You may have noticed Ghostbusters trending on various social media sites for the latest video by Screen Junkies in their Honest Trailers series, which saw fit to tear apart the 2016 reboot of a phenomenal cult classic film. Many criticized the minds behind Honest Trailers, calling it “brutal” and “biased”. While I cannot attest to a lack of or appearance of biased, I do think the video made many good points.
Let’s get this out of the way right now, the Honest Trailer found a way to summarize my exact feeling for this film in one sentence: “It’s not as bad as they said it’s going to be but… it’s bad.” The Honest Trailer touched on the Internet’s reaction to the announcement of a Ghostbusters reimagining, and the blood that was almost instantly shed upon announcement of the cast. While the Internet might have a tendency to… over exaggerate a bit, the overwhelmingly negative response to this movie was something that didn’t surprise me in the least. The most surprising part of the response was that people immediately jumping to hate this movie were hating it for all the wrong reasons. To hate a film’s concept merely for the possibility that it could taint an already established feeling of love/nostalgia/what have you for the original is a ridiculous concept. The studio’s response to the sentiment made matters worse, when the director in an interview states a complete lack of connection to the established universe but also expresses a desire to “give those nods” to the original (symbols of the original like the Ecto-1). Establishing yourself as a director with a concept lost between a reboot and a sequel by referencing an eerily similar but “new” universe is not the right way to fend off Internet criticism that the film doesn’t know what it wants to be. “Stop hating us because you’re right” isn’t ever a viable defense.
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I don’t have a problem with a good reboot. Sometimes forcing people to acknowledge the history of a popular franchise by shoving it back into pop-culture totally works. I might have a problem with the sheer number of reboots being announced and produced lately, but that’s a discussion for another time. I said from the get-go that my problem with the reboot wasn’t its existence, it was the cast. People praised the cast, specifically for the previously established brilliance of stage chemistry between Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids, as well as the inclusion of Leslie Jones in the top billed cast representing a female POC in a position of strength and power. Casting a movie with 4 protagonists focused on the chemistry of two of them, especially when the written relationship is supposed to be estranged and awkward establishes a relationship confusing for the audience. This is made worse by the sheer popularity of the actresses in question, because their relationship in previous films naturally emanated humor. Honest Trailers mentioned the lack of character development in the form of referencing “every character playing the comedic relief at the same time”, and this isn’t an entirely false accusation. The writing of this movie pretty consistently felt like it was making jokes, with the only dialogue ebb and flow occurring from changing subject matter as opposed to changing the style of the dialogue, which struggles to maintain the attention of the audience. The casting director of Ghostbusters suffered due to a fundamental lack of understanding of the relationship between audience perception of performer chemistry and the plotline significance of a LACK (and I cannot emphasize that word enough, because a lack of chemistry can be just as important as good chemistry) of chemistry.
While the concept of Ghostbusters might have been okay, even with the gender-bend (because hating a movie for taking a new direction with the cast gender is just stupid), the executives behind it picked a target audience without understanding what that target audience wanted to see, and while simultaneously forgetting the influence die-hard fans of the cult-classic from so long ago.
