Ghostbusters (Paul Feig, 2016)
As possibly the most controversial member of this forum, I feel as though it is my duty to review the most controversial movie of the year. First, a few notes on the politics of the situation:
- The furious backlash to this movie was absolutely predominantly sexist in nature. I don't believe that even half of the people ranting about it were anything more than casual fans of the original film beforehand.
- No, the backlash did not begin when that abysmal trailer was released. It began long before then, when it was revealed that the movie would star women.
- If the real grievance was that they were remaking a beloved geek property, then where was the backlash to the remakes of Total Recall and RoboCop? Both of those movies were far more beloved by the "reddit demographic," so to speak, than Ghostbusters, being super-violent, R-rated, manly action films, and their remakes had shitty trailers leading to lousy films with toothless PG-13 ratings. I don't recall the Internet going up in arms about them.
- None of the vitriol from Paul Feig and the cast regarding the backlash was directed at Ghostbusters fans in general. They explained they were talking about the assholes bombarding the Internet with misogynistic commentary.
- Getting another movie with the original cast was never, ever going to happen. Bill Murray had made it very clear on multiple occasions that he had no interest in ever making another one, no matter how much money they dangled in front of him.
- Speaking of Murray, no, Sony did not threaten to sue him to get him to appear in the film. That idea was mentioned in an email from December 2013, long before the form of the movie they eventually went with was in production.
- And speaking of Sony, the conspiracy theory the Internet has come up with about how Sony drummed up all the controversy by deleting all the non-sexist comments on the trailer and it was their plan from the start to turn it into a political football is just insane, and I've lost a lot of respect for Red Letter Media for diving into that well so eagerly. I mean, Sony is a shitty studio, no argument there, but to think that they have nothing better to do than try to shape a narrative about an upcoming movie by spending what would have to have been thousands of hours on fucking YouTube, manipulating the comments there? Is that really so much easier to believe than the fact that there are a lot of sexist people on the Internet?
With all that out of the way, it's time to talk about the movie itself. It's bad. Not as horrendous as the trailer made it out to be, but still pretty bad. The best thing it has going for it is the cast, who put their all into making the movie work, and the few laughs I had were due entirely to their efforts. But there's only so much that a talented comedian (comedienne?) can do to elevate weak material, and the jokes they're saddled with here are fucking lame. They're shitcom-level bad, and that is not a comparison that I make lightly. There are way too many jokes that just keep on going long after they stop being funny, too. You can do that once or twice in a movie, and it's funny because it's unexpected to the audience, but here, they do it probably about a dozen times. For example, there's a gag where Kristen Wiig's character, having been fired from her job, walks down the hallway carrying her things and awkwardly tries to make small talk with everyone she sees while trying to hide the fact that she's been fired. That could be funny if it were just a few seconds establishing her embarrassment and lame attempts at saving face. But it just keeps going on and on and on. She awkwardly greets one former co-worker, who pointedly ignores her, then another, and another, and another. Fucking cut already! We get it!
The movie's special effects also deserve mention, because it's amazing how visuals as shitty as these could be so expensive. I don't know what they were trying to go for with the look of these ghosts. Did they want them to look funny? Scary? Visually unique? Well, they're none of those. They just look garish, and they're very poorly integrated with the rest of the movie. It doesn't help that the film does a terrible job of hiding the fact that the cast clearly had no idea what it was that their characters were supposed to be seeing and interacting with. The way they carry themselves when ghosts are supposed to be nearby, their expressions never changing in response to what the ghosts are doing, things like that give it away. I get it; it's tough directing actors when you have a green screen and effects that are going to be added after the filming is complete. Some directors just aren't suited to that sort of work, and Feig is clearly one of them. He wasn't chosen to direct this because Sony thought he had a particular aptitude for
Ghostbusters or big-budget blockbusters; he was chosen because they decided to go with a female cast. Not that a different director would necessarily have made for much of an improvement, though. Really, there was no need to try and make this a huge blockbuster with an enormous budget to begin with. They could have toned down the effects heavily and aimed at a lower bar with a far more reasonable budget. It's first and foremost a comedy, after all. People watch it to laugh, not to see the thrilling battles and explosions. Why bother going big and having to compete with all the capeshit out there?
On the notion of this movie receiving fairly positive reviews overall. Do I think the gender controversy perhaps played a role in this, encouraging some critics to be kinder to the film than they ordinarily would have been? Yes, actually. Kind of like the opposite of
Apocalypto, where critics bent over backwards to twist some sort of racist or fascist meaning out of the film to fit with the narrative that Mel Gibson was an evil Nazi who couldn't possibly have any genuine artistic talent. I'm not mad about it, though. For one thing, it's nobody's fault but the pre-release, pre-trailer haters that the movie ever became a political football to begin with. For another, the shilling didn't do much good, as the movie underperformed at the box office. And finally, the reaction on reddit when the positive reviews came in that fateful day was truly hilarious, far more so than I could have reasonably expected this movie to be. So I guess the movie did entertain me well enough, in its own way.
tl;dr: idk, sexism or something