obijkenobi
Member
I finally got a chance to watch Ghostbusters 2016 (the extended cut) and I was horribly disappointed. Ghostbusters is my favorite film of all time and it felt like I was watching a bad parody of Ghostbusters.
The biggest disappointment was the change of style of humor. Ghostbusters has a lot of subtle, smart humor while 2016 completely changes the style, going for more in your face and dumb humor. 1984 felt like something that could of happened in the real world if ghosts existed and the tech to trap them did, but 2016 didn't.
So many things made it feel like a parody. From the very beginning one of the Ghostbusters wanted the pants of someone who soiled himself when he saw a ghost, but why would anyone want that? It felt like an obvious parody or tribute to the 1884 Ghostbusters collecting slime, but slime would of been useful to them since it would of helped them with their ghost research.
So many of the characters were extremely stupid or acted extremely stupid. I'm not sure how Kevin was supposed to function as an adult. He's an obvious parody of the dumb blond secretary trope but Janine wasn't a dumb blond secretary. Erin wants to prove to Bill Murry's character that ghosts are real so badly that she lets the one ghost they catch in the entire movie free, only to have it kill him and then have the police that question them make jokes about ghosts in movies. So many things like that just don't feel like something that would happen in real life.
The equipment and how they react to it is also very inconsistent, which is really annoying and again something you would see in a parody. The proton packs seem to do a lot of damage, but they don't have any problem firing them at a ghost when other Ghostbusters are running down the same hallway, or standing around testing them in an alley and just barely moving out of the way of the proton streams. They also need to catch the ghost at the concert but at the end they're just whipping them around and making them disappear.
There were some good things. I liked the focus on building the tech which was something a little bit different from the original, even though most of the plot points are very similar to the first. I also liked how the villain wasn't just Gozar, but he felt really under developed. I have no idea why he was able to build a ghost amplifying machine or why he because such a powerful ghost (maybe the machine did it?) I also though the cast had good chemistry together and probably could of made a good movie if they weren't given such a bad parody script.
I redboxed the movie today for my girlfriend and I and this was our reaction for the most part. I was surprised she disliked it more than I did because she loves McCarthy. I think part of her disappointment is that she really wanted it to be better than what it was.
It wasnt "ruin my childhood" but its not a movie I would watch again if I saw it on TV while flipping channels.