There are movies that get all the attention and praise, and end up being three hours of agony.
But there are also movies that get utterly panned and end up being gold. If you haven’t noticed the hate around the reboot of iconic movie franchise ‘Ghostbusters’, you’re probably new to the internet. Welcome. Avoid the shadowy bits.
From the moment the trailer hit YouTube, the internet has been awash with the anguish of those convinced the franchise cannot survive an all-female ensemble. Worse: Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth, is relegated to the role of idiotic eye-candy! Blasphemy! However, will the franchise cope?
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Honestly, it copes just fine, and listening to conversations while leaving the cinema, there are at least a few movie-goers who like the reboot more than the originals. There are hat-tips aplenty for the original fandom, with enough modernising to make the storyline fun for a new audience. It’s well written; smart without being high-brow, the comedy on point without being overly exclusionary.
It’s clear, though, that the writers knew pretty early that there would be a lot of backlash from the old guard, and decided to own that hatred rather than ignore it. If you’ve been eye-rolling through the controversy, that choice only makes ‘Ghostbusters’ funnier.
The controversy around the reboot really doesn’t take into account that original franchise writer and star, Dan Ackroyd, is Executive Producer of the reboot, making sure the new movie stays faithful to the themes of the originals. It’s not so much newbies throwing around our toys, as a well-reasoned, supervised romp through this particular universe.
The cast are brilliant, with Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones regularly stealing the limelight from comedic heavy-hitters Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig. There’s no leading lady poaching the best lines, and each character steps into and out of leadership as required with the only confusion being for comedic effect. It works really well.
If there’s a problem, oddly enough, it’s in not going far enough in the subversion of overdone tropes. It’s great to see the ‘ditzy eye-candy secretary’ trope played – and well – by a man, even better to see a team of women stepping up to save the day. But the racial tropes could have used a thorough subversion, too.
There’s literally no reason for Leslie Jones’s character to be the least educated of the group. And why is ‘angry black woman’ still the baseline personality setting? ‘Ghostbusters’ would have lost nothing in switching Kristen Wiig into the role of MTA worker, beyond having to re-imagine a cameo. It would have been fantastic to see the rebooted ‘Ghostbusters’ treat racial tropes with the same vehemence with which they targeted the gendered ones.
Though the trailer is the most hated YouTube clip of all time, the movie itself is really, really good. The sad part is that if ‘Ghostbusters’ fails, it has nothing to do with the cast, script or effects, and everything to do with outdated, banal notions around the roles women are expected to play in action and adventure flicks.
If someone could deal with that particular undead menace, that’d be great.
★★★★1/2
