The Big Picture

• Ghostbusters: Afterlife relies heavily on nostalgia, packed with Easter eggs and cameos.
• The film strays from the original's comedic horror roots, shifts focus to family and drama.
• Ghostbusters: Answer the Call is a better reboot, highlighting fun and comedy elements.

Much like the paranormal exterminators themselves, Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife tries its hardest to capture the spirit of the original Ghostbusters with a force far more powerful than any unlicensed nuclear accelerator: nostalgia. The bulk of Afterlife’s runtime features an onslaught of glorified Easter eggs, references, and cameos tied to the Ivan Reitman original and its lore, vying to be the long-awaited Ghostbusters three-quel fans have asked for decades to see. What results is a film that exists more in rose-tinted fanboy reverence of the franchise than an attempt to embody what made the original classic great as a film, which it failed to do.

Set nearly 40 years after the fact, Afterlife serves as a direct sequel to the 1984 original and centers on the surviving family of Harold Ramis’ Egon Spengler as they inherit his life’s work, lock, stock and proton pack. Through some strange supernatural happenings around her family’s new town, Spengler’s granddaughter Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) learns of her Ghostbusting heritage and rallies a team of misfits to once again stop Gozer the Gozerian from heralding a spectral apocalypse.

What Does 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' Get Wrong as a Sequel?

Indulgent call-backs aside, Ghostbusters: Afterlife's biggest fault as a follow-up to its namesake is that it tries to turn the series into something it never was. The film’s insistence to tell a story of discovering family legacy positions the original film and the franchise as a whole as a generational saga akin to Star Wars worthy of an emotional conclusion. Much like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Afterlife‘s new generational cast attributes the Ghostbusters to famed hero status and the events of the original film to legend as Phoebe reconnects with the literal ghosts of her family’s past. The film is also more self-serious and full-heartedly sincere than the original, substituting skewed comic cynicism with a mix of action-adventure elements and family-drama.

As far as the original film was concerned, Ghostbusters was never meant to be a family story or a whimsical coming-of-age adventure, but a wall-to-wall horror comedy. The 1984 classic featured some of the most popular comic talent at the time popping wisecracks and working off each other’s egos while bumbling through a larger-than-life sci-fi horror story peppered with high-concept technobabble and memorable one-liners. While Afterlife was a film about Ghostbusters in name and iconography alone, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016) had a stronger grasp on the kind of tone and fun spirit a Ghostbusters film is supposed to be.

'Ghostbusters: Answer the Call' Is a Better Reboot

Answer the Call served as a reboot for the franchise as opposed to a canonical sequel and cast Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones as a new proton-powered team pitted against a villainous plan that threatens to plunge the world into ghostly doom. The film infamously was drastically ill-received by fans and veritably broke the internet worse than a 50-foot rampaging marshmallow man stepping on a church. Although not without its fair share of shortcomings, Answer the Call better achieved the kind of tonal experience the Ghostbusters name should instill in its audience: fun.

Answer the Call understood that Ghostbusters is intended to be a joke-a-minute ensemble comedy. The film tries hard and often to get a laugh out of its audience through dialogue, improv, and physical comedy. Regardless of if the jokes lands, the film still tries to be funny in every scene by the power of its characters. Much like the original, the cast is given distinct personalities and quirks that permit them to be foils to one another and work off each other in comedic ways, between McKinnon’s sadistic mania, Jones’ city-weary charm, Wiig’s good-natured awkwardness, and McCarthy’s no-nonsense dedication. Comedic personality and chemistry are what make the Ghostbusters a team worth watching and laughing with. Afterlife carried itself with about as much comedy as a typical modern blockbuster movie where the story and characters were largely played straight with only an occasional one-liner here and there amidst a half-serious adventure drama with Phoebe as the singular lead. Answer the Call, like the '84 original, is a comedy first and foremost.

A chief source of Ghostbusters’ comedy as a plot is rooted in irony. The original 1984 film portrayed the team as degreed science professors working as blue-collar spectral exterminators facing down otherworldly threats. Answer the Call stems from that same kind of irony, but pushes it further by having the team’s overwhelming expertise work against them as their start-up science operation to save the world is not taken seriously by a public eager to deny and refute them. In Afterlife, the Ghostbusters as heralded as legendary heroes revered on the level of Jedi Knights, robbing the ironic mundanity of their profession.

'Ghostbusters: Answer the Call' Is Just More Fun

Apart from the comedy, Answer the Call also actively has more fun in its world-building than Afterlife. While Afterlife offers little in the way of new ghosts and gadgets to marvel at, barring the R/C mobile ghost trap and Muncher, Answer the Call introduces a whole slew of inventive new ways to bust a veritable world of new phantoms. Along with redesigning the familiar gadgets of the original such as PKE meters and proton packs, the film features the likes of proton grenades, ghost chippers, and gauntlets that lend themselves to fun new ways to subdue the paranormal. The ghosts themselves also range farther than in Afterlife and even the original by featuring demonic creatures, corporeal old-world spirits, evil parade balloons, and more in sequences that turn the art of ghostbusting into visceral combat. Afterlife reiterates the familiar threats of Zuul and Gozer and how they’re busted without much innovation aside from the Ecto-1's new mobile gunner seat. Answer the Call further expands on the possibilities of Ghostbusting by having fun in forging its own identity in how it is done.

In comparison to the original Ghostbusters, neither Afterlife nor Answer the Call are perfect films, but they each succeed and fail the franchise in different ways. Afterlife is a solid blockbuster overall, but scarcely resembles the kind of film the original wanted to be. Answer the Call celebrated and homaged the creative energy of the original, but also featured comedy that didn’t quite click with die-hard fans. How each of these films pleased one audience while leaving the other unsatisfied — and how quick the studio was to renege on its reboot -- illustrates the power of nostalgia has on franchises today, for better and worse. Despite emulating the exact kind of film the original Ghostbusters always was in almost every way, Answer the Call left lifelong fans scorned and yearning for something to vindicate their years of wanting a third film to recapture their childhood. Afterlife more than accommodates by drenching itself in a fanboy-gaze infatuation with every little thing it could borrow from the original while telling a story grander than anything Reitman intended with the original. Whether in trying to retain the spirit of the original through emulation or duplication, fandom nostalgia is the Ghost Corps’ greatest asset and its worst enemy all at once.

Ghostbusters: Answer the Call is available to rent on Amazon in the U.S.

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