I’m not that big of an animation person any more, but I’ve been excited to see this movie ever since I heard the Lin-Manuel Miranda was involved in the music. And I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, though not without reservation.
In Moana, the titular character is the daughter of her village’s chieftain, so will follow in his place as chief. There’s a blight that’s spread to their island, thanks to the mischievous demigod Maui having stolen the heart of the goddess Te Fiti. Moana embarks on a journey to find Maui and make him fix his mistake, and in so doing, takes her people back out onto the open ocean.
In all honesty, the main bits of this movie I wasn’t utterly charmed by involved Maui. The character felt very off, going from egotistical trickster to suddenly having a sort of angsty backstory to… justify him being a jerk, I guess. I make no claims to know how accurate or inaccurate he is to his legends (though I get the impression after some googling that he is upsettingly inaccurate), but he came across as a very standard sort of bully boy character who eventually makes good more because the script says so than because his character development makes that much sense.
There were also things I was puzzled about, like the Kakamora–evil little animated coconuts, as far as I could tell–showing up in a rig that looked like a homage to Mad Max: Fury Road. My only guess is it was a sequence created to justify a line of toys, because it really didn’t to anything in the movie. Though I actually did find them less offensive than the random troll things in Frozen, perhaps because they still somehow made more sense.
But aside from Maui (and that’s a big aside considering he’s the main supporting character to Moana), there is so much about the movie that I loved. I loved that Moana’s story doesn’t pivot on romance, but rather a quest to discover who she is, who her people are, and to save their way of life. I loved that Moana is a gorgeous brown girl that my nieces (who are also gorgeous brown girls) got to watch saving the day. Moana is truly their princess. I loved that Moana’s grandmother is a independent and happily odd old lady, who is her granddaughter’s spiritual guide. Grandma was the MVP of the film and tied with Moana for being my favorite character.
And then there was this:
Not ashamed to admit it: this song made me cry. Not because I was sad, but because I was so awed by the sheer ingenuity and beauty of humanity. This song is about the Polynesians traveling vast distances between islands in their voyaging canoes, which is one of those historic wonders that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. And reading more about this wonder lead me to find out about the Hōkūle’a Voyaging Canoe, which is a modern recreation of those ancient voyages.
I’m not too big into animated movies any more, but this was a good one and worth watching. If you want to read a bit further about the history of the Polynesian voyages (among other things), this was a good place to start: How does the story of Moana and Maui holds up against cultural truths?
Assassin’s Creed is utterly, delightfully bonkers as a movie. It’s really damning the movie with faint praise to say it’s probably the best video game film I’ve ever seen, but that’s one statement that it feels very fair to make.
In Assassin’s Creed, Michael Fassbender plays a being of pure manpain named Cal, who after being executed for murder finds that it was all a massive fake-out. He’s now prisoner in a facility run by the Templars, an organization so secretive that they put their logo on everything, including the outside of the giant building they own in Spain. The Templars also really hate the fact that humans have free will. Templar scientist Sofia (Marion Cotillard) uses Cal to search for the free-will McGuffin “the Apple of Eden” by using his “genetic memory” to make him relive the life of his ancestor Aguilar from 500 years ago and sticking him on the end of a giant mechanical arm that shakes him around like a ragdoll.
The concept of the film is quite stupid. I think, honestly, it’s meant to be stupid. You either nope out of the film because your disbelief can’t handle this level of suspension after the first ten minutes, or get over the stupidness threshold of the plot. At which point you are free to enjoy the absolutely batshit ride that involves Michael Fassbender being flung around at the end of a mechanical arem while loudly singing, or very memorably, stripping off his shirt for a protracted sequence for no reason other than he presumably knew I would be watching the movie. (Thank you Mr. Fassbender, by the way.)
And it’s a very pretty batshit ride, by the way. There’s an excellent contrast in the cool pallet of colors used in the “modern” sequences versus the warm in the memories. All of the assassin parkour nonsense is a pleasure to watch. This is a film that’s easy to enjoy on purely aesthetic levels, particularly when those aesthetic levels keep you from screaming every time the nonsensical genetic memory thing gets brought up.
I haven’t played the Assassin’s Creed games myself, though now I’m a bit tempted to try. The friends I saw the movie with reported that they were very pleased that the movie used the mythos but had its own story rather than trying to directly rehash one of the games. They were also happy to report that the modern-time sequences that insisted on punctuating the lengthy sequences of Michael Fassbender and Ariane Labed free running through fake medieval Spain were at least less boring than the ones in the game. So good for that.
Looking back on the movie, I’m pretty sure that it passes the Bechdel-Wallace test handily, thanks to a couple of the villains having a chat about their plans for humanity. I was actually pretty surprised just how many women there were in the movie. The apparent head of the evil organization is an older woman; Sofia is in charge of the project that’s using Cal and the other descendants of assassins. Maria (Labed) is a joy to watch, and I’d like to know when we’re going to get her movie. Michelle H. Lin gets a pretty significant chunk of screen time in the modern-day bits of the movie. The cast also wasn’t entirely Wonderbread white, and I want to call on Michael K. Williams as Moussa as a particular favorite.
It’s not a good movie, but it’s definitely a fun movie, and in its own way felt less soulless than a lot of scifi action movies I’ve watched lately. It is beautifully and unabashedly what it is.
Another transatlantic flight, another round of movies watched because I can’t sleep and find it utterly impossible to work on my laptop in the extremely limited space available in economy.
The Girl With All the Gifts: This movie shows the British still reign supreme in zombie cinema. And this one with a twist, where the main character isn’t a survivor, but a second generation infected girl who may be the key to the development of a vaccine for the infection—if the involved survivors can be reconciled to treating her as an object rather than a person. Weird, gorgeous, creepy, and utterly heartbreaking. Do yourself a favor and see this movie. It’s already out in the UK, and should be released in the US in February. If there’s any justice in the world, this film will get nominated for a Hugo, but I fear the confusion over release dates (2016 in the UK, 2017 in the US) and the fact that it’s not a major franchise will probably scuttle its chances.
The Secret Life of Pets: I mostly liked this for how all of the cats acted, not going to lie–particularly Max’s friend with that immortal and fundamentally cat like, “As your friend you should know I don’t care about you or your problems.” The plot, such as it was, didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense and just had the characters careening around between random bits. Glad I didn’t bother seeing it in the theater, but I’d still take this one over Frozen any day of the week. Plus, thank you for a dog movie that doesn’t involve a protracted fart joke scene.
Far From the Madding Crowd (2015): I wanted to like this, because I’m honestly a bit trash for romance stories of this sort. The problem was, I didn’t really get an impression of chemistry between any of the characters. (And I really, really didn’t get why everyone was so about Bathsheba, other than Frank wanting her money.) So it was a decent enough movie, but I just felt disappointed because I wanted more.
Edge of Winter: A thriller that could be subtitled “the dangers of toxic masculinity.” A divorced, emotionally volatile dad takes his kids out to teach them how to be men (eg: shooting a gun, making fun of each other for crying) and then escalates to outright kidnapping when he finds out that their mom and stepdad are planning to move. There’s some good acting, it’s got a deliberate and creepy buildup, and the realism of the situation really adds to it. But goddamn the score was aggravating. For example, we hear the dad tell his son, “listen to that, you can hear every little sound” in the woods as the soundtrack goes BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Stop trying to help.
I started watching this movie because it was late, I had two hours of tutoring to go, access to Netflix, and it looked like I wouldn’t have to think about it too hard. Basically, I was right. If something that’s basically an hour and a half long episode of Law & Order: SVU but with a slight (if predictable) twist sounds appealing, it’s not a bad way to go. If you’ve had enough of police procedurals that involve serial murder and/or rape, then skip it. Simple enough. (Also, there will be more mentions of rape and some discussion later in this review, so also feel free to skip.)
The plot is pretty basic. Detective Nick Hopewell (Aaron Ashmore) is a new transfer to Homicide and on everyone’s shit list because he helped Internal Affairs takes down some crooked cops in his last department. He meets crime scene cleaner Morgan Sher (Devin Kelly) when she shows up early to the scene of a murder. Morgan shows an uncanny understanding of the crime scene and finds a useful clue that Nick’s dickish partner wants to ignore. As more murders occur, Nick teams up with Morgan to try to find the killer, and they dive deeper into the increasingly creepy relationship between the victims, who were once accused of being involved in some kind of rape cult.
I’m not going to spoil the little twist, but I’m sure you can figure it out for yourself based on the above summary. It’s decently acted and shot; nothing really jumped out at me for good or ill. And I will say that it contained one very SVU-esque exchange that I was glad for:
Nick: I don’t think Adam really likes women.
Morgan: Well, I don’t think anyone who rapes women likes them.
Nick: Good point.
Nice reminder to the audience that rape isn’t about desire. Swept Under has that same problematic internal conflict that I see in SVU, where there’s an uncomfortable tug of war between media once again telling stories on the bodies of women—with bonus harmful stereotype perpetuation—while still having startling, marked moments of clearly stating that rape is not the fault of the victim and the importance of consent. (I recently read a piece that argued the worst part of SVU is that it lives in a universe where rape culture doesn’t exist and the police actually take rape seriously while pretending to be reality-based.) SVU has had its better and much worse moments at this (eg the false rape accusation episodes) and it’s weirdly one of my comfort watch shows even though I know it’s deeply problematic. Swept Under probably falls on the middling to better end of that SVU spectrum, for what it’s worth.
Though notably, this movie fails to pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, which many SVU episodes do by grace of having more than one female cast member. Morgan was awash in a sea of white dudes. (The one tech-savvy African-American police officer was a welcome island of color in a limitless field of Miracle Whip for the twenty seconds he was on screen.)
Really, the problem that I had with Swept Under was that it goes from Nick wanting to work with Morgan because of her insight to him also wanting to date her. I really could have done without that subplot, and it was entirely unnecessary in my opinion—even to the end of the movie. If nothing else, it perpetuates the bullshit idea that men and women can’t manage to work together without it being some kind of sexual thing, and that relationships built on mutual trust and caring aren’t strong enough unless they’re romantic. It also really bothered me how Nick pivoted from respecting Morgan’s insight to being insistent about dating her—it started feeling like that was his real reason for wanting to work with her.
Ugh.
Other than that, Morgan and Nick were likeable enough characters, and I don’t regret crocheting a significant portion of a scarf while watching it. Plus it has a title that’s reaching me levels of badness, so I’ve got to love that. Solid Meh+.
Jason Bourne is in a foreign country doing things that guys do when they have manpain. He just wants to be left alone. Then a shadowy part of the US government, headed by [old white guy] decides to do something sketchy that sets up the overly convoluted B-plot and also decides that this time he is going to get Jason Bourne. [competent female character] who assisted Bourne in the previous movie, has something important to tell him. Just then a government hit squad shows up and chases Bourne and [competent female character] through [country that has been in the news recently enough that American audiences might recognize it]. Bourne is about to get away before the government spooks kill [competent female character] in front of him.
Now Jason Bourne is really peeved. Bourne embarks on a path of revenge and self-discovery in which he cleverly avoids the shadowy government agents while the familiar score by John Powell and David Buckley plays. [new competent female character], a government agent introduced slightly earlier in the movie as helping out [old white guy], gets put in charge of running the op to capture Bourne. Because gosh darnit, this time they are going to get Bourne to come in. For really reals.
Some stuff happens with the B-plot, which involves [current buzzwords such as “social media” and “privacy” or maybe “kale”]. No one really cares, because the B-plot is overly complex and poorly explained, and really just exists to get [old white guy] into a position where Bourne can foil his plot, confront him, and then shoot him.
Afterwards, Bourne finds out a little bit more about his past and gets in a fight with [agent from yet another secret government program that no one has heard of before now], who wants to murder Bourne because he has been ordered to do so and also maybe because murdering Jason Bourne sounds like a great way to spend an evening. There is an extended car chase, things blow up, and Jason Bourne limps away with his newly acquired [information about his past that is still not quite enough] while his opponent does not.
[new competent female character] attempts to contact him, and Bourne lets her know that he has been stalking her, only it’s cool instead of creepy because he’s an ex-spook rather than a sexual predator, and that he would really please like to be left alone this time. Or else. He means it.
A new remix of Moby’s Extreme Ways starts to play. Roll credits.
I’m still trying to figure out how to tell you about Arrival. What I can say other than it’s a movie that made me laugh with sheer delight as the plot came together, and then cry because at the end of a really awful week (election week) it made me feel hope for humanity. You really ought to see it.
But it’s hard for me to tell you in more detail what I liked about Arrival without seriously spoiling the plot, and it’s one where I want you to go into it unspoiled. I want you to have that same moment I did, when you realize where things are going, and it just makes you happy.
So what can I tell you?
The movie is absolutely gorgeous, for one. The shot where you first get a real look at the alien ship as it floats over the clouds in Montana is majestic and eerie. It’s not an effects/action extravaganza – a rare thing for scifi films these days, it feels like – but what they have is so well done. The moment where the characters go from Earth gravity to the strange, tilted gravity of the ship is eerie as well, an unexpected shift of perception.
Really, the inverted gravity of the alien ship rolls in with the plot, the shifting narrative to show the necessity of changing how we look at and understand the events of the film. The main character of the film, Louise (Amy Adams) is a linguist, so she’s very concerned with what is said versus what is understood, bridging perceptions. The explanations of what she does and why (such as why building a mutual vocabulary using written language is better than with spoken) are all fascinating – particularly to someone who isn’t very familiar with linguistics.
I also genuinely liked the character Donnelly, played by Jeremy Renner in a rare role where wears glasses to let us all know he’s an intellectual. Donnelly starts out as very cocky and sure of himself, but once Louise convinces him that communication is key and the best approach isn’t mathematical, he throws himself behind her efforts one hundred percent. It’s a character dynamic that’s particularly rare considering the gender split, and very enjoyable for that reason.
One of the main questions of the film is how humanity will deal with the arrival of aliens, a generally peaceful first contact. Will we come together, or will it tear us apart around already existent fault lines? The only fault that I can really find with the film is that after building up an intense and complicated international situation, the third act solution is a little too simple, a little too pat. The time travel bit of the story has the same sort of problems that many time travel plots have, which is that in the moment, it’s delightful, and then later as you think about it, the problems of a deterministic universe become apparent.
Of course, it’s a film that asks a lot more questions, about relationships, about what sort of journey makes the consequences worth it – about if you had a chance to do everything differently, would you still live the same life, even knowing how it all ends? These are all big, crunchy, human questions, and it explores them beautifully.
Full disclosure, I haven’t read the Ted Chiang story that the move is adapted from, Story of Your Life. After what I’ve heard from my fellow podcast hosts on Skiffy and Fanty, it’s definitely on my list.
If you need a beautiful, hopeful film, one that reminds you scifi film can be something other than explodey or tinged with existential horror, see Arrival. It’s probably the most thoughtful film scifi I’ve seen since Her.
I made it my goal to watch and review one new movie per week, so I wouldn’t have a recurrence of the complete lack of any content I had in September and October. Of course, little did I know that my first weekend post-goal setting would be November 4 & 5, which offered up a smorgasbord of movies I could not even give less of a shit about (pack led by Jack Reacher) with a seasoning of movies I refuse to watch – let alone give any money to – on the principle of the thing. (I’m looking at yo, Dr. Strange and The Accountant.)
HBO Now came to my rescue. I have cable for internet but don’t actually have it for TV, but my household decided that each of us ponying up $5 a month was worth getting access to HBO. I wanted it for the Westworld TV show, since I watched the movie last month for my Patreon subscribers and thought it had some really interesting concepts. I’ve watched the first episode now and I’m really excited to see more. I’m going to try to find the time to write about the episodes as I go, I think.
But anyway, this week’s movie.
Vice is a super expensive resort populated by androids (in this world, called cydroids for reasons I never really figured out) who get their memories reset every 24 hours. The patrons of the resort are invited to do anything they want to the androids. And then things go haywire, when one android goes rogue.
Familiar, right? More Westworld TV show than movie, since it’s not about a theme park eating its patrons. And rather than an old west theme park, Vice is deliberately a setting that’s contemporary to the world in which it resides. The movie actually opens with two patrons doing a bank robbery – it’s pretty clearly supposed to be live action GTA, including all the violence against women. With that setting, there’s a little bit of commentary on society. The cop Roy (Thomas Jane) talks about how people practice to commit crimes in Vice and then do them in the real world, particularly violent crimes against women. And it’s explicitly stated that the resort can really do what it wants because it brings in about half the city’s tax revenue. Now there’s a societal implication that could have had some real meat on it.
But the focus instead is on the android Kelly (Ambyr Childers), who through a glitch is able to remember at least portions of her supposedly erased past, most of it involving being murdered by various guests. She escapes, and then there’s a lot of action scenes, because Vice wants its rogue android back, and Kelly, with a few others, wants to take the resort down.
When I explain the plot like that, it sounds like a decently fun movie, right? The problem is that there isn’t much to either of the main characters to care about. Roy is weirdly greasy and incredibly unappealing. I kept waiting on the reveal for his traumatic past (lost his wife, maybe?) that would tell use why he constantly looked like he’d just come off a month-long bender. It never happened. He’s a cipher, whose motivations, while explained, feel extremely thin.
Of course, he still gets better treatment in the script than Kelly. Despite the fact that her supposed gain of self awareness is the turning point of the plot, Kelly herself is functionally a football that various male characters pass around to move things forward. She gets about five seconds of apparent change from a passive to active character, development that is completely unearned by the lack of something even as simple as a goddamn montage, and entirely indicated by her slicking her hair back and dressing in black leather. Set as it is against a backdrop of constant violence against women and a camera that is remarkably male gaze-y even for an action movie, it’s even more troubling.
If Vice had spent more time on plot and character and less time on its interminable, too-dark, and thoroughly generic gunfights, it might have been a decent film. Maybe. If it had also employed someone on the creative team actually, I don’t know, talking to a female human being for five minutes so that they would realize women are more than sexy robot lamps.
I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am that I’m only just now going to tell you how fucking amazing the new TheMagnificent Seven movie is. Because it is fucking amazing. If it’s still showing in your area, you should go see it while you still can.
Though I will add one important caveat: go in with the clear knowledge that this movie is a Western, and keeps with some of the very classic motifs. (Which is a remarkable and beautiful, multilayered thing when you consider it’s based on Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai, translated to a different era, a different genre.) The villain (Peter Sarsgaard as Bartholomew Bogue) is a scenery-chewing, cartoonish capitalist-as-black-hat. The heroes are super stoic and the character development isn’t exactly deep. It’s all about men (and a single woman) with guns, shooting their way to justice. There are some wonderful revisionist elements called forth by the casting, but it still plays to trope.
So basically, if you don’t like westerns, you’re not going to like this movie, even though it’s wonderful.
Weeks after watching the movie, when I’m having to check my notes to remember details I liked or didn’t, there are certain things that stick with me. One, it’s absolutely gorgeous. Antoine Fuqua draws out the rugged beauty of the Western landscape with breathtaking detail, including location shots in the Valles Caldera in New Mexico. It’s landscape porn at its finest. But even when the camera isn’t making love to he scrubby desert, so much detail in the shots of the people is perfect. The opening credits of the man in black (Denzel Washington and his glorious sideburns playing Chisolm) approaching through the wavering heat of the desert gave me chills.
But beyond all that stark beauty, it’s the casting that really hit me. Denzel Washington is amazing as the Chisolm, the marshal who has his own reasons for going into this fight. Byung-hun Lee as Billy Rocks stole every scene he was in. Faraday (Chris Pratt) and Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) better have a serious amount of fanfiction about them on AO3 or I’m going to question fandom’s dedication to slash. And Martin Sensmeier as Red Harvest stole every scene that Byung-hun Lee hadn’t gotten to first and brought a massive amount of depth to a character who said the least out of all seven.
Basically, they were all wonderful. And the act of casting so many men of color (four out of the seven) is one of the greatest revisionist acts of this version of The Magnificent Seven. It’s hopefully not a surprise to you at this point to hear that the classic Hollywood vision of the west is incredibly whitewashed, even just looking at the percentage of cowboys who were black or Hispanic. And that all four of the non-white characters are so integral to the story—the team up literally would not have happened without Chisolm at the helm, for example—shows Fuqua’s vision of creating a Western everyone can see themselves in.
(Well, everyone male, at least.)
Come for the landscapes, stay for the fucking amazing gunfights and Denzel Washington’s sideburns. You won’t be sorry.
This is a trend that’s been endemic since the first new Trek film and has only gotten worse with each movie. The original Trek movies always had their special effects moments, but it was always about the thematic story (even if it was a dumb story sometimes) with the action as a seasoning rather than the point. The new movies? Action set after action set piece with a thin connective tissue of something plot-like, normally driven by a villain who would have a more understandable motivation if they were a cardboard cut-out.
And this is the thing. I don’t dislike action movies. I like big, dumb, explodey movies as much as the next person, particularly when they have a thin veneer of science fiction over them to provide rule of cool physics. But those aren’t Star Trek movies. What always made Star Trek special was its philosophical heart and that the story tried–even if it failed sometimes–to be about something bigger than just blowing shit up.
It’s that heart that’s missing from Star Trek Beyond, just like in the other movies.
Probably the best metaphor for the film is Yorktown, the nonsensical, enormous space station that’s been built on the frontier of explored and is densely populated with aliens and humans (including Sulu’s husband and daughter) for reasons that are never explained. The station itself looks like a giant snow globe with a lattice work of open air linear cities built on tubes that star ships go through. There’s free flowing water and air. Every part of the lattice has its own individual gravity. It’s an beautiful design and makes absolutely no goddamn sense as anything that was made specifically to facilitate several interminable action set pieces. It actively aggravated me.
The plot, such as it is, begins and ends at Yorktown. The Enterprise arrives there after letting us know that Jim Kirk and Spock are having individual quarter life crises. An unknown ship comes out of the giant, unexplored nebula (which is apparently full of asteroids, we see later, okay then) and asks for help. Of course the Enterprise goes, and of course it ends up being a trap and of course the Enterprise gets destroyed yet again. The big bad is a complete waste of Idris Elba’s acting talents named Krall, who wants a random MacGuffin off the Enterprise so he can complete his MacGuffin machine and finally make a fucking cup of coffee murder everyone. Because reasons. The crew, stranded on the planet, meet up with an alien named Jayla, free the rest of their people, and take off in an old Federation ship that Scotty and Jayla manage to repair, all in order to prevent Krall from killing Yorktown.
The extremely thin plot careens from set piece to set piece, contorting to come up with reasons for Kirk to ride around on a motorcycle, or have a fist fight, or for people to fly around in ships in a way that’s visually pretty but very difficult to orient in space. I got tired of the action set pieces. The movie feels longer than it actually is because it’s like okay, here’s a little plot, and now we’re going to pause to randomly run away from something.
Krall is paper-thin even as action movie villains go. Why does he have followers? Where did he get the cool swarm ships? Why does he keep dragging Uhura around and yelling her? Why does he want to destroy Yorktown? What the fuck is “here is where the frontier pushes back” supposed to even mean in the context of his character? There’s what should be a really cool reveal on him at the end, but it doesn’t really explain anything, and it’s completely unearned. There’s nothing before that to hint that there’s more, to build up to it. It’s just suddenly there, and flops because it had no scaffolding of plot holding it up. There might be more commentary to be had here, on Starfleet as a non-military organization, about soldiers being left behind by the society that once depended upon them, but as in ST:ID, any point was hopelessly muddled and underdeveloped to the point of incoherence.
I’m probably making the movie sound worse than it is, but that’s because I’m frustrated. There were some things I truly liked about the movie, and I could see where it could have been so much more if they would have just backed off on the fucking action set pieces and focused on the story. And perhaps some of the overbearing action sequences can be pinned on director Justin Lin, but I think the places where the film really shines are also a sign of his influence.
Lin is best known as the director of several of the Fast & Furious films. Which, yes, Kirk on a motorcycle. But the other major strength of that franchise is its strong ensemble cast, and in each film, everyone gets a moment to be cool. This is the first Trek movie since the reboot in which I felt that everyone in the crew really did get a chance to shine brightly–heck, I think this film did a better job giving everyone a moment than any of the older Trek films did either. Uhura particularly got to stand out even more than in ST:ID, and got to have a couple of cool moments that called on her skills as the comms officer. And when it was character moments, that’s when this movie did feel like it was Star Trek in more than name. Sulu gets to take over command again and we see in him the echo of George Takei’s Sulu in command of the Excelsior. Chekhov gets some one-on-one time with Kirk. The dryly humorous friendship between Spock and Bones gets some much-needed and long-awaited screen time. The new character, Jayla, had some great moments as well, and there’s a plot setup for her potential return, which I’m excited about.
And I’ll admit, for all I bitch about the action set pieces, I fucking loved every moment of action that was accompanied by the Beastie Boys song Sabotage. It was a clever ship battle move backed up by campily bullshit Star Trek science, and as weird as it might sound to say, in that moment it felt gloriously like Trek–but yet unique to this younger, new crew.
I’m frustrated because I want to love these movies. I’m frustrated because I care about the cast, which is still absolutely stand out. I want these films to be successful, but more than that, I want them to be successful and still Star Trek. This one has come the closest of the three, and much credit is probably due to Simon Pegg, who was one of the writers for the script and who deeply loves Star Trek in the same way I do. Star Trek Beyond proved that the reboot could finally move past cannibalizing the plots of the original, and I’m grateful for that, make no mistake. But here’s hoping it can also move beyond the soulless action effects blockbuster formula and become the franchise the cast and the fans deserve.
Warning: depending upon your spoiler sensitivity level, you may want to skip the plot synopsis (red) until after you’ve seen the film.
Ghostbusters (2016) comes to us in a world saturated with sequels and remakes and reboots that no one wanted, needed, or asked for—and finally, we get a reboot we actually deserve.
I have a lot of love in my heart for 1984’s original Ghostbusters, which came out in theaters when I was way too young to see it. I remember my parents showing me the movie when I was a bit older, and recall that I thought the first ghost in the library was absolutely fucking terrifying, and that Egon was my favorite ghostbuster. I have a moderate little wad of affection for the at-times cringe-worthy sequel, Ghostbusters 2. I got up extra early on Saturday mornings for years so I could watch The Real Ghostbusters cartoon series. I owned action figures. My Ghostbusters love is not a matter for debate.
Two years ago, for the thirtieth anniversary of the movie, I got to watch Ghostbusters (1984) properly in a movie theater. It was still funny, and fun, and I still loved it to pieces. But it broke my heart a little when adult me noticed the incredibly creepy sexism of Venkman that child me skated around and just thought was at worst an endearing quirk.
And now today, I rode my bike over to a movie theater so I could eat some overpriced popcorn and watch a new Ghostbusters that made it all better.
On its surface, this new Ghostbusters has a lot in common plot-wise with the old Ghostbusters. A team of scientific-minded paranormal investigators starts catching ghosts in New York City and notices that the ghastly activity is ramping way the hell up. They’re called frauds by some and loved by others. They figure out their technology, realize what the hell is going on, and try unsuccessfully to stop the coming spiritual apocalypse. Then it’s showdown time.
But one twist that really marks the departure from the original is that the villain of Ghostbusters (2016) isn’t an apartment building or an ancient god, but an ordinary man named Rowan (Neil Casey) who might as well be a stand-in for every internet neckbeard who’s been desperately trying to slime the movie since its inception. His entire motivation is anger at the world for not recognizing his genius and throwing itself at his feet—and it’s made absolutely explicit when he says as much to Abby (Melissa McCarthy) and she points out yes, this is the same sort of thing all of the female ghostbusters deal with daily. The difference is they lack Rowan’s profound sense of entitlement.
Makes you wonder how much of Rowan’s role (and his amazing sideburns) got scripted after the internet backlash started up. There’s also some delicious pokes about people being jerks in youtube comments.
In a way, 2016’s Ghostbusters is a film in dialog with its original. It reaches for the things that made the original film so great—the humor, the inherent ridiculousness of the supernatural crossing into an otherwise ordinary world, and ghosts that are just scary enough to make the stakes feel real without crossing the line into horror. It borrows a few of everyone’s favorite beats from the original (the team’s first encounter with a ghost, something giant destroying the city, etc) but turns them sideways enough to make it feel like a joke between friends, a wink, not outright copying like we felt from The Force Awakens. The story of Ghostbusters 2016 is very much its own, and the characters have their own lives. There is no female Egon, Venkman, Ray, or Winston—we get Abby, Erin, Holtzmann and Patty and they are decidedly themselves. It’s a parallel universe in which the events of 1984 never happened, but we can still see beloved old landmarks like the firehouse.
And it’s a reaction to the less-than-stellar parts of the 1984 film, tweaking them, mocking them, and holding a mirror up to them. Instead of an all-male team, we get an all-female team. Instead of Janine as the receptionist and Dana Barrett as the victim of both ghosts and Venkman’s creeping, we get Chris Hemsworth as the puppyishly dumb beefcake receptionist Kevin. And while Erin (Kristen Wiig) does a bit of objectifying and creeping at Kevin of her own, she notably doesn’t get rewarded for it at the end with a relationship.
This is Kevin. He would like to know which of these pictures makes him look more like a doctor.
The one part of the Ghostbusters (1984) legacy that 2016 doesn’t face so head-on is the profound injustice done to the character of Winston Zeddemore, the only non-white ghostbuster in the original. Ernie Hudson has written with heartbreaking eloquence about his experience of Winston’s character being diminished, of disappearing as the “soul” of the original team. There was a chance to have made that completely right with Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones)—and the movie does make a start. From the moment she appears, Patty is knowledgeable, independent, and determined. She decides to join the team because she feels she has valuable skills and wants to be part of the action. And from that moment, she is an integral part of the Ghostbusters who doesn’t ever disappear from the screen. She is undeniably the soul of the team that Winston was supposed to be. But listening to her get diminished as the only non-scientist was still damned painful.
So you get all of the above meta meatiness, and then the movie is fucking hilarious. I laughed more at this film than I ever laughed at the original. The end credits sequence alone almost killed me. The four women who make up the team are all excellent comedians in their own right, and what they make together is hilarious magic. Even better, they form a solid team of close friends—and the film never resorts to the sort of in-team friction as plot driver that we’ve seen in every damn Avengers-adjacent film. The fact that this is happening in an all-female team, where the women support each other and protect each other, feels even more profound because that is still so unusual, particularly in comedy.
Chris Hemsworth deserves his own paragraph here as well, for his amazing turn as a lovable buffoon who is a walking non sequitur with extremely nice pecs. This is probably the best role I’ve ever seen him in, and you can tell he’s having a hell of a good time—and so is everyone else, including all of the major castmembers of 1984’s Ghostbusters. There’s a Stan Lee-esque cameo in the film for each one of them, every appearance more delightful than the rest. Bill Murray wears a fedora. This is not a drill.
Perhaps the thing I’m the least thrilled about in the whole film were the CGI ghosts (though the mannequin was damned creepy) for the same reason I’m generally not thrilled any time there’s a lot of obvious CGI in a live action film. It’s less egregious when it’s ghosts, because they’re not supposed to look entirely real anyway, but there were too many of them. It felt like action for the sake of having an action sequence and using some of the special effects budget.
But really? It was hella fun. I’m going to see it again. I’m going to buy it when it comes out for home video and watch it regularly. And I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that if 2016 gets a Ghostbusters 2, it’ll be a damn sight better than the original.
And yet, I still can’t say that I love it more than I loved the 1984 movie. I don’t think that’s a judgment on the quality of the 2016 version, but rather an artifact of the original film being so ingrained as part of my nerd psyche. I grew up watching that movie. My older brother was a freaking ghostbuster one Halloween. The original, warts and all, is indelibly in my blood. And with that history in my head, the 2016 film will always feel a little derivative, a little unoriginal even if it does everything better than the first film did and I can watch it without cringing every time Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver are on screen together.
What I do wonder is how it will feel to those for whom Ghostbusters (2016) is their first love, and they go back to watch the 1984 film. I wouldn’t be surprised if this new one, with its hilarious women and doofy male receptionist accidentally poking himself in the eyes, will be their favorite, and rightfully so.
