Crossing the Streams Again
Ghostbusters is one of those films I carry in my body rather than my memory. Not the plot—the texture of it. The Ecto-1 turning a corner in Manhattan. The green slime. Bill Murray’s absolute refusal to take anything seriously while the world ends around him. I probably saw it first when I was too young to understand half the jokes and old enough that it hardwired something permanent.
The setup is almost absurdly tight: three disgraced parapsychologists—Venkman, Stantz, Spengler—get fired from their university and open a ghost-removal business in New York. Business is slow until the city starts crawling with paranormal activity and suddenly they can barely keep up. The climax involves a Sumerian god of destruction, a devotee who designed an entire Art Deco skyscraper as a dimensional gateway, and a giant marshmallow man on a rooftop in midtown. It shouldn’t work as well as it does.
When a teaser dropped in early 2019 for a third film—directed by Jason Reitman, son of original director Ivan Reitman—I was cautious in the exact way you’re always cautious when something you love gets exhumed. The 2016 reboot hadn’t connected with me, and Hollywood’s relationship with legacy sequels is spotty at best. But the teaser was atmospheric in a way I didn’t expect: an old farmhouse, dust, something mechanical waking up in the dark. It felt like it was treating the source material with genuine care rather than just strip-mining it for nostalgia revenue.
Whether it would actually work was impossible to know from ninety seconds of footage. Legacy sequels almost always disappoint in direct proportion to how much you wanted them. The original belongs to a very specific moment—mid-eighties New York, a particular flavor of sardonic comedy—and that moment is not reproducible. All you can really hope for is that the new thing is good on its own terms. That Reitman Jr. grew up with this material in his blood rather than in a pitch document seemed like at least a partial guarantee. Still not sure it’s enough.