Wanted to put this up yesterday, but I'm having an... interesting few weeks, scheduling and lifewise. Ah well. Anyway, here's the trailer Warner Bros. wanted people to trek out to IMAX theaters for on Monday but we forced to release online after someone leaked it hoping that a clean version would make the reactions not be so negative. It didn't seem to help much, but judge for yourself:
So, the blowback on this has been pretty negative. Understandably yet still unfairly, a lot of the geek blogosphere really, really wants the new DC Cinematic Universe to essentially look/feel like the DC Animated Universe (Batman: The Animated Series to Justice League Unlimited) as-produced by Marvel Studios; and while I get why (that sounds great!) it's crystal clear that that's not what they're making and this stuff needs to be judged on it's own terms - good or bad.
It feels more than ever like no one working on these can really "square" how to make Superman work in the kind of movies they want to make (how do you use a character who can end any real threat instantly and generally works to prevent destruction "work" in the Transformers-esque extended-destruction style WB clearly wants these movies to be?) and so the plot becomes about making everyone else not "get" Superman either. I know more than I should about how the plot of this supposedly goes down, but suffice it to say these things seem to start from the premise of "which trades are still bestsellers for us?" and go forward, so if this is looking like Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS smooshed together with a bunch of 90s event crossovers... yeah, that seems to be the case.
That said, I like the way it looks. We're a long way from MAN OF STEEL here, with Snyder once again working with his favorite DP Larry Fong. Visually we're very much in WATCHMEN territory, and it compliments Snyder's aggressively macho approach to the genre. It looks pumped-up, ridiculous, slick and showy - like a mid-90s foil cover come to life - and since that seems to be where they're aiming it might as well look like the best version possible.
Also: that first shot of Affleck in the "normal" bat-suit is probably as good as Batman's getup has ever looked in live-action, but I really want to know how much of those muscles are Affleck and how much is the suit because holy shit - if that's Affleck he must be on Ryback's regimen. On the other hand, the "big reveal" of the TDKR "bat-armor" look (which you know is meant to be a huge deal here) manages to fall completely flat because now it makes him look like Lego Batman. I'm getting a sense that LEGO MOVIE's send-up of dark-dark-dark Batman-performances may have rendered a good chunk of audience no longer able to take them as seriously, and the helmet isn't helping:
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Having now introduced somewhere just under a dozen new yet-to-be-solved mysteries in it's second season (what's "Real S.H.I.E.L.D's" real agenda, what's really going on at Afterlife, what's in The Iliad's super-secret cargo hold, what exactly is Cal using to gain his strength to name just a few), "Melinda" finds AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D doubling back to explain a leftover from Season 1: What really happened to earn Agent May the nickname "The Cavalry" (official story: She singlehandedly took down a superhuman villain and their entire army of henchmen) and why is she so cold and mysterious about it?
The answer and more (SPOILERS!) after the jump... So, the idea that something a lot darker than "just" a rescue went down with May in Bahrain has been a given since they decided not to reveal it right away; but the actual reveal (she actually only took out two henchmen, the rest were killed by their own master - a pre-teen girl Inhuman who'd transformed without authorization from... whoever is making that call - that May was forced to kill) was a lot darker than AGENTS is usually prepared to go, so that's interesting in itself.
Interesting enough, in fact, that it probably could've stood to be it's own story. Weaving it into Skye bonding with Jaioying works narratively, but it also ends up giving away the twist too easily: "Gee, I wonder if May's story will somehow pay off in a way the ties-in with the 'not every Inhuman should transition' infodump?" On the other hand, it feels wrong to criticize the show for wasting no time getting Skye to her "learning its your mother" moment so quickly when the lack of padding had been so praiseworthy all season - especially since I've also been watching through DAREDEVIL this week, which (while overall a solid series - review likely pending) is padded and stretched-out to the point of near absurdity at times.
Meanwhile, our new big piece of information is that Coulson actually does seem to have been secretly assembling what sounds like a personal army of superhumans, as part of something called "Theta Protocol." This is, apparently, where a bunch of S.H.I.E.L.D 2.0's money has gone, and the majority of the actual data is in the toolbox that just walked out the door with Fitz last week. Oh, and if you were guessing that Raina's complaint of constant nightmares was foreshadowing an Inhuman power for future-telling? Congratulations - you've seen a superhero show before.
Still, the "showpiece" for this episode was seeing Ming-Na Wen stretch her acting chops alongside her action work, and it delivered on that front - she turns in a hell of a performance that momentarily turns so "real" it almost feels out of place with all the broader genre-series business going on. There's only about 4 - 5 more of these left, and there's a lot of plot to tie up, so this might have been our last shot at a "character piece" episode before a sprint to the finish like last season. If so, it's a good note to transition on.
PARTING THOUGHTS:
I missed it myself the first time, but Coulson has mentioned Theta Protocol once before - to the Koenigs, as an "if we don't come back" measure. So there's that.
So what is Theta? At this point it could be anything, but it would be a weird coincidence for a S.H.I.E.L.D spin-off to be announced the same week we start hearing "our main character might be building a training-camp for superhumans" as a plot point. SECRET AVENGERS?
Piggy-backing on that: Remember, CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR *is* apparently going to still be about the government trying to regulate powered persons, so it'd be convenient to have a whole bunch of them ready to go.
An exchange between Gordon and Lincoln suggests that there's some tension between the human-looking and non-human-looking Inhumans. Seems a bit late to bring that up.
NEXT WEEK: The ads are acting like "Frenemy of My Enemy" is an AGE OF ULTRON tie-in, but I'm a bit skeptical - there's at least one more episode between this and the film's U.S. release, and other than the still sought-after Dr. List the prospect of a WINTER SOLDIER-level tie-in seems unlikely from a logistical perspective.
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This poll decided which hypothetical movie adaptations of... things I'd take a swing at pitching as movie treatments. Just a creative-writing exercise to keep things sharp. By decision of you the readers, first up is MEGA MAN - which I'm assuming anyone reading this recognizes as a series of video games from Capcom. Reminder: If you enjoy this sort of feature on this blog, please consider becoming part of The MovieBob Patreon.
Let's get into this: Open in extended montage, intercutting childhoods and teen years of two young boys: THOMAS LIGHT and ALBERT WILY. Light is a happy child of priviledge, the only son of two wealthy scientists (a lineage of doctors, professors, etc in fact) whose interests in science, technology and art are nurtured and encouraged from the start. Wily, on the other hand, is born into harsh working-class poverty - a middle child whose natural genius for science/engineering mostly get him bullied by his peers, abused by his siblings (his inventions broken, ideas mocked) and ignored by his parents.
The two become friends at an Ivy League college, where their complimentary talents make them a potent force in the emerging field of robotics and artificial-intelligence, which has just begun to fully explode (think the advent of home computers) into the mainstream. Soon, robotics and A.I. are ubiquitous, and L&W ROBOTICS SOLUTIONS is at the popular and technological forefront of the industry.
Virtually everyone agrees that L&W robots are the industry standard, but their most popularly-touted innovation (culturally, at least) is Light's solution to circumventing The Uncanny Valley by embracing the use of humanoid/animal shapes subtly-exaggerated to cartoon proportions. This means that the robots look exactly like they do in the NES Mega Man games - bulgy, smooth and "chibi-like," with humanoid models commonly featuring oversized heads/feet/hands and expressive doll-like faces (alternately, imagine a more expensive version of this nonsense.) Privately, Wily resents that "The Light Touch" (and Light's more public-friendly, Walt Disney-like persona) is so talked-about, as he feels his pure engineering contributions are the true source of their success.
The plot-proper finally finds Wily & Light as white-haired older men, 40 years after college, making a huge press presentation of their new products for the year. They are joined onstage by ROCK and ROLL, a male/female "sibling" pair of humanoid robots with super-advanced artificial-intelligence (most "work bots" are not as "smart" as virtual-only A.I. for technical reasons) who largely serve as crowd-pleasing mascots for the company.
The centerpiece presentation is six prototype industrial robots with unprecedented fusion of physical-dexterity and artificial-intelligence (not nearly at Rock & Roll's level, but impressive) built to work in harsh conditions - yes, CUTMAN, GUTSMAN (mining/clearing/etc, a team) ICEMAN (arctic industries) FIREMAN (high-temperature) ELECMAN (energy) and BOMBMAN (demolition).
The presentation goes well, and Light announces that Wily will be presenting a "concept robot" whose design he personally spearheaded: This is PROTO MAN, a demonstration robot meant to show off Wily's still-in-development "smart circuit" technology that theoretically allows a robot to "rewrite" it's own schematics almost as rapidly as software, in order to not only use any tool within it's ability and programming but absorb new functions and physical parts rapidly (he uses, to Light's obvious chagrin, a less than friendly metaphor of a military robot being able to repurpose the onboard weaponry of it's fallen comrades and enemies).
Someone in the crowd asks the obvious question about robots with universal function replacing human manual laborers. Wily treats the concern flippantly, while Light hurriedly interjects that those concerns are why Proto Man is only a research concept - they have no interest in putting humans out of jobs. There has clearly been internal disagreement on this, and the two men begin to argue - first by passive aggression, but ending with Wily blurting out an insult about "Giving the world the steam engine and being harraugned about the fate of mules!" This goes over bad, leading Light to usher his friend offstage and start-up the introduction of another product, RUSH the robot dog - a toy/companion for children.
Backstage, they have it out: Wily feels that Light only cares for the labor-class because in his life of priviledge he never actually had to "know" them; whereas Wily grew up in that world and became obsessed with robots partially because of a personal revenge-fantasy of seeing mechanized-labor drive the human working-class (whom he associates entirely with the "ignorant brutes" who tormented him in his youth) into extinction - ultimately creating a utopia where robots manage all menial tasks and scientists like him and Light are left unbothered to think and create.
Wily's rant is captured by a young Japanese hacker and technology blogger, MAYL SAKURAI (yes, Battle Network references - there aren't a lot of humans in this mythos) and goes viral - a P.R. disaster for the company that is "damage controlled" by an announcement to "gift" Cutman, Gutsman, Iceman, Fireman, Elecman and Bombman to specific operations of of "global interest"
Light is forced to dismiss Wily, who turns down a severance package "large enough to found your own new company" in exchange for taking PROTO MAN (and his patents for Smart Circuity) with him. Six months later, the rebranded LIGHT ROBOTICS remains on top of the market; with "sightings" of Dr. Wily in public (and the odd fact that no competing firm has been able to "poach" him despite trying) are the only real lasting memory of his "meltdown."
Where Wily actually is? A rocky island off the coast of Japan (L&W was located in San Fransisco, incidentally) where has has secretly maintained a whole "workshop" of "borrowed" company equipment in an abandonned underground military installation.
Light meets with a teen-aged girl who sneaks away from field-trip tour to show him "her invention." This is TRON BONNE, a young robotics wunderkind (she's actually already skipped ahead to college, used the tour for cover), and her invention is an affordable mass-production house-robot called a SERVBOT. Light is impressed, buys production rights to the Servbots and hires her on the spot as a "consulting intern" for the engineering department, which needs fresh ideas after Wily's departure.
Tron Bonne learns, along with the audience, Light's most closely-guarded secret: Rock and Roll are even more advanced than the public realizes: They have full personalities and even rudimentary, child-like emotions.
Sakurai investigates reports of famous hackers, mostly from Japan and Korea, disappearing after being contacted by a "Mr. X" (yes, Dr. Wily, who is also selling illegal "SNIPER JOE" combat robots to international terrorists and organized crime, using the money to grow his "workshop" and continue experimenting with Proto Man and... "other" projects.)
Bonne (whom was also learn is a big fan of Mayl's online presence) comes to Light with a new proposal: She believes that she's managed to reverse-engineer a non-infringing answer to Wily's "smart circuits," but needs his help to implement it. Light agrees, and they decide that they will first try adding the feature to the extra-durable Rock.
The rebuild of Rock is successful: He can incorporate almost any tools or programming into his body (and also does the color-changing thing when changing tools, because.) Wily, having hacked into Light's security systems to spy, discovers that they've (sort of) trumped his tech and becomes enraged, telling Proto Man "we're moving things up."
Light Robotics prepares for the launch of a major firmware update for around 20-30% of their most popular models, which will be downloaded automatically during a brief "power down" that the company treats like a mock-"event." But when the robots power back on, the they've been infected with a virus that causes them to go berzerk causing damage and mass-hysteria! The same protocol also causes Cutman, Gutsman etc to being operating "independently," taking control of the areas they've been dispatched to violently with backup from also-refigured Sniper Joes and other machines.
Light's tech-support finds the source of the infection immediately: Mayl Sakurai, whose home is raided and is arrested. But the virus has actually come from Wily, the creation of the hackers he's abducted.
After some web digging, Bonne theorizes that Wily pinned the initial hack on Mayl - and not just for revenge to take her away from computers, as she may be among those capable of reversing the virus. Light opts to retrofit Rock with combat equipment and hope he can use his new smart-circuit adaptability to fight his way to rescuing her from prison in Japan (the country has been hit especially hard, and she hasn't even been arraigned yet) and bringing her their (to Light's) to help stop the machine riots.
As MEGA MAN (and using Rush's transforming vehicle modes) Rock flies to Japan and fights through out of control robots to extract Mayl. He also encounters Proto Man (now looking like he does in the games, whistle and all) confirming that Wily is behind things. They fight, but Proto Man is ordered to withdraw.
Instead, it's Bomb Man (previously stationed at a Korean demolition project) who arrives for a showdown. He and Mega Man tear apart part of a city, until Mega draws the fight away to nearby cliffs. After defeating his enemy, Mega Man incorporates the bomb weaponry into his system - maybe if he can do this to the rest of them, there's a chance.
Proto Man returns to Wily, confused as to why he was recalled. Wily says there is more work to be done on his upgrades.
MM brings Mayl to Light's, then announces his plan to take down the other "Robot Masters" while they work on the virus.
GutsMan and CutMan are stationed at a geoengineering project in the Pacific Northwest, so they're first on the schedule. GutsMan falls easily to bombs, but doesn't fully shut down - his "living" head is taken away by HARD-HATS. CutMan is more of a hand-to-hand martial-arts foe, defeated but after a much harsher fight.
ElecMan falls next, fight taking place at a solar energy storage facility.
Robots bring Wily the remains of GutsMan, he orders them taken to "reengineering," with Proto Man continuing to grouse about not being allowed to face Mega Man again yet.
IceMan falls next (arctic weather-research station).
Mega Man arrives at a geothermal power-plant adjacent to an active volcano in Hawaii to battle Fire Man, but Proto Man is waiting for him.
At Light's, Sniper Joe robots attack the faciltiy but are repelled by Bonne's Servbots (and Roll, who repurposes "household" tools into weapons to beat them.)
Proto Man and Fire Man double-team Mega Man, subduing him. Proto Man then destroys Fire Man himself, intending to absorb the flame-thrower weapon and prove himself equal (and then superior) to Mega Man - who protests that they shouldn't fight because they're "brothers" built together.
The flamethrower weapon malfunctions, shocking Proto Man and badly damaging him. He departs, leaving Mega Man to claim the final weapon.
Light, Bonne and Mayl crack the virus code and stop the rioting robots. In response, Wily causes SKULL CASTLE to rise out of the island and announces his terms to the world: Bigger and more unstoppable robot uprisings, unless he is allowed to found his own mechanized nation on any plot of land he chooses.
Mega Man arrives at Skull Castle amid a battle between Wily's robots and an easily-outmatched human naval fleet, who are almost making headway until the ROBOT DRAGON from (Mega Man 2) appears to engage them.
MM enters the castle and begins fighting his way to Wily's inner sanctum. The way is guarded by (separate) encounters with two big-scale robots: The shape-changing YELLOW DEVIL and GutsMan rebuilt as the massive GUTS DOZER.
On the final approach to Wily, MM finds himself in a huge chamber where an unknown number of "figures" are being contained in opaque glass tubes. Wily's voice comes up, welcoming the hero to the "prototypes divison." The tubes open, and out of them come between 40-50 "fan favorite" Robot Masters (some not finished) from the entire Mega Man game series. An absolutely massive brawl ensues.
Outside, Light arrives on the deck of a naval carrier with Mayl and Bonne, explaining that they've developed a reverse version of Wily's virus that could shut down the robots protecting the castle, but it will take time to set up and broadcast.
Wily, in his lab, happily watches MM fight a losing battle against his prototypes - but is caught off guard when Proto Man bursts in demanding "answers" to his malfunctions.
Light and the girls' virus is broadcast and works, de-securing the castle and causing the prototypes to shut down inside. But it doesn't effect Proto-Man, who is still holding Wily at gunpoint when Mega Man bursts in.
Wily takes the opportunity to zap Proto Man with electricity, knocking him out. He explains that he sees Proto Man as a failed test, usable for parts, and that he hasn't been repairing his smart-circuits, he'd been carefully porting them over into a NEW project - Proto-Man has his "head" and memories, but he's basically a glorified Sniper Joe unit now.
Wily then unveils his "new favorite son," the robot who got all of Proto Man's implants: Wily's answer to Mega Man... "X!" (Yup, as in MEGA MAN X in full armor - that's our big final fight.
After a brutal battle and a last-minute assist from Proto-Man, MM defeats MMX only to see Wily get away in an escape pod.
Mega Man returns to Light with Proto Man and remnants of MMX. After repairs, Proto Man announces that he is going looking for Wily, while MM will stay to protect others if he returns for the sequel.
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"Even our movies that we totally fuck up midway through production and have to scramble to put together in under a year look better than everyone else's movies!" - MARVEL.* *(not really)
NOTE: FOX has made multiple Copyright claims on this video, which I believe to be invalid and have disputed. The video is available for viewing while my dispute is reviewed, but you should watch it ASAP because they could concievably block it again at any time if they choose to reject the dispute. As ever, if you want to show your support this project and others like it, please consider doing so via The MovieBob Patreon.
A week ago, I asked fans to vote on a list of four licensed nostalgia properties I'd been working up hypothetical movie pitches for as a writing exercise. The votes have been tallied, and the lineup (read: order you'll be getting these in by popular demand) looks like this:
1. MEGA MAN 2. CAPTAIN PLANET 3. X-MEN (hypothetical Marvel Cinematic Universe-compliant reboot) 4. CARE BEARS. Look for MEGA MAN this week. Thanks to everyone who voted. This should be fun - looking forward to it.
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Season 2 of AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D has now reached the point where episodes seem to be almost-entirely made up on plot points and comic/movie-universe references, which means it's all very exciting but we probably won't know if it adds up to anything until the finale on May 19th (or sooner, since it's looking more and more likely that some of this is going to tie into AGE OF ULTRON, which hits on May 1st.
This makes appraisal of quality fairly difficult, because there's no real way to tell (for example) whether the presence of the season's first "Oh, come ON!" plot twist is head-scratchingly dumb or makes some kind of sense. Frustrating, but entertaining. For more (including SPOILERS) hit the jump:
So Jaiying, aka Skye's Mom, is actually alive. Alright, then.
Seriously. How this is supposed to work is lost on me. Fine, we already knew she had super-longevity, and in Marvel Science that usually means an off-the-charts healing factor a'la Wolverine so it's not outside the realm of possibility that she could've come back even from being dissected by Daniel Whitehall. What doesn't work for me is where this revelation is meant to fit in dramatically: Her death (and the brutality of it) was the main thing making Mr. Hyde (Calvin, aka Skye's Dad) vaugely sympathetic as a character and driving the bulk of his actions in the plot. So the idea that she's not only alive but that Calvin has (apparently) known this the whole time seems to render his characterization thus far completely nonsensical - are we now back to square one in terms of who this guy is, what he wants, etc? Because at some point that's one mystery two many for a season that only has 6 episode left.
But okay. To recap this part of what is now a two-story narrative: Skye is actually an Inhuman (still not yet named as such in the series), a race of people genetically descended from early humans who were experimented on by Kree alien interlopers who develop superpowers and/or monstrous appearances when exposed to chemical mists from Terrigen Crystals. Her real name is Daisy Johnson, her mother (Dichen Lachman) is a near-immortal Inhuman named Jaiying, her father (Kyle McLachlan) is technically human but is also known as "Mr. Hyde" because he augments his strength to superhuman levels with chemical experiments. She (Skye) has been spirited away to "Afterlife," an isolated retreat for potential/recently-transformed Inhumans seemingly located in the Himalayas a'la Shangri-La. Also onhand is Raina, the super-power obsessed female villain from Season 1 whose Inhuman transformation has left her looking like a human porcupine.
The idea is that Skye is here so that Jaiying, Gordon (the Inhuman teleporter who serves as the only way in or out of Afterlife) and a sexy guy with electricity-powers named Lincoln are going to help her "transition," i.e. wax-on, wax-off her way to mastering her Inhuman super-vibration powers (in the comics, Daisy Johnson's superhero name is "Quake;") but there are murkier issues afoot: Calvin is being held captive(?) somewhere nearby, Jaiying elects not to tell Skye who she is (or that she's keeping company with Calvin) and there's a troubling tinge of elitism to how The Inhumans (or this arrangement of them, see below) conduct business: Most denizens of Afterlife are still "normal" people who come there to be evaluated by unseen elders who have final say over who actually gets to go through Terrigenesis. Hm...
Back in the "main" story, Coulson and Hunter are still running their two-man (or now three, since Deathlok get's a triumphant reveal as Coulson's newest ace in the hole) war against "Real S.H.I.E.L.D," whose director Agent Gonzales (Edward James Olmos) is holding everyone else in soft-captivity trying to get them onboard with his program. I bemoaned last week the possibility of the show dragging out the tension-less question of whether or not status-quo busting fuddy-duddies in a comic book storyline were going to turn out to be evil, so I was pretty giddy that Gonzales is wasting no time tipping his "bad guy" hand by referring to Skye as "that thing."
The rest of the S.H.I.E.L.D vs S.H.I.E.L.D story continues to be a mixed bag, but mostly because it's plot turns are telegraphed too early, too often. I can't imagine that anyone didn't see it coming re: Fitz/Simmons pretending they disagreed about opening The Toolbox in order to let Fitz "quit" and get out into the wild with the real one (though points if it turns out that Simmons actually pulled some sort of double-cross with a tracking-device or something, her established bias against superhumans having driven her fully to Gonzales' side) but it's hard to dislike that bit because the actors play it so charmingly. Likewise, there's not much in the way of story-momentum with Coulson and Hunter hanging out at the Hulk Cabin to get over on Other S.H.I.E.L.D, but the character's play off of eachother well.
On the other hand, Coulson's big sign-off about the one nuclear option he has to go to for help being... "Grant Ward" was a groaner moment of near self-parody. I get that we need to slam these storylines back together at some point, but that was pretty clumsy. Surely there are other people he could turn to for help first that aren't quite so dangerous - what about Peter MacNicol's undercover-Asgardian from Season 1? That guy at least had super-strength to offer...
PARTING THOUGHTS:
So does Jaiying tolerate Cal/Hyde's actions because of history, or is she also not on the up-and-up? There's a sense that things aren't as lovey-dovey in Afterlife as they seem, which one imagines could be a setup for a "See? Told you we've got to put these people down!" moment from Gonzales etc.
Since I've already seen people speculating: No, I don't think Afterlife is Attilan and I don't think any of the Inhumans we've met so far are really big-guns like Black Bolt etc incognito. The "Crunchy New-Agey X-Mansion" angle is fine for TV, but I doubt this relatively low-tech vision of the Inhuman's world will be the foundation for the eventual movie - more likely, we'll discover that this is only one of many Inhuman "operations" worldwide and that the marquee names will wait for the feature film.
It's weird that after two "this will be important!" super-clunky shout-outs last time, we don't hear any more about the supposedly all-important cargo The Iliad (Gonzale's S.H.I.E.L.D carrier) had and presumably still has onboard. I have a feeling it relates to next week's Agent May origin-flashback, though (see below)
It occurs to me that Gordon (eyeless teleporter guy) is filling the same basic role that Lockjaw does for the Inhumans of the comics - I hope this doesn't mean they've already decided that a giant teleporting bulldog is too weird for the movies.
Let's get this on the table right now: Is it an "accident" that "transitioning" is the big central buzzword for The Inhumans re: discovering/nurturing their powers? These are supposed to be the MCU's expy-XMen, remember, and that franchise has always been at least partially about metaphors for various Civil Rights issues (racial-segregation in the 60s comics, gay rights in the 2000s movies, etc); so are they going with transgender-rights as the driving metaphor of THE INHUMANS?
FWIW, the transgender metaphor would dovetail nicely with the seeming elitism of Afterlife's transitioning-model; as the question of the morality of the tools for transition only being available to those who can financially afford them is a big ongoing topic of discussion in and around that community.
By that same token, a prediction: The season finale (or maybe before?) will partially involve a deus ex machina that somehow "activates" nascent-Inhumans worldwide, which would potentially create the hundreds of thousands (millions) of super-powered individuals in a short span of time necessary for this to become the X-Men/Mutants replacement Marvel Studios intends it to be.
The lone un-killed HYDRA figure Coulson talks about tracking down (with Ward's help, for whatever reason) is Dr. List, whom you may recall was the guy helping Baron Strucker use Loki's Scepter to experiment on Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver in a post-credits scene from WINTER SOLDIER. Is this going to be our AGE OF ULTRON tie-in?
Do we really need to dive back into Ward's story, though? I liked his mini-adventure with Agent 33 in "Love In The Time of Hydra,"but I can't help remembering how little I care about his storyline every time he shows up.
NEXT WEEK: "Melinda" promises a flashback-heavy episode finally revealing the details behind the violent encounter with a yet-unnamed superhuman (Winter Ave Zoli as "Eva Belyakov," the trailers suggest) that earned Agent May the nickname "The Cavalry" but also left her to exit field duty for several years.
Easy prediction: This is mainly setting up an eventual confrontation between May and Jaiying, who are too-perfect mirrors of one-another as mother figures for Skye.
Not-so-crazy speculation: "Eva Belyakov," eh? Name is similar to Eva Bell, the civilian handle of time-manipulating recent X-Men addition named Tempus. So there's that.
Totally crazy speculation: Belyakov? Sounds Eastern-European. Wonder if she had anykids?
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The debut episode of REALLY THAT GOOD was a resounding success, and I'm hard at work on the next one (next two, technically.) But that doesn't mean I want fans and followers to stop re-watching and sharing the original. To that end, after the jump of this post I'm going to post the full text of Episode 1's look at GHOSTBUSTERS, for those who prefer text to video-essay format (or who just want to be able to read it). Thank you all, again, for helping (via The MovieBob Patreon or just by watching and sharing) to make this project a continued (early) success. I hope you enjoy the text for now, and the next episode as soon as it's able to be uploaded: NOTE I: There are some minor differences between this text and the narration from the original episode, primarily to remove instances where a more casual/conversational spoken tone would've been awkward within a written document or where a point was made/punctuated by film clip rather than by narration in the original video. NOTE II: If you like this piece and would like to read more like it, please consider a donation to The MovieBob Patreon. Thank you.
REALLY THAT GOOD
GHOSTBUSTERS (TEXT VERSION)
by Bob Chipman
GHOSTBUSTERS is one of those movies that basically everyone agrees is good - even people who haven't actually seen it. Its presence in the popular culture is such that its goodness is generally taken to be as much of a given as that it features both ghosts and the busting thereof. If you’ve seen it, chances are pretty good you love it. Even if you don't love it, chances are you like it. Even if you don't like it, you probably don't hate it. And even if you hate it... you probably long ago resigned yourself to the idea that it's simply not the film for you - that its charms are effectively lost on you and that you, not GHOSTBUSTERS, are the problem.
It’s a film that has permeated our popular culture: Other films use it as a reference point. Its catchphrases and zingers are part of the cultural lexicon. It’s impossible to describe characters like Peter Venkman or Egon Spengler without defaulting TO those very men, who have by now eclipsed whatever archetype from whence they may have been drawn. GHOSTBUSTERS has been sequelized, merchandised, video-gamed, Ecto-coolered, animated, re-animated and is on its way to being gender-flipped and rebooted. It’s not simply enduringly popular – it’s a film that has become one with our shared cultural essence.
...but does it deserve to?
Popular cinema, particularly the popular cinema of the 1980s, is littered with films whose stature is at odds with even the most generous appraisal of their objective quality. This is particularly true of films that spawned ancillary empires aimed primarily at children, which GHOSTBUSTERSmost certainly did. It’s entirely possible that for many audiences who came to the property from the sides, the original film is afforded an undue "boost" in affection owed more to lingering nostalgia for toys and cartoons than to its own merits.
Is that what's happened? Is this film a genuine comedy classic, or just another over-merchandised 80s genre flick permanently cast in rose-colored hues by nostalgic Gen-Xers? Is GHOSTBUSTERS... Really That Good?
Let's get the basics out of the way first: The main reason we're still talking about GHOSTBUSTERS is that it's an astonishingly well-made film that manages to feel effortless in its undertaking.
It presents a high-concept premise with a surprisingly coherent mythology in strokes exactly broad enough to not be at odds with a breezy comic tone but strong enough to have real weight and matter as a story: If you don't understand a single joke, the overarching narrative of an upstart team of paranormal investigators coming up against an ancient malevolent deity is entirely compelling... but if you don't really care about the occult machinations drawing Gozer the Gozarian back into 20th Century Manhattan, the central comic observation conflating the roles of exorcist and exterminator is just really, really funny.
When you couple that with a group of comic legends who also happened to be gifted character actors (and also Ernie Hudson but y'know what we're going to talk about Winston in depth later) playing at the absolute top of their game in an ingeniously well-balanced screenplay that gives each 'Buster a coherent character but doesn't let any one character overwhelm the piece - not even Peter Venkman, whose entirely personality is about overwhelming and filling up the space in any situation or conversation with his laid-back bravado.
In fact, let's start out by talking about those characters:
THE BASICS:
The first thing that everyone thinks they know about good storytelling is that characters are supposed to have "arcs," i.e. they're supposed to start the film with an incomplete goal or an incorrect outlook or a personal flaw and, over the course of three acts they're supposed to achieve, learn a lesson or otherwise improve themselves thus providing a framework for the rest of the story. But GHOSTBUSTERS... doesn't really do that.
One of the most interesting and unremarked-upon things about GHOSTBUSTERS is that it effectively opens in media res. The four heroes arrive in the story already fully-formed by events we're never fully privy to (that's because it's unnecessary, for the record, but we'll come back to that, too.) It’s an easy mistake to call this an "origin story" because the first act is a going into business narrative, but in terms of the film proper and the story it's telling that's not really the case.
Think about how much important story and what modern-day franchise-blockbusters call "world-building" has already been handled before the film has even unfurled: When we meet the three founding Ghostbusters; Egon Spengler, Ray Stantz and Peter Venkman have already met and become friends, already agree that ghosts are real, already have a theory about exorcising them through science *and* already have the basic Ghostbusters business plan cooking behind the scenes of their research. Granted, none of them appear to have actually encountered one until they find the library ghost, but once they have they already know what it is and what they plan to do next.
On one level, this is just efficient storytelling. But on another level it's establishing a setup whereby the film gets to be itself: The whole comedic "hook" of the film is watching this grand “invasion-by-dark-forces” occult adventure story play out in mostly serious terms while four snarky heroes react to it in funny ways; and since there'd be less room to BE funny if they also had to explain the plot and their motivations within it, the film relegates all that business to passing references to pre-film events - trusting that the screenplay is sharp enough and the actors good enough to get all the necessary data across in passing. And they are.
As a result, the Ghostbusters themselves don't really have individual character arcs, at least not as they'd be recognized in Screenwriting 101 today:
Egon is exactly the same guy at the end of GHOSTBUSTERSas he is at the beginning. His personality doesn't change, he was never "wrong" about anything and even the implication that he and Jeanine are eventually going to hook up and make adorable nerd-babies doesn't really seem to faze him. There's a sense that his Hail-Mary saving throw at the end about crossing the streams is a way out-of-character move for him, but he comes out the same guy.
Ray undergoes even less of a shift. He's the childlike "mascot" of the team, and the closest thing he has to an arc is right at the end when his attempt to thwart Gozer's scheme to draw The Destructor from the Ghostbusters own imaginations by regressing into innocent memories of youth (a coping tactic one imagines Ray employs a lot in his life as it is) fails and instead conjures The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. But while this mistake is noted, the both Ray and his colleagues mainly just shrug it off as “Well, of course that’s something Ray would do.” And yet, even devoid of anything resembling "growth," Ray remains fully the heart and soul of the film.
Even Peter, who feels the most like he should have an arc given that his would-be romance with Dana Barrett makes him the 'Buster with the meatiest B-story, really doesn't - and if he does, it's over by Act II when we see his first honest reaction in being attacked by Slimer. Otherwise, Venkman's story is all about misdirection: We're told from the get go, both by the film and the man himself, that Peter is the consummate con-man and pickup artist - which is meant to be ironic since The Ghostbusters are performing for real a "job" (i.e. exorcism) usually undertaken by phonies and charlatans.
But for all the talk, we never actually see him prove that reputation all that well: Dana sees right through him – it’s the basis of their relationship! As such, what would be the "payoff" to this arc in a more conventional narrative - i.e. The Player gets played once Dana has been possessed by the seductress GateKeeper demon - is yet more misdirection: As it turns out, ancient powers of manipulation are no match for 20th Century sleeping pills.
On the other hand, Peter’s lack of an authentic up-front “heroes journey” while still getting on-balance more screen time than the other four Ghostbusters WORKS largely because he’s sharing his non-Busting scenes with the great Sigourney Weaver, who – it’s easy to forget – was still two years AWAY from cementing her place as the First Lady of American sci-fi blockbusters.
For most of the film Dana Barrett is a thankless role – she has to be the straight-woman the literally every other character’s comic shenanigans until Act 3, wherein she gets subsumed by the more broad character the body-possessing Zuul. And while she’s not precisely the audience point-of-view character, she is the film’s anchor: Gozer, Zuul and 55 Central Park West are scary because she’s scared by them. We can accept that Venkman is actually a mostly-decent guy because she seems to think so and what non-comedic stakes the narrative has are indeed her stakes. In other words, she’s sort-of a plot device – and yet Weaver is so vibrant, real and engaging in the part Dana also works as a full-fledged character, and it never feels like the movie is just cutting back to her story because it “has to.” That’s not easy to pull off.
And while we’re at it, special attention must be paid to how brilliantly Annie Potts inhabits a hard-to-pin-down yet instantly memorable character like Jannine Melnitz, our how completely Rick Moranis commits to the outrageous caricature that is Louis Tully and the somehow even MORE bizarre Vinz Clortho the Keymaster. And, of course, has anyone ever been better at playing a complete dick than William Atherton (Walter Peck?)?
And then there's Winston Zeddemore. Let's talk about Winston Zeddemore.
Everybody knows by now that Winston's role was written for Eddie Murphy, and you can see where that makes sense in terms of the meta-symbolism of the older-guard SNL/SCTV comics enlisting the face of the new generation. But surely the luck of not being able to get Murphy can't be overstated. And not just because of the hindsight factor where Eddie's eventual superstar status would've turned GHOSTBUSTERS into a retroactive "Eddie Murphy movie" where the biggest star is stuck in supporting duty.
Yes, Ernie Hudson doesn't get an especially great amount of screen time as Winston (largely because he wasn't AS big a star as Murphy would've been, even then) but he *does* end up providing a vital component without which the film wouldn't feel quite as unique as it does. Of the four 'Buster actors, Hudson is the lone non-comedian among sketch comedy veterans; and by choice or happenstance that adds a welcome layer of meta-text to Winston - since he's the odd man out in the story, too.
Whereas Peter, Ray and Egon are all scientists from either well-heeled or at least academically-ensconced backgrounds, Winston is a regular guy - or at least he seems to be. In the original screenplay, he was actually meant to have been a former Marine and multi-disciplined PhD scientist who was actually more qualified than the three founders. But basically none of that ends up onscreen: as a result, Winston is presented as an everyman - the Audience POV character. In that respect, Hudson's energetic but grounded characterization humanizes and solidifies the proceedings in ways that, sorry, Eddie Murphy simply wouldn't have.
Finally, Winston being (or at least seeming to be) a regular person who can learn to master the Ghostbusters technology feels very much a part of what might be the film's most unfairly overlooked element of quiet yet revolutionary subversion.
LET’S DIG DEEPER:
One thing that sets the heroes of GHOSTBUSTERS apart from most of their contemporaries and nearly *all* 21st Century blockbuster leads is that there isn't a "chosen one" or a "destined hero" among them. Venkman, Stantz and Spengler are Ghostbusters because they discovered a way that they could use their knowledge and skills to earn a living and benefit society. Zeddemore is a Ghostbuster because he answered a Help Wanted ad. The qualifications for the role are wholly technical and real-world skills based - they aren't knights or samurai or wizards... they're basically just supernatural pest-control. And that is where the real genius of this whole enterprise resides.
Now, to talk about this most important aspect, we need to digress a bit and recognize the ways in which GHOSTBUSTERS is somewhat a victim of its own success. While rightly seen today as an exemplar of the wild creativity associated with high-concept blockbusters of the 80s, it’s easy to forget that this movie did not conjure it’s central plot element of ancient occult evil breaking out in a modern metropolis out of whole cloth - that particular aspect exists largely as a reaction to other films and aspects of the pop culture zeitgeist of the moment.
A particular fascination with the supernatural, occultism and even Satanism had gripped American popular culture from the mid-1970s well into the 80s; largely seen as part of a broader “traditionalist” reaction against the rising trends toward secularism in the 1960s that saw (among other events) the mainstreaming of televangelism, moral panic about hidden messages in rock music and culminating in the wholesale assimilation of the American right-wing by the so-called “Religious Right” that helped push Ronald Reagan into political prominence.
While most visibly transformative in political and social realms, this shift also had a profound impact on genre fiction – particularly in film, where features like THE EXORCIST, OMEN, THE GUARDIAN, ROSEMARY’S BABY, THE AMITYVILLE HORROR and countless others literalized the “demons among us” rhetoric of the new revivalism with stories about demonic occult forces lingering in the shadows; repurposing imagery and rhetoric from medieval “blood libel” propaganda to more modern paranoia about Freemasonry or global-government into tales of demons, devils and even Lucifer himself rising in the conspiratorial background of the world’s elite spaces – the inevitable result of a modern world turned from the One True God; ultimately (and tragically) giving rise to real life “Satanic Panic” hysteria via books like Michelle Remembers and tabloid journalists sensationalizing The McMartin Preschool Trial.
But that serious stuff is another show. We’re here to talk about the movies.
Now since GHOSTBUSTERS is a comedy but not a parody, it doesn't really make explicit reference to any of that. But make no mistake: From the secret pagan altar covertly concealed within a strange but otherwise anonymous old building, Zuul's Netherworld hangout glimpsed in Dana Barrett's refrigerator, the unsettling subsequent tableaus of Dana being engulfed by demonic limbs and "Gatekeeper Dana" vamping on the altar in the red dress, the city skyline overrun with streaks of ghost energy, the banal domesticity of the haunting sequences in Dana's kitchen and Lewis Tully's house party and Gozer "itself" standing with the Terror Dogs; GHOSTBUSTERS is *marinated* in visual iconography signifying a connection to the popular-culture's familiarity with then-recent possession/haunting imagery and also to more genre-savvy fans’ shared reference-points for D&D-style quasi-occult symbology and the 70s/80s resurgent popularity for early 20th Century pulp fantasists like H.P. Lovecraft. (That one especially being an unspoken ur-text influence later made explicit by an appearance by none other than Cthulhu himself in the spin-off animated series.)
Of course, using immediately-familiar aesthetic shorthand isn't in itself revolutionary. What's key is that GHOSTBUSTERS doesn't merely stop at borrowing post-EXORCISThorror's scenario of a Satanically-infected New York for effect, it twists the idea back around against itself to build up its own mythos and firmly establish its heroes as specifically-subversive counter-culture iconoclasts… ones whose subversion was so successful it ultimately supplanted the icons they both swiped-from and swatted-at in the public imagination, to the extent that the sheer grandeur of their victory is all but lost to popular memory.
To understand why and how, you first need to ask yourself a simple question: “What is Gozer?” Gozer is a god. An ancient, pre-historic (and, outside the context of the story, fictional) god, yes; but a god all the same. In fact, despite the overly convoluted Lovecraftian backstory involving Zuul, Vinz Clortho, Keymaster, Gatekeeper, etc being needlessly overcomplicated for humorous effect; the initial incarnation of Gozer is actually pretty well researched as these things go: There's a lot of subtle Freemason-esque detailing to the altar set, the Terror Dogs are an interesting mix of Pagan and/or Occult animal-iconography like goats, bulls and hounds with elements of Medieval and Gothic Chrisitan gargoyles.
And, of course, Gozer itself appearing in the form of a vaguely-androgynous but subtly female-favoring form that fits comfortably into the framework of various prehistoric Matriarchal goddess-figures like those associated with the pre-Olympian gods of pre-Hellenistic Ancient Greece - notably, while somewhat out of style today, the idea of Matriarchal nature-cults being especially widespread among prehistoric humans was enjoying popular favor as a branch of hypothetical occult scholarship at the time.
But Gozer also incorporates elements closer to more familiar masculine-identified gods - specifically The God of Christianity, Judaism and Islam: What's the humanoid Gozer's main special-attack? Lightning. And then there's the enemy's final form: A giant booming voice in the clouds, shouting down at humanity. It's easy to miss the daring significance of this visual given that it precedes the much more iconic and GHOSTBUSTERS-specific introduction of Mr. Stay-Puft as The Destructor; but think about it for a minute: In this moment, Gozer is largely indistinguishable a decidedly Old Testament vision of not simply a god but The God. And that's pretty damn interesting when you remember that The Ghostbusters aren't standing before Gozer as worshippers, challengers, sacrifices or even rival-religionists trying to work out the proper prayer or incantation to banish it.
Yeah! Ever think about that? In most movies involving all-powerful deities or demigods, the "finisher" tends to be finding a talisman or long-forgotten trick in the canon OF the otherworldly fiend itself; with the explicit or implicit moral to the story almost *always* being that a familiarity with and respect for The Old Traditions is necessary to remain safe even in modernity. Remember: that's the underlying theme of even THE EXORCIST – if only Reagan's all-too-modern mom (a single mother acting in movies about leftist political-activism, by the way) hadn't raised her as a godless, secular heathen, she might not have needed an Old Priest/Young Priest tag-team to keep Satan-by-way-of-Pazuzu from taking hold of her.
But that's not GHOSTBUSTERS. When Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler and Winston Zeddemore stand before Gozer the Gozarian; they are scientists of no discernably notable religious disposition (except for Winston, sort of) standing against a god - and they've come to defeat that god *with science.* GHOSTBUSTERS, fundamentally, stripped to its core, is a movie about science versus superstition - the ascendant technological ingenuity of man (and, as mentioned, not even “special” ingenuity that only certain benighted scientists can use, since the Ghostbusters have already refined their tech into a democratized user-friendly form that a newbie like Winston can evidently learn to wield in the course of a day or two) versus (literally!) the ancient powers of the gods. And since nearly all modern stories about humanity's relation to ancient or fictional gods are subtextually "about" the relation of said story's society of origin to its own currently-dominant spiritual belief systems... yeah, you see where this going: GHOSTBUSTERS is a science vs religion story where religion gets its ass handed to it.
Four men of science, representatives previously of a secular academia that institutionalizes the forward-thrust of knowledge against belief and the Western city that most iconically symbolizes the upward ascendance of human progress - stand before an ancient all-powerful lightning-tossing voice from the clouds and declare in no uncertain terms: "No! You don't get to win anymore. You don't get to be in charge anymore. Knowledge is power. We've got it. We know how to use it. Everything from the management of Spirits to the date the world ends isn't under your control anymore, it's under ours!"Or, as Peter puts it:
“Let’s show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown!”
Now, again, I'm talking strictly subtext and meta-text here (and not necessarily even intentional extra-meaning, at that!) I'm certainly not looking to suggest some kind of insipid "fan theory" that the prehistoric god Gozer and the modern understanding of the Judeo-Christian God are somehow one and the same (by way of mythic-appropriation and widely-recognized historical record of Monotheism assimilating prior Polytheistic traditions) or that The Ghostbusters aren't simply cancelling out Gozer's world-ending shenanigans but in fact thwarting God Himself’s plan for the actual Biblically-proscribed Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation. Nope, not at all. Firstly, because insipid fan-theories aren't what REALLY THAT GOODis all about. And secondly... because I don't need to suggest that - the movie does it for me, in the quiet scene where Ray and Winston discuss their respective relationships with religion while driving at night in Ecto-I: When Ray (seemingly an Atheist or agnostic) refers to Judgement Day as one of many “myths about the end of the world,” Winston (either a Christian or at least was raised as such) asks him if he ever considered that they’re recent spike in business could be evidence that Judgement Day has actually started to play out.
But, again, I don't know or care if we were “meant” to take The Ghostbusters as Atheist Superheroes. I'm interested in subtext and symbology within the words and moving-pictures; and once you recognize the technology-conquers-superstition theme at the core of GHOSTBUSTERS, the symbology is everywhere.
What's often seen as the very beginning of science re: man taking control of powerful natural forces rather than seeing them as things to be feared and worshipped? Fire. What real-world heroic vocation are the Ghostbusters most explicitly associated with? Firemen. What's the role of a god in most spiritual systems? Creating and managing The Universe. What's the Universe made of? Atoms. What's the source of The Ghostbuster's spirit-wrangling and eventually god-killing powers? They harness the power of splitting those very atoms. Dana and Lewis Tully are freed from their enslavement to Gozer by the (literal!) smashing of decayed, powerless stone idols - stone idols not unlike the lion statue that looms large and imposing in the first shot of the film. Hell, if you want to really stretch things, both Ectoplasm and the viscous remains of StayPuft could easily be taken as flood, baptism and rebirth imagery... or maybe not.
LET’S TALK IMPACT:
I'm not going to claim I'm the first person to point out that GHOSTBUSTERS is subtextually a science-versus-religion movie. And besides, while subtext and symbolism are interesting they only mean so much without examining what their presence accomplishes in terms of how the work in question impacts its audience; and while I'd happily argue that the mere presence of these themes makes GHOSTBUSTERS a smarter, richer, more intellectually-layered film than it's commonly understood to be (perhaps even by some of its biggest fans); that doesn’t automatically explain why this isn’t simply a good movie and a smart movie but a great and beloved movie… but, you know what might?
I know it’s been a few pages and we’ve covered a lot of ground, but remember how I mentioned that it’s an interesting screenwriting gamble for the heroes of GHOSTBUSTERS not to have conventional individual character-arcs? Part of what’s interesting is that you can easily see how a less inventive, more cookie-cutter screenplay could try to impose one: Just make one or two of the heroes outwardly and openly resistant to the idea that spirituality has any place in fighting ghosts, only to have the tech come up short against Gozer and said resistant heroes have to “open their minds” and get some magic talisman of spellbook or whatever for the real key to thwarting Armageddon; thus learning a lesson about considering other viewpoints and blah blah blah… You get the idea. Oh! Hey, people writing the scripts for these “new” Ghostbusters movies? That thing I just described? Don’t do that. That would be stupid.
Ahem. In any case, the original GHOSTBUSTERS doesn’t do that. And while in subtext that means it’s a rare science-versus-god movie that comes down definitively and enthusiastically on the pro-science side and that’s all well and good… in the actual text of the film, it means it’s a movie about how all you need to rid the world of evil of darkness is the tools and talent. Now that might be a foregone conclusion (or commonly-shared fantasy of a just world order) to you and me, but… there are people for whom it’s not. They’re called children.
Something else I mentioned back at the start was that one reason GHOSTBUSTERS is sometimes suspected to be “overrated” is that a lot of people who love it came to love it as children, and thus could be expected to be nostalgia-blind to any hypothetical flaws it might have. When GHOSTBUSTERS hit in 1984, it had been 7 years since the advent of STAR WARS and a lot of Hollywood was still slowly absorbing the idea that children and teenagers had supplanted college-aged and adult moviegoers as the prime audience for blockbusters and the sci-fi/fantasy genre in particular, and GHOSTBUSTERS is very much a sibling to BACK TO THE FUTURE, ROBOCOP, TERMINATOR, ALIENS, POLICE ACADEMY and other films made decidedly for an adult that wound up being adopted with unexpected zeal by kids.
GHOSTBUSTERS is a movie made overwhelmingly for an adult audience. Sure there are things in it that a younger crowd is inevitably going to zero in on like monsters and lasers and… well, that’s actually it - monsters and lasers - but they aren’t even close to having majority screen time. Most of the movie is about grownups and grownup “stuff”: Starting a business, money problems, flirting at work, dating, sex, ghost sex, legal trouble, red tape, etc. And there’s actually not a great deal of physical comedy, with most of the humor being verbal digs, one-liners and clever wordplay. Even the pop-culture references are decidedly Boomer-centric.
So what was so appealing about it to kids? Was it *just* the monsters and lasers? Remember, the home video era hadn’t fully dawned yet, so the kids who were enraptured by GHOSTBUSTERS in 1984 largely became so watching it in theaters. Were the relatively brief onscreen appearances of Slimer and Mr. Stay-Puft really so compelling that Gen-X kids were willing to sit fidgety and bored through story-points about the upscale New York dating scene and haggling with regulators at work just to get to them? Well, it wouldn’t be the only time the world went nuts over a movie for one or two scenes, but… I don’t think so. I think GHOSTBUSTERSspoke to kids – to everybody, but especially to a generation and now generations of youngsters – in a way that nobody could’ve predicted.
The world of GHOSTBUSTERS is a world where big cosmic horrors are omnipresent but always just out of sight. Where that creeping feeling of dread in an otherwise familiar home or that something “off” about the banal sameness of a hotel hallway at night or the unsettling staleness of an old library really are evidence of lurking malevolent horrors. Where that rustling in the bushes at night really is something evil out to get you, and that creepy stranger is… more than *just* creepy. Where something really IS going bump in the night, hiding under the bed, lurking in the shadows and, yes, where there is a monster in the closet. But if they scare you, you’re likely to be told it’s all in your head, or not really all that scary, or that you should get over it; which in turn is going to make you feel not only frightened but alone.
To children, that world is also known as their real world, day to day. Kids don’t need to make much of logical leap to understand a movie where people live at the mercy of seemingly malevolent forces beyond their understanding or control – most of them feel like they’re living it, already. But in the GHOSTBUSTERS’ world, there’s something that can checkmate all the scary stuff: You.
The subtext that underlines and empowers the narrative of GHOSTBUSTERSis science and technology overcoming superstition and the supernatural, but the practical surface-text is monsters and ghosts being overcome by cool gadgets – and not cool gadgets powered by the same indeterminate scary stuff that the bad guys are made of or cool gadgets that are rare and hard to find or cool gadgets that only certain special people can use like in so many other stories. It’s made unmistakably clear that the Ghostbusters thought up, made and maintain the proton packs, traps, PKE meters and the containment unit themselves – and that is all-important for understanding the power of this particular fantasy.
The unique, powerful idea at the heart of GHOSTBUSTERSisn’t simply that ghosts and demons and things that go bump in the night are real, and it also isn’t simply that they can be busted. It’s that with the right equipment and a little bit of know-how you could bust them. And while there is a grownup appeal in that idea particularly in the aforementioned subtextual mans-conquest-over-god sense, the appeal of that to the mindset of kids is far more potent, more obvious and more powerful: With cleverness and determination, you can take control of what scares you, assert your own power over what lurks in the dark and beat back the things that frighten you; and that core idea makes Spengler, Stantz, Venkman and Zeddemore more than movie heroes: it makes them the Spirit Animals of every kid who ever set a trap for the monster under their bed or even stayed awake trying to catch a glimpse of The Tooth Fairy.
Incidentally, this was *another* idea later realized in more explicit terms by the more deliberately kid-focused animated series, wherein The Ghostbusters fought the (literal!) Boogeyman (Season 1, Episode 6: “The Boogieman Cometh”) revealing that having been menaced by the creature as a child played an all-important role in inspiring Egon’s commitment to mastering the how and why of blasting away the supernatural - which of course makes perfect sense. Just like the fantasy of being a Ghostbuster appealing so strongly to audiences of young kids makes perfect sense, even as the filmmakers had never planned it that way.
ON THE OTHER HAND:
Now, this is a series about positivity. But accentuating the positive of good movies doesn’t mean ignoring flaws, denying issues or glossing over the problematic. GHOSTBUSTERS is a truly great film (if you’re not convinced of that by now, then why are you even still reading this?) but it’s not a perfect film and it’s imperfections deserve notice amid the praise.
The storytelling in Act II leans a little bit heavy on montage. Louis Tully is kind of a thin character relative to how much screen time and story-investment gets, while by contrast Janine and Winston both feel like they could’ve used a bit more. The ghost-blowjob is a funny gag but it feels just a touch out-of-step with the rest of the film and the importance of crossing (or rather NOT crossing) the proton streams could’ve stood at least one more hat-tip between the hotel sequence and finale if we’re talking structural business.
More substantively, while it holds up “better” than just about any other 80s movie featuring a supposed “ladies man” hero does in this regard, Venkman’s pickup-artist routine does feel more and more… well, a little bit skeevy as time goes on. Granted, the film does a good job at subverting this in the story-proper, with his introductory scene falsifying the psychic test making it pretty clear that we’re to recognize this behavior making Peter kind of a dick and Dana (an independent-minded, successful grown woman) not buying his schtick for a minute and seeing through to the (presumably) redeemable Ghostbuster within right away. That’s fine, but then you remember that nobody has that many go-to lines to say nothing of self-confidence without putting in a lot of practice and you recall that he held a position of significant power at a co-ed University for years and, well, the unquestioned presence of this kind of character as “just” a playfully rakish scoundrel is the sort of thing that can’t help but date the film and not in a good way.
And then there’s the Walter Peck subplot. Yeah, that thing. Peter Venkman getting even less pushback for his creeper-tendencies than, say, Glenn Quagmire is some “bad old days” cold water to the face of GHOSTBUSTERSwarm n’ fuzzy 80s nostalgia factor; but the red-herring villain being an environmental regulator with actually pretty reasonable concerns about nuclear-tech in the middle of a city is a genuine eye-roller – an unfortunate relic of the Reagan-era “backlash culture” cynically reframing the disastrous corporate-fellating rollback of Federal health, safety and general-welfare regulations in terms of idealized small business Davids beset by beaurocratic Goliaths; rendered even more unfortunate by how at odds it is with the film’s otherwise smart and decidedly forward-looking themes of scientific progress, entrepreneurship for the common good, class-consciousness and re-assertion of the melting-pot metropolis as societal pinnacle worth defending.
On the other hand, I’m inclined to at least give the film credit for casting Peck strictly in terms of a petty tyrant, not necessarily representative of his vocation. Hell, there’s not even any trite, overly-tidy reveal that he’s somehow “working for” or “influenced by” Gozer (and you’d better believe that if they wrote this today, that’s exactly what would end up happening). Also, well-intentioned red tape creating a pain in the ass for startup businesses IS a thing that happens. Sorry, it is.
THE VERDICT
Even while acknowledging the film’s imperfections, the relative triviality of their presence mainly serves to highlight just how startlingly close to perfection the total package actually gets. Upon full inspection – its component parts broken down, analyzed from all possible angles, studied bit by bit under the metaphorical microscope and reassembled for posterity and a more complete re-appreciation – GHOSTBUSTERS isn’t just a good movie or a great film… its existence is something close to miraculous.
The ingenious premise of exorcists as high-tech exterminators is inventive enough that you’d almost have to try to make a boring movie out of it, and 1984 was indeed the ideal moment in both the development of the modern special-effects blockbuster and the overall pop-culture zeitgeist for such ideas to first be explored, granted. And both the grownup-skewing subtext of scientific conquest over mystic superstition and the kid-empowering surface-text of your worst fears being no match for creative know-how are pretty-much always going to “work” in terms of audience engagement.
But that it also maintains such an easygoing, deceptively laid-back, jovial comic tone? That it feels so loose, unkempt and anarchic even as it fires the imagination of the young and prods the humor-center of the older? That it comes across so effortless and idiosyncratic even as it builds a complete lived-in world, develops iconic three-dimensional characters, lays out a functional comprehensive mythology while also deftly satirizing a genre and the culture swirling around it and covertly challenging the beliefs and worldview of a big chunk of its prospective audience?
That’s not supposed to be possible. That’s not supposed to happen. And that’s definitely not supposed to work. Not while also being this funny, this exciting, this imagination-expanding, this subversive, his meaningful, this compulsively watchable and absolutely NOT with this once in a lifetime confluence of such specific talents behind and in front of the camera. But it did happen. And while it might be talked to death by some fans, championed for exactly the wrong reason by others and indeed over-praised in the grand scheme of things… it holds up. The damn silly thing holds up.
GHOSTBUSTERS holds up.
GHOSTBUSTERS is as good as you remember.
GHOSTBUSTERS is smarter than you might’ve given it credit for.
GHOSTBUSTERS is deeper than you may have considered.
GHOSTBUSTERS matters.
GHOSTBUSTERS counts.
And that’s why GHOSTBUSTERS… is Really That Good.
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I'm a big believer in the "use it or lose it" school of creative aptitude, and that concerns me as I find myself (or, at least, feel like I've found myself) with less and less time for creative experimentation when it comes to writing.
Sure, my movie reviews (back again!), REALLY THAT GOOD, the re-launch of GAME OVERTHINKER (coming soon!) and a few other projects that can't be announced yet are all keeping me sharp in terms of analysis and critical-thinking, but I'm feeling like I stand to put in more practice-time on fiction, particularly screenwriting. On the other hand, it's not like I feel comfortable putting effort into "just for kicks" experiments when I should be busting ass (relatively speaking) here and elsewhere on behalf of my exceptionally generous Patreon backers, who expect (and should expect!) some entertainment and interaction.
So! Here's how I'm going to combine the two for a bit: Okay, here's the basic idea:
This post from awhile back, laying out a hypothetical Hollywood pitch for a (proper) live-action SUPER MARIO BROS* movie, turned out to be pretty popular. Since I'm always thinking about this kind of stuff anyway (and since this is the age where we're officially making movies out of fucking anything) I've since worked out the basic outlines of a few other "if I had to pitch _____" scenarios on similar lines as thought experiments. I'm going to list four of them below, and ask anyone who wants to to vote in the comments (Blogger has no good option for putting polls into posts) either for which one they'd like to see an actual full pitch for OR rank all four (1 being highest, 4 being lowest) on a scale of most to least want to see pitched. I'll keep the poll open for a week (so you've got until 4/10 at 11:59pm) and then I'll start posting the actual pitches in the order decided by the votes (schedule yet to be determined as consensus emerges)
The four possible pitches are:
MEGA MAN X-MEN (hypothetical near-future Marvel Cinematic Universe version) CAPTAIN PLANET CARE BEARS Okay. Get down into the comments and get to voting. You're also welcome to toss out other ideas as well, but these four are going first no matter what. Yes, even if like 300 people all demand STREET SHARKS. *Since I'm sure plenty of people are wondering, the reason ZELDA isn't among the choices is that the lore there is so rigid yet also so loose mapping it out in detail doesn't hold that much appeal to me. But if you want a quickie: Trilogy of films based loosely on OCARINA but with the "quest" streamlined. PART I: Young Link, end on Master Sword aquisition and time-jump. PART II: Adult Link, Tri-Force quest in ruined "future" Hyrule with Sheik, end on Sheik/Zelda reveal and realization that key past mistakes make victory impossible. PART III: Final battle against Ganon, with time-jumping between kid and adult eras to ensure defeat of evil.
