I enjoyed Ghostbusters, but I’ll be upfront: the movie had problems. Plenty of problems. And if you’d like a reminder of those, or a more succinct breakdown of how over the top some people’s reaction to the movie was this year, then Honest Trailers is here to help.
I feel like Honest Trailers has been holding off on this for a while; they disabled the comments for a reason. And it’s nice that the video opens up on Sony first and the reaction before tackling some of the movie’ss structural problems — like the fact that the cast were all trying to fulfil some form of comic relief at the same time.
“Suit up for a film that desperate to prove that it’s not like the original, but also desperate to remind you of the original at every opportunity,” Honest Trailers says.
I’d forgotten about the wonton jokes as well.
Now that we’re well removed from all of the online drama — what’d you think of Ghostbusters? Would you watch it again?
Comments
27 responses to “Honest Trailers Finally Takes On Ghostbusters”
All the hyperbole and drama asides, I thought it was utterly dire and really, really shit. It reeked of corporate-mandated remake in every single way. Like the trailer said, every single role tried to be the comic relief and the movie suffered from it, the only humour I found in the movie was Hemsworth and his passive-aggressive performance. The controversy surrounding the movie was *far* more interesting than any single bit in the movie itself that’s for sure.
You would describe racist and misogynistic (really, the venn diagram would probably be just a circle) message board posters as interesting, would you?
Haven’t seen the movie myself, but I have heard good things. I guess I’ll watch it some time. Different strokes….
What are the odds there’s a pushback towards the Wonder Woman movie, because it’ll dare to probably just pay lip service to the same themes present in Ghostbusters, or hell, Mad Max Fury Road last year – teh wimmins think they’re as tough as men, the silly things!
Let me get this right…. your having a dig at someone who HAS seen the movie, and pointed out that its less entertaining than the shit storm it created, but you haven’t seen it, yet still feel you can make that objective call yourself on how someone else see’s it?
How do you know that he didn’t find the backlash funny as a “Ha these racist/misogynists are dumb as hell, its so funny anyone takes them serious”…. you just decided that based on your perceived version of his opinion it was obviously because he agreed with the scum making it about the wrong thing? nice hypocrisy there.
I’m not having a dig at anybody, he’s a good egg. Spot on with everything else.
It’s really funny these days that you can’t criticise a POC without being labelled racist and can’t criticise a woman without being labelled misogynist.
What makes the situation so interesting is how Sony manipulated it to their favor. The angry trolls were a minority of the people who disliked the trailer, yet sony turned it into a big story and got the media completely behind them.
What it taught me was to be wary of trusting movie reviewers. On release, Ghosbusters metacritic score was crazy high for a movie most people now say has major problems.
Metacritic removed negative reviews and stopped people from being able to submit them, basically saying that people needed to “grow up”.
Admittedly, people troll voting 1s out of some sexist principle was going to skew the results anyway, but at the other end of the spectrum you had people calling James Rolfe sexist because he said he wouldn’t watch or review the movie. They accused him of being super mad and being sexist and lashing out at the movie, when his video was, if anyone took five minutes to watch it, him quite reasonably saying “I really love the 80s Ghostbusters, it’s important to me, and I’m simply not interested in any remake at all.”
This is the exact reason i wont watch it, after how terrible Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Transformers was done, i dont want that to be how i remember Ghostbusters.
EXACTLY. I still haven’t seen TMNT either. Transformers seemed good on release until about 2/3 of the way through the film when I was silently crying into my popcorn. Still a fun brainless film though 😛 let’s not discuss the sequels…
Yeah but that stops the dislike of the new film pre-release being just women hating misogynists. People don’t want actual deconstructions and valid reasons for disliking a reboot. They just want to light their torches and wave dem pitchforks 😛
Im talking about the professional aggregate score, not the user score. Its come down now but when ghostbusters first came out i remember seeing it in the high 80% range.
The blowback on the movie was incredibly interesting, it was an indictment on how utterly stupid fanboyism/fangirlism has become, how a corporation manipulated fans into believing feminism was a driving point for the film when infact it was a guise for nothing but profiteering (there was truly no, absolutely no, feminist purpose here) and in the end, we saw people on BOTH sides of the argument at their worst. If you didn’t like the movie you were a misogynist, if you liked the movie you were a feminazi etc. Me? I didn’t like the movie because it was an uninspired, boring remake that had no soul, nothing interesting to say and no decent direction. I personally fucking adore Kristen Wiig and think Kate Mckinnon is one of the funniest people on SNL, however cannot stand McCarthy (but loved SPY and Bridesmaids) and have zero opinion on Jones who I actually thought was the best of the four in the movie.
But in terms of a social observation, the furore surrounding the movie was absolutely more interesting. there was far more than racism and misogyny, there was corporate manipulation, there was blind manipulation from the other side of the argument as well, people who basically picked up arms without seeing the movie championing it as the holy grail for feminism without knowing a thing about it etc etc.
Wonderwoman will receive no blowback because it doesn’t have its director out there attacking its audience, it doesn’t have its stars out there speaking down at the fans, it’s being openly embraced as a female led and driven movie and highly anticipated as hopefully the first *non fucked up* DC property, I mean I for one am *eager as hell* because I goddamn love Gadot in the role and love how they presented her character so far. There’s a complete lack of themes in Ghostbusters unfortunately because these supposed themes were pushed aside in an effort to go for the lulz, to play each other off as the comic relief, any decent message, any good effect that could’ve been achieved was half arsed and that’s the saddest part.
It’s awesome if others found something in it, but I personally didn’t. Not for misogyny, not for women hating, if others are that awkward and uncomfortable they have to label me that for whatever reason, whatever, but personally, I prefer my female empowerment to come from the heart and the soul, not from the companies wallet.
This movie sucked pure ass. And the fact people level “oh you’re just a misogynist because you didn’t like it?” nonsense really gets on my tits.
My favourite film of all time is Aliens. You know, the one with a woman who kicks so much fucking ass it hurts? Yeah, and Fury Road is right up there too.
It’s got nothing to do with women, it’s only to do with quality of movie. And GB 2016 is fucking dire.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate how awesome Kristen Wiig is? So many classic roles.
She is indeed extremely talented, she’s just unfortunately slumming it these days with a director who peaked after two movies.
The movie is flawed, no doubt about it. I enjoyed it though. I’d say it’s just as fun (though not nearly as iconic) as the original. My only majot drama was Chris Hemsworth’s character. He was too stupid. Like Ralph Wiggum stupid. Seemed way too out of place.
No, see, he HAD to be stupid, because all of the female cast were comic relief but still had to be ‘smarter’ than the man so it wouldn’t look like the movie was stereotyping them as ‘dumb women’.
I got the joke of why his character was so stupid and that would be funny, but it felt like the writing itself was stupid. He wasn’t Ralph Wiggum stupid because as dumb as the character is Ralph’s dialogue is genius. It was sort of a poor man’s Derek Zoolander in a movie that’s not right for that character. He was almost like a prop comic. I get the whole meta joke there but getting a joke and a joke being funny are two different things.
It’s a shame because Chris Hemsworth is a lot better at comedy than he gets credit for.
The reboot was a mistake. It is nothing but trash.
Thankfully listened to James Rolfe and didn’t watch it.
So… you watched the movie or you didn’t?
I didn’t. I’m just judging it from what others have said about it, which makes my arguments ironclad.
I haven’t seen the movie. I don’t plan to see the movie. It just isn’t a blip on my radar, and no amount of online controversy will change that.
Here’s my problem with it, though, because I was almost interested in seeing it.
During one of the trailers there’s a scene where Hemsworth is answering the phone and asks “What’s this place called again?” and he gets a long technobabble response. Then there’s a cut back to him and he answers the phone with “ghostbusters” while giving a cheerful thumbs up. Perfectly timed comedy, hit the beat perfectly. Was discussing the movie with a friend, saying that one moment from the trailer gave me hope that the people behind the film knew what comedy was and how to do it.
My friend broke the news that the scene I saw in the trailer is not in the movie at all: it was two scenes stitched together.
Scene 1:
Hemsworth: what’s this place called?
One of the Ghostbusters: [long technobabble answer]
Hemworth: [tries to replicate the technobabble answer but can’t because it’s too complicated and he is dumb]
Scene 2:
One of the Ghostbusters: We are NOT calling this place Ghostbusters! Absolutely not, no way, Ghostbusters is a terrible name, that will never happen, over my dead body!!!1 (I’m paraphrasing here obviously but it’s the set up to the gag where a character adamantly refuses to do a thing and then immediately that thing happens – a joke that was played out around the time Noah’s wife felt the first drops of rain and said “there’s no way I’m getting on your stupid ark with a bunch of stinky animals”)
Hemsworth: (answering phone) Ghostbusters!
I was neutral on the movie. Then I was interested. Then than interest was snatched away, leaving me hollow and empty.
I watched it just last weekend when it came out on the play store. I didn’t love but i didn’t hate it. I definitely want prepared to pay to go to the cinema for it. The characters i liked the most was Kristen Wiig and Chris Hemsworth. Mostly when both of them were together in the scene.
it’s first major joke was about ‘front bum farts’ and the ending had 4 women shooting a ghost in it’s non existent nutsMy wife claimed that was just as derogatory for her as anything online trolls could write.
Chris Hemsworth had more comedic timing and delivery than the rest of the cast combined.
Ha ha ha, when a dude (and a woman) writes women trying to do bloke-y humour. Result: gutter trash.
I haven’t seen it, but I want to watch because the trailers look ok. But I want to watch it on Netflix or something, I didn’t look like a movie I’d pay money to see (beyond a Netflix subscription).
This feeling applies to lots of movies for me, especially these days where everything is remakes and sequels.
Watched it. Enjoyed it. It’s a movie, not a treatise on human existence ffs.
I enjoyed it – it wasn’t amazing but had some laughs and an ok story. The characters were decent but the movie wasn’t structured particularly well.