‘Ghostbusters Afterlife’ works as a tribute to the original film

This was where I first saw the 1984 comedy “Ghostbusters” with my older brother. I was 7 years old at the time. To this day, I can’t watch “Ghostbusters” without thinking of the Grand Lake Theater.

This is where the nostalgia for Ghostbusters begins for me. It was the second movie I watched in a movie theater.

“Ghostbusters” stars Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis as scientists, along with Ernie Hudson, the straight man of the comedic trio. They create a paranormal investigations and eliminations business as ghostly activity begins to build up in New York City.

The movie was followed by a sequel, “Ghostbusters 2” in 1989, and a rebooted film also called “Ghostbusters” in 2016, directed by Paul Feig.

The humor behind the 1984 film is on par with the Marx Brothers or Abbott and Costello, who made a bunch of supernatural comedies in the 1940s and 1950s.

The four comedians in “Ghostbusters” all have unique personalities. And the comedy behind the story is watching them not just finding ghosts, but actually catching them indefinitely, all while dealing with a looming apocalyptic threat of “Biblical proportion” without much of a plan.

Directed by Jason Reitman, the son of “Ghostbusters” director Ivan Reitman, this next film in the franchise is a labor of love for the Ghostbusters and for his dad.

“Ghostbusters Afterlife” picks up more than 30 years later after what the movie calls the “interdimensional crossrip” of 1984 — the events from “Ghostbusters.”

Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon) and her teenage kids, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) are evicted from their apartment. All they have is a dilapidated “dirt farm” they inherited from Callie’s father, Egon, out in the small town of Summerville, Oklahoma.

Callie’s relationship with her late dad is tumultuous to say the least. She resents him for having left her years ago. It’s touched upon but not explored much.

When they move into town, Phoebe becomes friends with a young supernatural enthusiast who calls himself Podcast (Logan Kim). With the help of their summer school teacher, Mr. Grooberson (Paul Rudd) they learn who the Ghostbusters were, the paranormal events that hit New York City in 1984 and that Phoebe’s grandfather was, in fact, one of the Ghostbusters.

Meanwhile, paranormal activity is spilling out from within a local abandoned mine shaft that belonged to occultist Ivo Shandor back in the early 20th Century. Shandor had used the mine in Summerville to construct and design the apartment building (aka “Spook Central”) in “Ghostbusters.”

As the first two are great popcorn movies, this one fits well enough into the franchise. But I find it to be the weakest link. That’s not to say it’s an awful movie.

In several interviews, Jason Reitman said he carried around a mental vision for years of a young girl wearing a proton pack (the device the Ghostbusters use to capture ghosts), shooting it in a corn field causing popcorn to start flying which she catches and eats.

It wasn’t until recently that he concluded that young girl in his vision was a related to Ghostbuster Egon Spengler, played by the late Harold Ramis in “Ghostbusters” and “Ghostbusters 2.”

Though I had fun watching “Ghostbusters Afterlife” it’s not as tremendous as the previous two films. The movie is also deep in emotion. That’s not surprising as the idea stems from director Jason Reitman’s motivation to make the movie in part to honor his dad, Ivan.

The jokes work for the most part in the new films. There are a few lines that lean too far into the realm of cringy. Some, but not many.

For instance, when Phoebe asks to make a phone call while sitting in a holding cell, the sheriff asks...well, if audiences have ever heard Ray Parker Jr’s theme song, no doubt it’s blatantly obvious what question would follow a phone call request.

The movie as a whole relies more on Ghostbusters nostalgia. While I’m a sucker for nostalgia, and enjoyed this third installment in the franchise, it felt like the story is merely meant to get the franchise back off the ground so that Sony can likely make more Ghostbuster films. It’s meant to get audiences, fans particularly, excited. It certainly pays service to the fandom.

In that regard, there’s one line in the movie that strikes me as self-referential.

When the Ghostbusters’ former receptionist, Janine Melnitz (played again by Annie Potts), stops by Egon’s farmhouse and meets Callie and her children just after they arrive, she tells Callie that Egon left behind a considerable amount of debt. Callie asks if her dad’s house is worth anything.

“No, unless you’re considering the sentimental value,” Janine says.

Some of the character arcs are lacking in “Ghostbusters Afterlife.”

Wolfard is a talented actor who, at age 18, has some memorable roles under his belt. He plays Richie Tozier in Stephen King’s “It” and Mike Wheeler in the popular Netflix series “Stranger Things.” Unfortunately in “Ghostbusters Afterlife” his character just doesn’t have much to do. He fixes the Ghostbusters’ recognizable Cadillac, the Ecto-1, after finding it covered and nearly rusted out in his grandpa’s old barn. This leads up to a fantastic action sequence as Phoebe, Trevor and Podcast chase a metal-eating ghost all through town. After that, there’s not much else he offers except to fill one of the Ghostbuster uniforms.

The same goes for Lucky, played by Celeste O’ Connor. She’s the love interest for Trevor. If she wasn’t in the movie, it wouldn’t really matter to the story. Again, she’s simply there to wear a uniform in the climax so the movie can have its four new Ghostbusters.

That’s no reflection of the performance of these young actors who do a great job with what they’re given. I can’t help but wonder how much more content for Lucky, Trevor and Callie there is which may have ended up on the cutting room floor. I bet a director’s cut would help the film considerably for the sake of fleshing out these characters and adding solidity to the storyline.

Logan Kim, who plays Podcast, is the comic relief. At first, I hoped his eye-rolling humor wouldn’t carry on in the dry way it starts off. But it didn’t take Kim long to make his lines work well, and get some laughs out of me. Kim makes his character very likable.

It’s Mckenna Grace’s performance that really carries the movie. Her character, Phoebe Spengler, is similar in personality to Egon – monotone and scientific. Though she looks like a young, female Egon, she adds her own element to the role of Egon’s granddaughter. “Overstimulation calms me,” she tells Podcast at one point in the movie.

Phoebe is bright in the field of science like her grandpa. Though she makes it a point to suppress her emotions, she can’t keep those feelings down when she learns truths about her grandfather alongside her mother’s bitter feelings towards Egon. Grace brings the family theme into the story as Phoebe realizes she’s not completely divorced from the legacy of her grandfather, despite not knowing anything about him until she’s forced to move to the “dirt farm” he left behind.

Though her mother has nothing but disdain for Egon, and the locals of Summerville remember him as strange and unusual, and even his friend and former colleague has grown resentful towards him, Phoebe overlooks all that to really understand his actions, redeem him and resurrect his legacy.

I expected other characters to fall into the cliché of not believing her because she’s a kid. Thankfully, they weren’t written that way. Otherwise, too much of the story seems like it was written hastily.

One plot point in particular that demonstrates the weak spots in the writing begins when Phoebe makes her one phone call at the police department.

Rather than call her mom, Phoebe calls the phone number from the old Ghostbusters commercial she saw on YouTube, taken from the original movie.

This number puts her in contact with Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) who’s still working at his occult book store from “Ghostbusters 2.”

Stantz goes into exposition with Phoebe, even though he doesn’t know who she is at that moment, about what became of each Ghostbuster within the last 30 years. He mentions Egon’s claims that a great cataclysmic paranormal event was imminent. But Ray didn’t believe these claims from his scientifically brilliant colleague — the one who created their ghost catching technology.

Even as the Ghostbusters tagline is, “We’re ready to believe you,” Stantz didn’t believe Egon during those previous 30 years.

“Egon Spengler can rot in hell for all I care,” he tells Phoebe.

Still, there’s a lot for audiences to take away from “Ghostbusters Afterlife.”

The sets are truly memorable, particularly the underground temple that serves as the portal for the main evil specter. The film also uses Elmer Bernstein’s music scores from the first film, with some variations. It’s pleasant to hear these scores again as “Ghostbusters 2” uses different music composed by Randy Edelman, which gives the sequel a distinct feel apart from the first movie.

As the original movie also uses pop songs in a jukebox fashion such as “Cleanin’ Up the Town” by the Bus Boys (a song that unfortunately never hit the zenith of popularity as Ray Parker, Jr’s theme “Ghostbusters”) and the Alessi Brothers’s “Savin’ the Day”, “Ghostbusters Afterlife” has a similar soundtrack. Songs such as “The Clapping Song” by Shirley Ellis, “Can You Get to That” by Funkadelic and “Boredom” by the Buzzcocks are used which adds life on top of the otherwise eerie Bernstein soundtrack, just like the first movie.

While “Ghostbusters Afterlife” has many little callbacks to the original in the form of small details hidden in the background and a few familiar lines here and there, the film certainly didn’t beat me over the head with all these references to part one in order to continually remind me that I’m watching a Ghostbusters movie.

Despite its flaws, “Ghostbusters Afterlife” illustrates well how people have a connection to their past, even if they never met those from their familial history.

The movie took a short while to pull me in. But once it did, it worked for me as far as being an entertaining flick. All it needs to be is goofy and oddball like the original. Thanks to Paul Rudd’s performance, it just squeezes by in being precisely that.

The 1980s saw a large handful of movies with heroic kids and teens, even in the genre of horror and science fiction. Films like “The Goonies” (1985), “The Monster Squad” (1987), “Gremlins” (1984), “Explorers” (1985), “D.A.R.Y.L.” (1985) and even “Back to the Future” (1985) find a place in that sub-category. “Ghostbusters Afterlife” has that same feel as the stars of the movie are four young people strapping on the proton packs just as the original Ghostbusters did back in 1984.

The movie will likely be a hit or miss with audiences who find “Ghostbusters” to be the funny popcorn comedy it’s meant to be.

As a fan of “Ghostbusters,” I am one of many who waited years to see how a part three would play out. It delivers overall to the fanbase, but it needs more thorough thinking behind its story. It’s a nostalgic trip for sure.