The new Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire movie is out, and fans are wondering what to make of the new installment of this tired franchise. It feels like the previous entry in the oddly handled Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which didn’t get a very warm reception from stalwart fans or anyone in particular, but it must have done well enough all told to warrant a sequel.
For my part, I enjoyed Ghostbusters: Afterlife for what it was while fully acknowledging the rampant issues with nostalgia overload, sometimes contrived occasions for callbacks, and a nearly token inclusion of the original Ghostbusting team.
What the film did right, for me, was achieve a cozy vibe that, while not particularly derived from the original films, felt appropriate for the Ghostbusters world. The creep factor was solid, mostly due to the characters’ being drawn into the mystery of their benign farmhouse haunting.
The theme of intergenerational connection also worked for me. It culminated in a sweet moment between grandfather and granddaughter that I thought worked well as a tribute to the lost but beloved Harold Ramis as Egon.
While the comedy was lacking in comparison to the lightning in a bottle that was the first Ghostbusters movie, and to a lesser extent the second, Afterlife was ‘cute’ enough, and Phoebe’s character, in particular, was charming enough that the very late sequel was able to become its own thing.
All that said, and plot issues and various flaws aside, Afterlife turned out to be a movie that I think about every once in a while and can just throw on for kicks.
Frozen Empire, unfortunately, doesn’t quite hit that same spot.
Plot:
The plot of this sequel to Afterlife, which also specifically references Ghostbusters 2 a few times, is the sudden appearance of an ancient artifact used as a mystical ghost trap containing a wickedly evil god. Phoebe gets swept up in the spirit’s plans to escape, not just as a Ghostbuster but also because of her involvement with another ghost that appears to her at random.
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Along the way, other characters get their own B, C, D, et cetera plots, but once again, and deservedly so, Phoebe is the heart of the movie. This is one of the choices the writers got right. Another good choice was bringing in Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz as a full-on supporting character and not just a cameo.
The film’s stated goal was to channel some elements of the legendary The Real Ghostbusters cartoon into this, and those elements are obvious when they appear and are some of the most interesting bits of the movie, apart from the better characters.
The Big Bad could absolutely be something out of a cartoon episode, along with a small variety of other ghosts and a large variety of gadgets and gizmos. The science of Ghostbusting, with the now rich Winston Zeddemore as an angel investor, is growing, and the laboratory he’s built and stocked with Ghost Engineers is one of the more interesting settings.
Overall it’s a pretty basic plot, but not a bad one at its core, with the threat of a very powerful monster, his accidental release, and bracing to resist his attack while planning to capture him once again.
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The main thing that gets in the way here is that there are too many characters to follow in the way the writers have chosen to follow them. If we had cut perhaps a half hour off the movie, that would go a long way toward fixing issues with the plot’s pace, but a tighter rewrite would be preferable. I’ll get to that later.
As-is, the plot just never gains a real sense of momentum, and the film feels like something that’s earnest and has heart but just doesn’t have enough energy to grab you.
Character:
Again, there are way too many Ghostbusters in this movie. Phoebe’s family are Ghostbusters. Winston has a crew including one of the characters from Afterlife. The three remaining original busters are here too, and even Jeanine straps on a proton blaster!
Too much.
Then, we get mini-arcs for what feels like almost all of them, none of which are particularly compelling or complete, and which actually steal much-needed screen time from Phoebe’s (spoiler….) friendship with a ghost. Another time stealer is the hereditary keeper of the haunted orb, who keeps trying to be funny but can’t quite get there.
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Slimer is here too, which gets a cheer at first, but then he doesn’t really figure in, and he’s not a friend but merely a nuisance. If we’re channeling the cartoon, he needed to both help out and do some baby talk! Heck, he even drove Luis in a bus in G2.
I liked the setup for Phoebe’s story well enough, but it didn’t get enough time to develop. And Ray could have had a fuller arc concerning his own issues of age and level of involvement that Winston brings up at the last minute. These two bits and the notion of expanding the Ghostbusters’ presence and arsenal were the elements with the most promise, and they just weren’t delivered on.
Frozen Empire almost coasts by on the strength of Phoebe’s character and the familiarity and likeability of Ray… almost, but not quite.
Craft:
The writing, unfortunately, feels like a well-intentioned and optimistic film school fan-fiction script with way too many kitchen sinks thrown in for its own good. The attempts at dialing up the comedy just don’t work because every joke is the same type of 2010s humor, which no one thinks is funny now and also didn’t then. The cozy vibe of Afterlife was a much better call, but it might not have been possible to keep that with this story being set in NYC.
The plot is cluttered, and the characters aren’t given the time they need to achieve what the story wants. There’s a strong sense that someone along the way said, “Yes, you can channel the cartoon, but only thiiiiiss much,” while holding up their thumb and forefinger to indicate something tiny.
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That said, you can really feel Aykroyd’s influence on the world of the movie. He still wants to expand the Ghostbusters universe into something much larger, and I get the sense that if he could make something more like his original Ghostbusters script, where busting makes us feel good in outer space, he would. Maybe these movies will keep doing well enough for him to get there, who knows!
My fix? Strip the whole thing down to 1. Phoebe makes friends with the plot’s convenient ghost while fleshing out her angst with her current limitations in life and trying to embrace her calling as a buster. Spoken in teenager voice: “Why won’t you guys let me do anything?”
And 2. Ray dealing with the fact he just can’t bust anymore the way he used to, and maybe it’s not so good that he’s spending all his time shopping around for more wicked artifacts.
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Make these two the core of the story, reduce all the side plots, cut the one about the completely unnecessary ‘Firemaster,’ and let the side characters just be there for the fun scenes and incidental support. Make Slimer the troublesome friend he was in the cartoon, including a clash with his frenemy Venkman, and enjoy the bonus effect of actually making the kids (and some adults) in the audience laugh at his comic relief!
So did I like the movie? Sort of. I appreciated everything that felt sufficiently Ghostbuster-y, and I fully accept Phoebe as the head of the next generation should they choose to continue following her. But overall it was pretty mid, which made it easy for me to go more ‘hard mode’ in this review than I did in my last one.
Some people commented on my Rebel Moon Writer Reaction video that I was going too easy on the movie. Fair. I was writing from a POV of insisting on having fun with it and not taking no for an answer. For all its hundreds of flaws, it was still generally more engaging than this movie by sheer virtue of energy.
I guess it’s time to recharge those proton packs…
What do you think about the new movie, are you interested in it or could you care less? Let us know in the comments!
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I enjoy this review. I agree with the too many characters. It didn’t feel disjointed, but I felt it took away from the ending ghost fight. I also agree with the adjustment you would have made. Overall, I enjoy it, but not at the level of Afterlife. I reckon the next film (if there is one) shouldn’t spend time on the set-up of characters since it’s already established. We shall see.