Films > Film Reviews

Ghostbusters

14/07/16

Ghostbusters is a 2016 reboot of the famous 1984 classic. Typically the remake of films never live up to their ancestors. But this new addition wasn’t as bad as the trailers perhaps show; with nowhere near the quality of cast that the original had it was always going to be hard. The film cleverly used all the things that were good about the original so that diehard fans could get involved. And it worked.

The film’s plot was loosely based on Ivan Reitman’s classic with noticeable similarities but that wasn’t a bad thing. It was almost refreshing to be brought back to memories of everyone’s favourite ghost film. Teacher Erin Gilbert is at risk of losing her job due to a supernatural book she wrote with her friend Abby. But inevitably when she goes to complain she ends up telling ghost fanatics Abby and strange engineer assistant Jillian about a ghost appearance in a museum. She ends up getting caught up in it and as a result loses her job and joins them on their adventure. Later in the film Patty joins us and she just wants to kick some ghost ass, if that’s possible. So once we had met the nice guys it was time to meet the bad guy. Eddie is someone who wants to get back at the human race for making his life a misery so he builds machines to encouage the appearance of ghosts and eventually let them break through the barrier between worlds.

It was a big relief that they used the original Ghostbusters theme song! I’m sure we were all dreading a 21st century remake. And of course Slimer and the Marshmallow Man made short appearances in the film making us all laugh out loud and smile. And we laughed throught. In the original film there was only really Bill Murray that made us lol but it felt like we had four Bill Murray’s all making us laugh. Personally I’m not the biggest fan of Melissa McCarthy because she just isn’t very funny but as much as I don’t like to say it she played her role as Abby really well. And the same goes for the other three female lead roles; in this film they all portrayed themselves as ghostbusters really well and made us believe that they could save New York from the supernatural.  A sweet touch was made when we saw Annie Potts make an appearance - she was the desk clerk in the original Ghostbusters. But the sweetest of all was when Bill Murray made a short appearance which was lovely for us Ghostbusters fans to see. What’s nice about seeing a Ghostbusters film made in 2016 is that the special effects are brilliant, and fair to say a bit more updated than they were in 1984, so the ghosts actually looked pretty creepy and you could’t see any of the strings they were hanging from.

So to conclude my ramblings, Ghostbusters is actually a really enjoyable film and certainly worth watching as it relives our memories of the original and also gives us a perfect amount of ghostbusting and humour.