MOVIE: Ghostbusters – Afterlife (2021)

Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Year: 2021
Rating: PG-13
Length: 124 minutes / 2.07 hours

Hollywood nostalgia is a huge moneymaker for my generation. Movies we grew up loving like Star Wars (1977), Jurassic Park (1993), and Ghostbusters (1984) have all received “requels” in The Force Awakens (2015), Jurassic World (2015), and Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). These movies act as sequels, reboots, and remakes that take advantage of years of movie-making technology that weren’t available when the originals came out (even if the originals created amazing spectacles without excessive CGI). The question is: are these requels still entertaining? For Ghostbusters: Afterlife, I think it certainly did a better job than Ghostbusters (2016) did.

While these types of films rely heavily on call-backs and recycled plots from the movies that came before them, that’s part of what makes them fun nostalgia-fueled flicks. New characters can give a spark of something different, even if the story beats are still the same as before. Case in point: I absolutely loved Paul Rudd’s and Logan Kim’s characters in Afterlife, as they were the right balance of straight-man and comedic timing. Still, there’s something special about a movie like this paying tribute to the actors and directors we’ve lost since the first film became a hit.

I appreciated that there were enough plot points that differed from the original Ghostbusters to make this movie that added to the lore from the previous films. Jason Reitman clearly honored his father Ivan’s legacy by directing a film that took itself seriously. Even with moments of comedy sprinkled throughout, the laughs weren’t forced (like in 2016). After all, the original had brilliant dead-pan delivery that made it funny because the characters were taking the existence of ghosts seriously. I hope this movie gets a sequel so it can explore something different from the first plot in the series, but if this is all we get, it’s a pretty good consolation prize.

A requel that honors the source material, I give Ghostbusters: Afterlife 4.0 stars out of 5.