I like the villain, too, the "horny" demon god Garraka. We learn about him in a nice library scene in which Patton Oswalt appears only very briefly. Mostly it's Dan Aykroyd doing the storytelling--he's credited among the other castmembers of the original film only as a "special appearance" but I'd say he has more screentime than Finn Wolfhard or Carrie Coon. He was very clearly more up for this movie than anyone else and he's great. I was surprised by the number of biblical references he makes since Ray was the one in the original film who said he "never met" God. But he did know the Book of Revelation and that quiet moment in the car with Winston was one of the more genuinely creepy moments of the original film. The biblical references in movies of the '80s still had the impact of screening for a largely, if latently, religious audience. In his new movie, there's a whisper of that effectiveness which I think can be further exploited since, if the recent success of small religious films in the US is any indication, the US is not quite as atheistic as Hollywood tends to think it is.
Ray also briefly refers to the Japanese god of fire, Kojin, possibly the only moment that nodded to Sony. It wasn't a bad moment. Meanwhile, I'm not quite sold on this tie-in music video:
"Frozen Summer" is the title in Japan and I actually think it's a better title than "Frozen Empire". I think "Empire" is supposed to be a reference to New York as the "Empire State" but I don't even think most Americans would get that right away, let alone anyone in Japan.
Anyway, when Garraka's past is explained, there's a sort of faux-stop motion mural. I wish instead they'd have used footage of unmoving artefacts to give it the sense of a remote past. You have to create a real sense of death, the impenetrability of it, that fuels the malevolence of ghosts jealous of the living.
A lot of people are talking about the vaguely lesbian romance between McKenna Grace's character and the ghost of a 16 year old girl. Honestly, calling it lesbian is really reading into it, it says more about the culture than the movie itself. I mean, if you want to look at it that way, that's great, I hope you enjoy it, but there's nothing really romantic in it that gets off the ground. It would've been nice--the film could've used some romance. I say that even though it's overstuffed with subplots. Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon are totally wasted. As the two working, defacto Ghostbusters, it would've been great if we'd had a few scenes of them answering a call, nailing a ghost, and then haggling over payment. Coon's character would've been great at that. I could see the dynamic of Rudd leading the way when strategising on how to take out a ghost, and then Coon taking over when it came to squeezing a client for payment. It would've been a whole lot better than the cliche stepdad subplot.
The movie's much more enjoyable as a supernatural adventure film than as a comedy--the difference, again, recalling the contrast between the first film and the animated series. There's a new Ghostbusting research team that includes English comedian James Acaster and he had one line that made me laugh due to its excellent dry delivery. But 95% of the rest of the film's effective comedy came from Kumail Nanjiani and Bill Murray. Nanjiani gets a lot of the kind of mercenary huckster dialogue the Ghostbusters ought to have had. Murray plays Venkman as the same old asshole. A scene where he interviews Nanjiani to determine if he's human is just pure gold.
Otherwise, it's definitely a movie aimed at a younger audience than the bulk of the franchise fanbase but it's an enjoyable little romp.
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