Amerika

The new politically-correct reboot of Ghostbusters (1984) was designed with a singular task: to translate a favorite franchise into an advertisement for feminism, diversity and Leftism. However, its impotence as a film crushes the film’s own message and shows why ideological thinking is destructive.

Given the same storyline, better equipment, and recent advances in special effects, one would assume that four of Hollywood’s top upcoming female comics would be able to deliver a movie on a par with that of their male predecessors from a generation ago. But as if the case any time humans force reality to conform to their inner emotional needs, it is not so: this film misses out on the adventure, fun and chemistry that makes a good movie, and instead we get the same mediocre schlock that fills up every sit-com and safety video. It is not horribly bad because of the minimum competence of all involved, but there is nothing good here either, which is why we use terms like “typical” and “mediocre”: like most of humanity, it gets a barely passing grade which means it demonstrates basic competence but no depth of understanding.

Ghostbusters (2016) feels like a drive-by movie as a result. It seems as if all the people involved took a cursory look at the original, maybe just using stills or storyboards, and decided to remake that world aesthetically while relying on entirely new content. Four ladies from different backgrounds coming together to bust ghosts in 2016 is a different story than four misfits doing so in the 1980s, but that story is not told. Instead, we get a film with no sense of spirit, enjoyment or even purpose. It barely hangs together as if all the participants were compelled to interact at gunpoint by KGB colonels.

Un-inspired acting appears consistently throughout this flick. A lot of screen time goes to long rambling scientific terms which no one seems to really care about on a real level, but since it is in the script, so they have to get through each line (and they just barely do…). It is like watching a politician read from a Teleprompter. When characters do interact, you wonder if they were all green screened in, because they do not seem to react to one another so much as they are reading their lines at the right cue. And every time one of these actors starts doing something which could be interesting, the script smashes that momentum in order to go on to make its next point.

Making points: that is what this film feels like, an educational video or wartime government propaganda. Every aspect of this production feels like it was designed to say or do the correct thing, and it has selected an audience from those for whom ideology is more important than quality. This film for them is more about the political concept than the film.

For many years we have heard that women don’t get the good roles in Hollywood, and that they are underpaid because of discrimination. The lack of synergy and spark between these actors suggests that the free market economy is deciding things correctly, and that women are not delivering entertainment value for certain types of roles. Lately the same was also said for black actors, despite presidents and scientists being black in every big Hollywood blockbuster. This film tries to address both of those questions by having an all-female cast, making the men into morons, and featuring a black female typecast character, played by Leslie Jones (who is supposedly some big deal in comedy) who has forced racial dialogue in terms of maximum lingo and being “the cool one” of the bunch. Whenever a laugh is needed they pan to her and she delivers dud after dud. But the all-female cast have none of the energy or charisma of even the corny 1980s film, and the hip black character act becomes alarmingly like a racial caricature.

This reboot has switched the roles around beyond one hundred percent to where not only are the men all useless and militantly clueless (even Bill Murray’s cameo is as a skeptic which makes no sense), but they are pretty boys who cannot even answer a phone call or perform secretarial duties. The women who are supposed to be the focus of the film end up either delivering their lines like bad office workers or over-acting like carnies, as Kate McKinnon does, a glitch she shares with official white male moron Chris Hemsworth, who plays a receptionist.

No one will come right out and say it, but for this movie its appeal, its political concept and its summary are identical: four women (irony! rebellion!) battle ghosts in New York. No depth is added to this to make the film worth watching. The women approach ghost-hunting like dweeby pacifists, and they spend the whole movie looking dumpy and being unfunny, appearing to waddle their way around and even at one point they try and “run” with their packs on. The filmmakers seem to think that the audience will show up and praise this digestive byproduct of a movie, and in the case of angry, lonely female SJWs they may be right, but for the rest of us it is transparent propaganda and a badly-done film.

Tags: equality, feminism, ghostbusters, propaganda