Ghostbusters 2016 – A Post Analysis Review

A film, an icon to many who've come to admire it and recite many of the lines from it's era, was remade into a load of shit. I thought I wouldn't be so crude but I have to when it came to the new Ghostbusters 2016. At first I felt I must approach this with a sound reason and argument about the merits of the film but as I got to that line, both figuratively and literally, there had to be no sugarcoating the film. With a running time of one hour and fifty six minutes, did I laugh one time? No! Did I register a smirk? No! I was expecting this film to warm up after the first fifteen minutes to get its sea legs and find its rhythm but that never happened. It just kept plodding along.

I went to the Internet bible to the film industry, IMDB, to see what the average person had to say about the film because I wanted to be sure first that I wasn't imagining things and my criticism wasn't being jaded. Well, there were many and the first page held a good sampling with what I had observed. IMDB have star ratings ranging from one to ten. Everyone one of those reviews had given Ghostbusters 2016 a rating of one star and that's the lowest it can go. So I find it amazing that overall the film scored a 5.6 review. Clearly some of those must be people who work for the studios salting the reviews.

Paul Feig and Katie Dippold wrote this malicious mess of a script and Paul Feig directed it. At some point, Columbia Pictures must have had some warnings about this film? The trailer for the film was released on YouTube and it received the highest negative comments of any film trailer that was ever released on YouTube, And then the comments came in and those comments were attributed to misogyny because the film was led by an all female cast. That's debatable because one of the arguments was that chicks aren't funny. They can be with the right material as some of this cast has experienced.

The film has problems, a lot of problems. One major problem is that it had big shoes to fill. This movie was a toddler's size 3 trying to fill in a man's size 11. And I would like to also stipulate that I don't fault the cast. It's the job you are given. You do the best you can with the material that you are given and that material was a big heaping steaming fly swarming load of crap. So you have four women, three who are scientist and white and one who is black and uneducated and a walking stereotype. She worked for the MTA as a booth operator. You may not see it this way but there was the flavor of racism with her part. The thing that stood out for me was her language or rather her use of the language compared to her fellow actresses. It stood out like a sore thumb that she used the word “ain't”. That bothered me because once again, the black person must speak like this all the time because it would be uncool to depict a black person with any level of education and that's why they must always speak with the ignorance that comes with have no education. And it's not about “speaking white” as some tends to fall to in this argument. The dialogue with the other cast is just as bad because the film is peppered with cliches and non-sequitur that don't make any sense. It did nothing to move the script along or add to the meaning of the scene.

Originally I thought did film was to pick up from what the original had done but after seeing cameos from the original cast, it was a blown opportunity to embrace the old with the new. Instead we get Bill Murray, I guess, getting killed and Ernie Hudson in the mortuary business. The music even sucked. At least create your own music instead of remaking the original into an ear splitting fiasco.

And while some talked about those who had their negative opinions and the implications of misogyny, let's talk about the misandry. Chris Hemsworth portrays the adequately stupid receptionist. He's even more than an imbecilic moron, he's the walking dumb with a six-pack. He's playing the Annie Potts character and if the same had been done to her when she took the role, the women advocacy groups would have shut the film down for depicting her as an airhead. Annie brought a sense of purpose to the role and defined it with honor. She was no buffoon at all but Chris is an embarrassment so why does his role gets accepted without a whisper of controversy? Some would say so what, but if we are to move forward in our society, we can't keep throwing back to old vestiges and stereotypes and expect them to be overlooked for the sake of some lame comedy.

Watching this film wasn't a fun watch. With the original, you had lines you could quote, “He slimmed me!”; “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together”; “Don't cross the streams.”; “That's gotta be some cockroach.” See, that was a fun film. There were no lines worth quoting with Ghostbusters 2016 because it wasn't fun to experience and there lies the crust with some films today, you jut don't have the fun experience anymore. I thought the Kate McKinnon character would be a fun watch but it was just the opposite. The lines she kept spewing out were too much of gibberish that she and Kristen Wiig kept describing when it came to the equipment and soon that became just white noise. At the end of the film I was hoping for some silly outtakes that Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy is known for but even that let me down. None of it was funny. How do you make a classic original comedy and turn it into a liquefied diarrhea filled slog fest of savage abdominal pain turning your hole raw in the process and expect people to be entertained. You don't.