Review: Ghostbusters (2016)

[terresdebrume]

So I went to see the Ghosbusters all-female reboot on the day it came out in France (Wednesday 10^th) and then stuff happened, which is why I’m only posting the review now—and also why there was no book review on Friday. At least in parts.

Ahem, anyway. Ghostbusters. It’s been tumblr’s favorite film for the past few months, meaning that the best moments got gifed the second the movie released in the USA, and that the hype was strong in this one…and as is often the case with Tumblr hypes, it didn’t quite live up to its reputation.*

Plot: After Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) is accidentally revealed to be interested in paranormal phenomenons, she’s fired from her job at Columbia university and join her former friend Abby Yates (Melissa McCarty) and her assistant Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) in their quest to find and study ghosts. Together, they witness their first real apparition in a haunted museum and decide to create the Ghostbusters, which leads them to meet Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) who comes to them after seeing a ghost at her job in the New York underground train.

The four women then embark on a quest to discover who is setting ghost-generating machnes all over the city, and why.

Mild spoilers below the cut.

Review: Let us all be clear on one point: when I say Ghostbusters failed to live to the hype it got on Tumblr, I don’t necessarily mean it was a terrible movie—more that it tends tobe presented as the Movie Of The Year and it is, honestly, not.

The Ghostbusters reboot is good in the way the original was good: it’s fast paced, there are ghosts, situational humor (helped by copious amounts of slime) interesting stunts, and the obligatory—but not overwhelming—lot of throwbacks and cameos to the original movies. Overall, it’s a fun B-list movie with an all-female cast (which is pretty cool, let’s be honest here) and good special effects, even if I personally thought they were a little too far on the technicolor side.

However, because this is an all-female movie, I can’t really take the feminist goggles off and I couldn’t help notice that some of the broader, less-good sides of it seemed to me to be at least influenced by sexism. Case in point: Kevin and Rowan.

Kevin and Rowan are the two main male character of the movie. One’s the super smart villain, the other seems to have the IQ of a teaspoon, and both overstay their welcome on screen by a fairly strong margin (at least, the editor had the good sense to move the dance number to the end credits). Rowan’s monologue served no purpose, if only because his character type is well known to the audience and he re-states his intents during his first confrontation with the Ghostbusters. As for Kevin, while a popular staple of comedy, I can’t say I find his character type less anoying as a dude than I find is as a woman.

In a similar vein, I felt like some of the difficulties our protagonists (aka Erin and Abby, but I’ll get back on that later) were faced with were definitely gender-specific. There’s the (obvious) bit where Erin gets criticized for her  outfit, but also the part where the team is explicitly asked to pretend not to be battling ghosts and then repeatedly criticized in-movie as ‘pathetic lonely women looking for attention’. I don’t remember if similar things happened in the original movie but, regardless, when about female characters, they leave a very sour taste in my mouth and frankly lowered the interest of the movie.

The other problem that I have with calling this movie feminist is…well, it isn’t, for a start, and if it were it would be very, very straight and white feminism. I mean, aside from the issues I have with the fact that Abby’s recurring joke is a food joke**, and aside from the fact that Holtzmann does not count as a lesbian character*** there’s also the whole mess surrounding Patty’s character and the “classically” racist way in which she’s portrayed.

As a white woman myself, I don’t really want to get into all of the details—first of all, it’s not my place, and second of all I’m really not educated enough to do more than to link you all to other sources [article 1] [article 2].

Honestly, I feel like Ghosbusters, for me, might become a second Kingsman: a movie I see praised as progressive when it’s not—or if it is, only as a shiny thin varnish on top of it all—which may well sour me to the movie entirely.

I guess, once again, I expected too much of Hollywood.

*Yes, some movies do live up to Tumblr’s excitement—I personally thought the praise surrounding Mad Max: Fury Road was well-earned. Ghosbusters doesn’t play in the same category.

**I’m not an expert so I don’t want to expand myself on it too much, but the fact that the fat woman gets the food jokes smells too much of fatphobia for my comfort.

***The misconception comes, no doubt, from the fact that McKinnon herself is a lesbian. However, given that zero indication of Holtzmann’s sexuality has been given in the movie, she doesn’t count as an LGBTQ+ character in my book.