Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Since Austria is going into a complete lockdown on Monday, we thought it would be nice to go to the cinema one last time. Ghostbusters: Afterlife had just been released and so we took the chance to even watch it in OV 😅

The story mostly takes place in the small, fictional town of Sommerville in Oklahoma. Egon Spengler has moved there many years ago but is killed in the opening scene by a ghost. His daughter (who has two kids on her own by now) learns of his death and plans to go to Egon’s farm when she’s evicted from her apartment (not being all that good with money seems to run in the family). Trevor, her older son, and Phoebe, her young daughter, are not all that happy to move but eventually find themselves in Egon’s derelict farm and with a mandate to attend summer school or do some vacation jobbing.

Curious, Phoebe stumbled upon an old laboratory hidden under the farm with basically the complete ghostbuster equipment. While messing around with it together with her new friend “Podcast” (because he has a podcast with… pretty much one subscriber) they stumble upon their first ghost and from that point everything goes downhill…

I went into the movie not expecting much. The trailer looked entertaining but that’s about it. What I got were highly enjoyable 2 hours with lots of nostalgia and fan service paired with some really funny dialogues and great acting. Logan Kim as Podcast was just amazing and don’t get me started on how great Mckenna Grace played Phoebe. Paul Rudd as summer school teacher who just wants to do some science and therefore puts his students behind a VHS player full with old horror movies was … Paul Rudd 😅

I was also glad that the fan service didn’t completely go overboard. Yes, there are lots of references back especially to the first movie and good old ECTO1 is also in there but the stars here are definitely Egon’s grandchildren and not the old crew (that also has their roles to play, though).

I just wish they’d have at least tried to build a bridge to the 2016 movie instead of completely ignoring it.