Because of this, it’s hard to escape any negative or foreshadowing thought going into this.
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The chemistry of the group is excellent and it gives me hope they can do better than the Murray and Aykroyd Ghostbusters did at turning this into a multi-film franchise.
Online ticketing service Fandango reported on Wednesday that Ghostbusters was its top pre-selling live-action comedy of the year, outpacing Central Intelligence and Ride Along 2-both which opened at over $35 million.
“We knew we were making the movie in the spirit of the first two, with the people who made the first two”.
The story starts out when physicist Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) finds out her old colleague and friend Abby (Melissa McCarthy) is still selling a paranormal book the pair had written together years before (without her permission). It will likely be overtaken by The Secret Life of Pets for the weekend, but not before Ghostbusters acquits itself nicely with a weekend of about $47 million. The movie trailer now sits at close to a million dislikes on YouTube, making it one of the top 10 most-hated videos of all time. As a result, she has no choice but to join up with Yates and Yates’ engineer, Dr. Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon), to study ghosts. This time, it’s directed at Kevin (Chris Hemsworth), the Ghostbusters’ handsome and well-meaning and comically un-smart secretary.
The story is decent, and so is the pacing albeit we are given an typical Hollywood happy ending.
Let’s get one of these questions out of the way. It just felt way more collaborative. Wiig and McCarthy endeavour to make us care about the friendship between them but it just feels a little forced.
“Are you kidding me?” Another refreshing element of the film is that no character feels more important than any other in the main quartet.
Lastly, I want to mention the nods to the originals. That Patty and Jones’ portrayal of her is the epitome of racial stereotyping. Although at first they wanted to rage back, they quickly learned that the better course (as always) is to not feed the trolls. That it encourages the idea of bullying the weirdos. It wasn’t said once and I loved it. Why was there such a campaign against it, especially from people who hadn’t seen the film yet? Racial stereotyping is never a good thing but could it possibly be its own self-awareness coming in to play? It’s now the most disliked trailer in YouTube history and the idea that four women would be donning the famous jumpsuits is one that has been labeled as an “insult” to everything the original franchise stood for. That’s really too bad, because the movie is a good-not-great reboot that actually tries to do some things differently with its premise, which is more ambition than a lot of remakes have. The music has some fun moments, but the soundtrack would never be able to supercede the catchiness of the original ear-worm theme tune. Normally, that’s a recipe for success, since movies see significant drops between their first and second weekends, leaving the path clear for newer flicks. Perhaps maybe the hype was too high for these women and we’ve come to expect nothing but phenomenal work from them so when they fall short of that it shows more than it would for anybody else. Part of me wishes it weren’t such a gendered thing, because why should it matter?
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In truth, it has been the other kind of insane fans – the people who adore and obsess over all things Ghostbusters – that have really turned me around. It’s not, but it’s something that you have to learn to work around.
