Film Journal 2024: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Directed by Gil Kenan
The follow up to Afterlife, and this is not something I thought I would be saying a few years ago, has big shoes to fill. One of the great, unexpected delights of Afterlife was its minimalist and intimate approach. It allowed the film to take some of the scattered themes from the original franchise films and weave it into a poetic exploration of life, death, loss and newness. The slight stumbles in its obligatory third act did not overshadow its strengths, leaving a film that was fun, endearing, funny and meaningful.
This follow up tries on a larger size shoe, trading in the ambiguities of the first films imagining of the relationship between science and belief with a film that almost seems to reverse engineer its insights. Here the demigods of our mythologies are made to be real (and dangerous entities) while the spirit world they belong to is relegated to the field of quantum science. The film asks good questions- what is it like to become a ghost, or for a ghost to move on- questions that in the context of this film form its emotional core. And the story even offers an easy pitch to give these questions a fitting and meaningful conclusion. The bigness of the film, however, gets in the way of landing these themes and turning this story from relatively entertaining to emotionally impacting. Perhaps even more of its struggle comes from some of its beats feeling more like a retread than a natural progression.
Still, I’m all in on the new family, and whatever the film loses by trying on those bigger sized shoes is kept afloat by their chemistry and their authenticity. There were enough moments that garnered a smile and a laugh to remind me of why this latest iteration still works. There is a nice thread too, established in a singular scene in which we see both the retired and aged ghostbuster and the young, 15 year old prodigee, being left behind, watching the iconic symbol drive by without them, where we are looking in at the same questions from two different vantage points. This is where the film is at its finest, and these two stars, young and old, are the best parts of Frozen Empire by far. Thankfully we get a good dose of them in the first half of the film.
The story too had potential, for as big as it tries to go. The whole connection between worlds thing was interesting, and there is a young ghost who is given some complex things to work with regarding the plot. It just felt like too much, with the film rushing to catch up to it’s own plot progression at times, and sacrificing certain character moments in the process. It also seems like the film needed to go darker than it does for its central threat to really translate.
I’d be perfectly okay with coming back to this world. I suspect that the novelty of that nostalgic factor will wear off by this point for some audience members. In that case, if they are able to double down on telling fresh, and smaller, stories moving forward I feel like this could find some continued success.
The Stories of my Life 