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Unfortunately, the idea of it being always Spengler makes no sense with the current plot since it's not exactly a common last name and it would have been really hard to keep the family secret a secret for as long as they did.
Paul Rudd is a huge fan of the Ghostbusters, and a student with the last name of Spengler brings in an actual ghost trap.
Spengler in that world is what Murphy is in ours - a hugely important name that raises a ton of red flags to chemtrailers but nobody else gives a shit. That world's chemtrailers just happen to be right but still nobody gives a shit.
And Paul Rudd wouldn't recognize the last name Spengler? Not even after one of the students brought in an actual ghost trap?
First, that's a completely different movie from the one we were actually given. Phoebe isn't raised thinking her grandfather was a fraud, only to discover that he was right all along. She doesn't know who her grandfather was in the first place. Presumably, Egon's wife would have believed in ghosts. So was Callie a skeptic since birth despite being told that ghosts were real and her dad was a hero, or did she become a skeptic later on? If the second one, then why? If she was angry at her dad, then why keep it a secret? Why not share her resentment with her daughter? Phoebe doesn't seem like the type of person who would need to be sheltered from that.
Second, that's a pretty bad comparison considering the fact that Gozar actually happened in the world of Ghostbusters with lots of empirical evidence to back it up.
You can try comparing it to something like climate change or COVID-19 which has plenty of deniers despite being real (And I've already done that), but the idea of "only crazy people believe that the ghostbusters are real" is silly.
The entire point of Ghostbusters is to show that scientific method can win over superstition. Egon, at the very least, scientific geniuses who managed to invent miniaturized nuclear accelerators. Ray says they continued to catch ghosts after Gozar, which means they still had reproducible empirical evidence that ghosts exists. All they have to do is release a ghost from one of their traps, and that will shut any doubters down real quick.
So while the general public might doubt Egon's findings, there's no reason for the scientific community to doubt him.
Apparently, no one was maintaining the containment unit.
I thought the mini marshmallow men bit was kinda dumb (it always feels like stuff like that is added to movies solely to sell merchandise, see also: Porgs), but the one that gives a Terminator 2 style thumbs up as its being melted on the grill made me laugh. I think "You're my subscriber?!" was my favorite line in the entire thing.
YouTube channels? They always seem fake. Ghost Hunters was kind of reputable.
I did see a video where someone drove through a ghost that seemed authentic.
Authentic as in talking about and checking out places that are historically considered “haunted” and not trying to make it into something that would be on TLC or History?
Yeah. I did find a Newsweek article on more scientific investigators. They have ran into things like stuff flying off shelves and tugging on sleeves that have been unexplained.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/there-is-a-paranormal-activity-lab-at-the-university-of-virginia/283584/
Also I was laughing at the hosts OBVIOUSLY reading off a teleprompter and acting like it was spontaneous. "This. is. the. first. time. I've. seen. this. and. I'm. so. excited!"
In the LEGO Wrecto-1 there was a bag of marshmallows hidden under the front seat, but I guess that scene got cut as well.
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It's all just a conceit for a kid's movie. You're over thinking it.
And the bolded is absolutely not "the entire point of Ghostbusters".
But yeah, Ghostbusters and the Scientific Method have fuck-all to do with one another, unless "The Scientific Method" is slang for "burning down a building using nuclear laser guns".
I'm curious how well it actually works as that. Being a person in their 40's without kids I don't personally know anyone who has seen the movie who hadn't seen the original decades ago. Does it work for a (pre-)teen who has never seen Ghostbusters? Or is it incoherent?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
If you squint, I guess, but the Ghostbusters' ghost-busting science is effectively magic without even a Science Montage to show us how Ray and Egon arrived at it. And there's not really any superstition being shown. The ghosts, aside from Gozer, are basically treated like paranomral vermin. Gozer uses beliefs and desires and shit but is completely forgotten in-universe. Nobody (aside from, presumably, Ivo Shandor) is worshipping or even has any beliefs about Gozer. It's just the giant spider invasion to the Ghostbusters' pest control service.
My neighbours kids are my barometer for this kind of thing. They've been exposed to the old films through their parents and relished the opportunity to share some geek-outedness with their parents with this new film. They absolutely loved the new movie and found it fully coherent - they just care less about Bill Murray.
Yeah I'm not sure what part of the scientific method involves covering the Statue of Liberty in ghost-goo and marching it through NYC while blaring "Higher and Higher".
In that respect, the tone of the 2016 movie was much, much closer to the original than Afterlife. Afterlife got way, way too reverential, and did very little supernatural stuff that wasn't recycled. Reanimating Shandor for like five seconds (way to waste JK Simmons), but that's it.
*yes, I know only two of them were actually in SNL, shut up
I'm not very well versed in this sort of film criticism so my argument sucks but I do think there is a strong undercurrent of 'modern science vs ancient religion' going on in the movie. Just the way certain things are shot or presented. Even the climax presents itself as 4 plumbers vs Old Testament God.
As for why it seems more meaningful and lasting than other "funny guys doing funny stuff" films of era: I think it's just the worldbuilding. Ghostbusters manages to paint a picture of a really weird and interesting world full of monsters and stories-come-to-life but where regular, blue-collar schlubs can still make a difference and save the day. It's jokes and sexism and ghosts-as-rats-with-nuclear-powered-pesticide but you can't watch the movie without feeling like there are a thousand other stories luring around the corners, and these guys in overalls who (despite their technical credentials) present as everyday joe's are in there being badasses. If it did lean hard into making Ray and Egon Very Scientific Professional Scientists, or without Tobin's Spirit Guide and Class IV Free-Repeating Specters, I don't think it would have worked nearly as well.
That is something that science does not have an explanation for. Usually, they just throw it out.
If ghosts are real in this universe, then presumably, superstitious methods for defeating ghosts would be real as well, such as exorcisms an magical trinkets or chosen one protagonists or whatever. And that's the route that most movies normally take. The humans either demonstrate humility by learning to respect the old ways, or they get defeated by their hubris.
They could have just as easily had Egon be an expert in the occult where the team is armed with wands of lightning. Ghostbusters intentionally doesn't go this route. Because it's not enough for the ghostbusters to win, they have to win via science.
You're basically dismissing the entire genre of science fiction because the fictional science isn't real.
The science in ghostbusters is metaphorical, but in the context of the fictional world, the science is very much real. It's a metaphor. Just like Star Trek is a metaphor for scientific exploration, even though FTL travel isn't real and none of these alien species actually exist.
MovieBob has a great essay on this. Relevant portion starts at about 11:30.
I just realized that this might also be a callback to the first movie, where Dana asks the same question twice:
Observation: Judge yells angrily at the ghostbusters, slime reacts and explodes
Hypothesis: Maybe this slime reacts to negative reactions?
Prediction/Experiment: Yell at the slime to see if you can reproduce the results. It does.
Okay, so new question: Does this slime only react to negative emotions, or can it react to positive emotions as well? Does it only respond to actual people, or would it respond to recordings as well?
Yes, obviously mood slime doesn't exist in the real world. But that's not the point of this scene. The point of the scene is, "If mood slime WAS real, then how would scientists react to it?"
they would sleep with it.
My kids have seen the original movie once, maybe 2 years ago. Never watched the second or the 2016 one. They both loved Afterlife.
My 7 year old daughter was most excited that the main protag was a young girl, but she followed along with everything pretty well and only had one or two questions along the way. My 10 year old son was having a blast all throughout, and would get very excited at anything he could tie back to his memories of the original. He had no trouble at all following everything.
I can't say much about Ghostbusters 2, because it's been decades since I've seen that one, but whatever the original film's themes were, I don't think there's much evidence that it wants to be about science vs superstition.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
She remembered: she even mockingly quotes 'if they are gods' in response if she remembered them.
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!
I'm not sure why you see professional plumbing and modern science as incompatible. When you use modern science to overcome superstition, then overcoming superstition becomes mundane and ordinary. Most of the technology you take for granted today would have come across as magical 100 years ago.
As for the role the EPA makes in the movie, you could remove that subplot from the movie entirely, and the only think you lose are a few jokes. For instance, you could have the containment system fail because of any number of different things, and the rest of the movie would play the exact same way. Heck, you didn't even really need the system to fail in the first place. Yes, the themes of Reagonomics are there, but that seems to simply be reflecting the current sentiment of the era without really digging any deeper. Where as the decision to have science triumph over ghosts was in direct opposition to popular media at the time.