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[Ghostbusters] Thread - Open Spoilers
Krathoon
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I just watched Afterlife. It was definitely a swan song of a movie. Discuss.
I guess all that was needed to defeat Gozer was to split her apart. Not much of a God.
I liked how she separated the streams.
I spoilered that in case someone accidentally entered the thread. I liked how she separated the streams.
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Gozer had lost three destructor forms at that point, two of them in rapid succession, so Shandor losing one and not actually being destroyed seems reasonable. The logic of the universe seems to be that spirit beings can't be destroyed, only banished from this plane or contained within it, hence Egon's eventual realization that Gozer wasn't destroyed and had to be captured to break the cycle.
Bigger hole is that Shandor tried to meet Gozer as a supplicant after what happened the last time the two met, but one could argue that's why Gozer killed him immediately.
The setup in the mine kind of makes sense with the whole spirit sewer thing shown in the game, too. Shandor had built a whole network to power Gozer's arrival with multiple endpoints and trigger mechanisms in case nodes were disrupted as happened in both movies and throughout the game, destroying Stay Puft and disrupting the nodes in New York was just playing whack-a-mole as long as some part of Shandor's works remained elsewhere.
Edit: I mean, I can spin some good bullshit but trying to shoehorn the game into the canon post-afterlife is like trying to do the same with the Mad Max game, you can kind of squeeze it in immediately before Fury Road if you squint and turn it sideways and don't actually watch the movie or play the game but the two just diverged in opposite directions from the original plans too much.
Still, how did not anyone find the temple? It was not like it was sealed shut. I guess Egon made the elevator into the temple.
It was all wide open. I guess no one had the nerve to go down there.
I guess this was a backup plan for Shandor to summon Gozer and come back.
Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd are definitely getting too old for this. It was a good idea to have Winston have the money to start up the Ghostbusters again.
Gee. I guess she is a genius. I guess she already knows Modern Physics. Fictional particle physics that is.
I guess she has a nuclear engineering degree.
Sneakily capturing one of the dogs was a good idea. Apparently, you cannot trap the living. It just pulls the spirit off you.
You really get the impression that this was a last ditch effort of Shandor trying to get what he wanted. Still, the movie was good, but it is more like a epilogue.
He guides her in fixing it if you re-watch that scene.
Paul Rudd is obsessed with the ghostbusters, he moves to a town built by Ivo Shandor and investigates mysterious Earth quakes, he learns that his student has a ghost trap in his house. There's a history of a lot of mining deaths in the area where the mine was closed down because of "The Shandorian Curse." but he never thinks to put these things together?
Podcast runs a podcast about the supernatural. He's never heard of the ghostbusters either?
Egon becomes convinced that Gozar is coming back, and none of his fellow ghostbusters believe him? Not even Winston?
He doesn't even bother to explain his theory to any of them?
Callie knew her dad was a ghostbuster, but apparently doesn't care? She sees so many examples of weird shit going on, but she never blinks an eye? None of the other ghostbusters were aware that Egon had kids?
And then at the end they reveal that the containment unit is in danger of breaking down. No one's been keeping tabs on it? Not even now that they've managed to trap Gozar and the apocalypse?
Now and days, $5000 is what you might pay to have a doctor look at a sprained ankle for 15 minutes if you have no insurance. I've had auto shops quote that much for minor dents on my car, I can't imagine how much it would cost to build the ghostbusting equipment from scratch.
The financial aspects of ghostbusting is the part that makes the least amount of sense, since realistically there's no way for 99% of the population to afford their service.
That's still chump change considering they have total monopoly over a service that the hotel absolutely needs in order to function.
If something simple like a pipe burst at the hotel, I would expect the repairs to cost a lot more than $13,000. The only difference is that the pipe might be covered by insurance.
It was kind of like everyone was cynical and had their heads up their butts.
Egon totally had evidence that something was going on.
It was neat that Gozer could actually grab the proton streams like rope.
It felt like they were aiming for capturing "Stranger Things" or "IT" in a universe where it doesn't make any sense for adults to act that way because it's already been definitively proven that supernatural shit is real. In a post-COVID world, I can totally buy most people not taking the threat seriously and not taking proper precautions. But the idea that the ghostbusters themselves don't take it seriously (Except Egon) and the rest of the world seems to have completely forgotten about ghosts in general is completely nuts.
Honestly, the story feels written as if they originally made it so that a complete stranger with no direct connection to Egon discovers the equipment, which would have fixed a lot of holes. They could have had Egon go senile and die from radiation poisoning or cancer, to explain why no one took him seriously. Make an inside joke about how Louis completely disappeared because raising kids was more important.
The only thing that would have been lost is that Egon wouldn't have been able to give his emotional farewell to his family, but that's what the other ghostbusters were there for. Have Janine show up and she could give Egon a hug instead. Making Phoebe Egon's grand daughter doesn't really add anything to the story, especially since she never had any connection to him in the first place. Also, the timeline doesn't make much sense for Egon to have a 15 year old grandson. Ghostbusters 2 came out in 1989. I suppose he could have had a kid the following year and abandoned her immediately and then she could have her own kid at 15?
Another direction they could have gone was exploring the idea that this entire town was basically built by Shandor. They could have shown that his cult was still alive and well, and the sheriff happens to be one of them. The movie mentions that all the buildings are named for him, and we're only learning this detail really late in the movie? If my father was Egon Spengler and I was moving to a town where everything had Shandor's name on it, I would be scared as fuck.
When Phoebe is watching the Ghostbusters ad on notyoutube, one of the videos in the sidebar is entitled "What REALLY happened in 1984". I suspect that the idea is that the world refused to believe them (an idea that was also in Ghostbusters 2) and just thought it was a hoax of something. Nearly forty years later, I can see it being largely forgotten by the general public. But yeah the guys themselves would not be so forgetful and it is a pretty big plot hole that they would not help Egon.
Shandor was defeated in the video game and went to the spirit world. Then, he gets put back in his body and ripped in half.
Still, he somehow preserved his body. Black magic or something.
The movie did have some pretty sharp dialog. It just did not make real sense why Egon isolated himself unless everyone thought he was nuts. I got that impression since he spray painted on everything.
The Ghostbusters video game is like $6 on Steam right now. The sale runs out in 30min.
* Egon and Ray come up with a way to bust ghosts
* They rope Peter into it and start up the Ghostbusters
* They hire Janine and Winston
* Various relatively low-profit-margin bustin'
* The big Gozer battle
* The bustin' business dries up to a trickle and eventually nothing
* Ghostbusters goes out of business, Ray opens an occult bookstore, Peter and Winston do...who knows what
* Egon becomes obsessed with the idea that something big is coming, ghost-wise
* After some years of increasing obsession, Egon ditches not only his friends but his own family to go live in the middle of nowhere building ghost traps
Even if Ray fully believed Egon that Gozer would return, as year after year goes by and there are no ghosts to bust...what's Ray going to do? He was apparently making a living with his book shop. Once Egon was living out on his dirt farm, Ray probably only heard from him less and less frequently, and always going on about how Gozer was coming back... losing touch seems fairly realistic.
If you assume Egon's daughter is the same age as the actress who plays her, he had her ~3 years after the events of the original movie. She was old enough to remember him when he ditched his family but still a kid, so probably less than 10 but not a lot less. Figure something like 10 years after Gozer, with probably 8 of those years after the ghost business dried up. Egon and Ray would have already seen a lot less of one another after Egon went off and got married and had a kid. I've got friends I was close with a decade ago who had kids and I haven't even talked to on Facebook in 5+ years at this point. By the point Egon was obsessed enough to ditch his family and live on a dirt farm making ghost traps he probably just assumed nobody would have his back which...was probably accurate. They showed up 40 years later, when shit hit the fan, sure, but were any of the guys really going to move to the middle of nowhere with him with nothing obviously happening?
I just like the idea of Shandor trying to weasel his way back to Gozer.
When they did the last Ghostbusters reboot movie I was really disappointed it wasn't just Ghostbusters: the Video Game but with a whole team of new employees instead of the one new guy and the old crew.
Still it is paranormal. When they put the statue back, it could have reverted back to like it never happened.
I doubt it though.
In the video game Control, they do stuff like that. Something will happen and then it will be like it never happened at all.
Control has a quasi-governmental agency with supernatural resources to cover up and redact memories and shit, though.
The Stay-Puft marshmallow man walking like a block or two down a street and getting blown up could, twenty or thirty years after the fact, be written off as a hoax or some kind of weird performance art thing. Moving the statue of liberty around would be a much larger and harder to deny operation.
They should have just let Winston do a spinoff movie 20 years ago where he's the only one left behind after everyone else has moved on, which is also a meta commentary on their careers. They could do the same thing they did in the other movies and have the rest of the team name cameos.
I know the Hollywood execs would never go for that, though.
Everything was super predictable and I loved every second
though I will say the dialogue when Ray, Peter, and Winston showed up was really stiff
Yeah. They kind of just showed up. You could tell they didn't really want to do much. Maybe they are just old.
Podcast kinda explains this by saying there were many unexplained deaths happening in the mines, probably caused by gas and other dangerous explosives, which causes them to close the mine.
In the intro, we see Egon drive through a closed of fence warning everyone to stay clear.
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There's a lot of history we've forgotten or chosen to ignore. I absolutely believe that only a bunch of 80s NY Boomers would remember NYE 1985 or whatever year it was.
Like I get the arguments for the video evidence and stuff, because news crews would have filmed things, but if ghosts stopped after that and the people who founded the place vanished into thin air never to be referenced again, then society is gonna forget about it.
Hell it kinda seemed like the Ghostbusters had forgotten about it. They were pretty content having moved on.
also, the Sigorny Weaver cameo was perfectly timed.
Very few movies are special to me, and Ghostbusters is on that list and at the very top. I'd watch another one if they make it like this movie, that is with love and respect of the source material.
(and we don't need to talk about the previous GB movie any further, it was just an observation)
I liked the 2016 movie and thought it was a good option to continue the series.
But the moment the OG Ghostbusters show up, it just feels so shoehorned in. The flow of the movie, the energy, everything felt off. Beyond the obvious questions like "Where did they get their gear if Egon took it all?", it felt like they weren't even in the same movie. I really disliked it. If they had shown up and shown a level of gravitas that the scene and other characters were displaying, maybe that would have worked? I get that the OG Ghostbusters were cutups, but when they had to get serious in the original movie, they got serious.
And I very much disliked how much they used Ghost Egon here. If they had just shown his hand helping Phoebe steady her stream, with her looking up and off camera to him, I think it would have been perfect. Or at the very least, don't have him stand there mutely while all the characters say goodbye to Harold Ramis.
All in all, I liked it? Most of the movie I found to be genuinely fun, just enough reverent to the original material without going overboard, and the acting was solid (except for Finn Wolfhard's character, who was just kind of there?). But again, the ending almost ruined it for me.
Also, completely random but JK Simmons played Shandor and Olivia Wilde played Gozer. Neat!
There is heavy speculation on GBfans that Janine was supposed to be bringing the GB to Summerville. She steals the ESP shock device and brings it to Peter, we see a shot with Peter and Dana with Janine holding the device, the shot with Winston was repurposed as a stinger at the end of the movie and she was cut out of the final battle.
A bunch of deleted scenes pop up in the 'Summoning the Spirit' special. You can see Janine sitting on the porch during the final battle. There is also a deleted scene where she steals the coin she looks at in Winstons office.
In short, it seems likely the ending was supposed to make a whole lot more sense, and at least the Winston stinger was supposed to be in the movie and the Dana Peter Stimger had a scene building up to it in the movie itself.
Here is most of the info:
Summoning the Spirit special feature
-0:55: Bts of mid credit tag, Dana at front door with Janine.
-1:07: Bts of final battle, Annie talking to Jason.
-1:30: Bts of mid credit tag, Dana, Peter, and Janine in room seen in tag
-1:50: Bts of final battle, Janine on porch of Farmhouse
One Poster says the following:
So I believe Janine found the electro-shocker, maybe when she talked to Callie at the Farmhouse, and delivered it Dana as a gift then left and Dana tried it out on Peter in the mid credit tag.
Wonder why they cut Janine out of the finale. Would have been nice for Janine and Ghost Egon to have a moment, too.
Shoot m to BITS (hold Y) [hard] C109-0000-014D-4E09
P-POWER Switch Palace 3838-0000-0122-9359
Raiding the Serpents Tomb 1A04-0000-0098-C11E
I like to move it, move it FCE2-0000-00D7-9048
See my profile here!
The heat between Egon and Janine was palpable.
Paul Rudd referencing Beethoven the dog talking about Cujo was extremely funny