Ghostbusters: Afterlife

• Directed by Jason Reitman
• August 23, 2021 (CinemaCon) / November 19, 2021 (US)
• Based on Ghostbusters by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis

A mother and her children move to an Oklahoma farm they inherited from her estranged father Egon Spengler only to learn something terrible is coming.

The legacy sequel or just rebooting is all the rage lately in Hollywood. Sequels to old films seem to come along with a level of regularity that you could set a watch by. Enter into this trend Ghostbusters: Afterlife-a sequel to a film that should have received a sequel decades ago. A legacy sequel that while not perfect has far more done right than wrong.

There’s a clear effort from the start to not only honor what came before but build upon it as well. They weren’t simply trying to slap the Ghostbusters name on something barely similar like was done with Answer the Call. Rather they tried to continue the Ghostbusters universe even if they could not continue the story of the original group. Truth be told Afterlife is largely to introduce a new group of characters to keep things going.

Certain elements of this film that have irked me elsewhere do not. Given certain real life issues they needed to do something in order to satisfy the fans. What I’m referencing is Egon being a bit of a deadbeat dad. You needed to include the character but given that Harold Ramis had passed that was difficult. It fit with the character but eliminated the need for the character while ultimately framing him (once all is revealed) as doing the right thing.

Afterlife smoothly and quickly establishes the new actors/characters in the Ghostbusters mythology. Despite not featuring the original cast, this feels like a Ghostbusters movie. Not perfectly like a Ghostbusters movie, but with all the connections to the first film it connects in a way that Answer the Call could not.

Director Jason Reitman wanted to make the fans happy. They were not telling the fans what to like but rather trying to give them what they knew they would like. We have some good fan service as well as this movie being a direct sequel to the original with the plot being driven by elements first presented there. Wait. Is Ghostbusters II considered canon here?

There’s a nice mix of practical effects and CGI when necessary. That is important to captioning that feel. Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II used practical effects because CGI was really not a thing back then with the rest done in the old ways. That old style approach helps get the viewer to feel the connection.

There are genuinely funny moments in this movie. It’s a little more family-friendly than the original film was but then again the film was pretty tame for what was offered in the PG rating at the time. Ghost fellatio aside.

To use modern parlance I thought the scene with Egon would be rather cringe. After all Harold Ramus had passed before production of this ever began yet there was an element of heart to the moment with it becoming rather moving. Despite him starting off being framed as a bit of a deadbeat dad when the truth is revealed there is a catharsis that strikes all the right chords with his daughter. Egon got a great sendoff. He went out in a way that would leave everybody happy. 

We get a bit of an update on all the characters. Their lives did not descend into a pile of excrement. Maybe things weren’t as good as they could be in some cases but time marched on yet did not screw them over. All too often legacy sequels put the characters that we haven’t seen in decades into the worst possible situations rather than simply have life happen. Not so much here. 

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a legacy sequel done right. It honors what came before while also creating something new. It has fun with the concept. Hollywood could learn a thing or two from this.