.
The return of original Ghostbusters Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson help bring things full circle, yet it is the spirit of these “children of the slime” found in these young characters, and indeed Jason Reitman himself, that gives Ghostbusters: Afterlife the spirit and fun energy it needs.
