Here, we can find a damning summary of modern Hollywood’s default mode – a nostalgia object, drained of personality and fitted into a dully palatable mold, custom-made for a fandom that worships everything and respects nothing.The six new figures span across the upcoming film’s central characters, including the returning Peter Venkman, Winston Zeddemore and Ray Stantz as well as fresh faces Trevor, Podcast and Lucky. Perhaps it’s appropriate and telling that the 2021 incarnation of an 80s artifact would be imbued with all the issues most endemic to the current studio release. There’s a disturbing sense of ownership over the past in Reitman’s continuity-building, as if he’s the heir apparent entrusted with sacred texts rather than a guy running roughshod over the memory of a movie still a staple of middle-school sleepovers for its laugh quotient. To speak in broad terms, a crucial ethical line is crossed whenever computer technology starts marching around the ghostly form of a dead person, doubly so when that person was famous for their smirking irreverence and their digitally reanimated corpse instead arrives just in time for a movie’s most nauseating cornball moment. It’s impossible to fully appraise this film without getting into spoiler territory the PR team has wrapped in yellow “DO NOT CROSS” tape, but the howling obviousness of the third act’s surprise appearances may enable talking around its specifics. The message is clear, as are its intended recipients: there’s nothing more powerful, important or cool than being a nerd. Even the championing of scientific expertise comes off as overreaching and aggrieved, from Grooberson’s declaration that science is “punk” to the smug superiority of the pint-sized Phoebe. Consider the casual cowardice of a script that uses its own mythology to subtly erase 2016’s all-gals reboot from the canon, giving the rage-choked trolls carpet-bombing IMDb with zero-star ratings the vindication they’ve always craved. It’s not all groaners like a cop offering a jailed-for-the-night Trevor the phone and asking, “Who you gonna call?” There’s the set piece with cutesy, nattering mini-Stay-Pufts scratching the itch for cloying mischief-makers planted by the Minions. It’s pandering all the way down, the shocking part being the variety of Reitman’s ploys. Alongside new pals including a kid with a podcast named “Podcast” (Logan Kim) so no one forgets what his defining thing is, and sarcastic schoolteacher Mr Grooberson (Paul Rudd, forced into a comic relief role with Coon that only underscores the brutal unfunniness of everything else), they’ve got to defeat another one of the CGI energy-cyclones apparently mandated to close out today’s tentpoles. He, beleaguered mom Callie (Carrie Coon), and stem-disciplined sister Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) relocate to the abandoned farmhouse left to them by the kids’ recently deceased deadbeat granddad, which just so happens to be situated on a hotbed of ecto-activity. In case we couldn’t make this connection for ourselves, shared cast member Finn Wolfhard stars here as Trevor, teenaged son to the hard-luck Spengler family. There’s no other explanation for an approach trading the ironic quippiness embodied by Bill Murray for a guileless, earnest Amblin knockoff in line with the on-trend Stranger Things.
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