Postby Squigsquasher » Mon Oct 10, 2016 2:02 pm
Part of me wants to watch this movie to see how bad it really is, but I'll only do so if I can pirate it as I outright refuse to pay as much as a penny towards it. So let's focus on what can be gathered from the movie without actually having to watch the bloody thing.
First of all...why? Why did we need a new Ghostbusters at all? The first one was superb, the second one was nowhere near as good but still not without its good bits, the cartoon was a lot of fun, and IIRC the game was really good, and widely praised as the Ghostbusters 3 we never got. The franchise didn't NEED rebooting. It was fine as is. It should have been left to rest. The only reason it was resurrected at all was because Sony thought they could tap into the nostalgia market and suck the cash from moviegoers' wallets.
Which brings me onto the second point: The marketing for this film was awful. Quite frankly the film could have been the End of Evangelion of comedies and I'd have boycotted it with how shittily it was marketed. Let's recap; we have a franchise that hasn't been relevant for years and whose main appeal will be nostalgia. So what do they do? Market it as a generic "progressive" "quirky" comedy that replaces all the Ghostbusters with literally who's for...reasons, and then accuse everyone who so much as lifts a finger in protest of being a "muhsojinist" and THEN claim that the original movie wasn't that good anyway and people who came to see Ghostbusters to see more, uh, Ghostbusters, are "stuck in the past" and "need to accept that Ghostbusters has been reclaimed from the dudebro genre".
OK, let's stop right there Mary Sue, Huffington Post and whatever other useless rags were paid off to shill this movie. Firstly, if you're going to make a movie whose primary selling point is nostalgia, it helps not to insult the original source material and those who liked it- ESPECIALLY not when the source material is as undeniably good as it is. Secondly, "dudebro" is not a movie genre. Thirdly, how in the flying fuck do you manage to perceive GHOSTBUSTERS as a "dudebro" movie!?!?!?!? It's about a bunch of dorky down-on-their-luck guys in need of a job, who set up their own business using their nerdiness to their advantage. And finally, even if it WERE a "dudebro" movie (whatever the fuck that is)...so what? Who gives a shit? Is a movie that appeals to young men (or in the case of Ghostbusters, people who grew up in the 80s/have good taste in movies) some kind of threat to society? Why does it need "reclaiming"? It's not like it was ever "stolen" in the first place! If you want a quirky progressive all-female supernatural comedy then why not do something original and make your own movie rather than trying to piggyback off the success of a movie you clearly don't like anyway? And I'm not even going to touch on the responses to people who dared to openly criticize the movie without the blessed shield of anonymity, for the sake of avoiding a massive flamewar.
Now, let's look at the elements of the film that were known to many before the movie was even out. We had an all-new, all-female cast, with the original surviving Ghostbusters reduced to mere cameos. We're not off to a good start at all, are we? Now I'm no director, but I would have thought it would have made more sense to have one of the original Ghostbusters in the team as a mentor figure, with 3 newbies- 1, maybe 2 of which should have been female. I don't object to female Ghostbusters on principle, but making them all female just screamed "progressive-bait gimmick". Heck, there was a female Ghostbuster in the cartoon, why not introduce her? Or have Janine Potts the snarky secretary take up the proton pack as a badass old girl? Then there's the matter of the effects. They're all (from what I've seen) pretty shitty CGI. Now personally I'd have preferred it if they'd used the stop-motion puppets transplanted into the film ala the originals, but I can understand that that takes time. What is unforgivable is that the main bad ghost is...the Ghostbusters logo. Come on Paul. And to make matters worse? Rather than the epic showdown we got in the original movie, he's defeated...by a shot to the crotch. Because grrrrrrl power apparently.
So we have questionable motives for rebooting the franchise in the first place, abysmal marketing, stupid creative decisions, comically missing the point of how they were supposed to make money in the first place, and a complete disregard for the people they were supposed to be selling the film to. There's enough here to dismiss it as a trainwreck right off the bat. And this is before I've even seen the film. Oh dear.
Oh, and on top of all that? It committed the cardinal sin of reboots- it's just called "Ghostbusters". Not "Ghostbusters 3" or Ghostbusters Resurrection" or whatever. Just "Ghostbusters". STOP DOING THIS.
I will get round to watching this disaster eventually, and when I do I'll report back with my feelings. But I have to say, I'm not optimistic.
Here lies Squigsquasher.
2013-2017.