The trailer for the new Ghostbusters is finally here. If we can manage to drown out the meninists and dudebros ("Urgh, they put girls in it! Women catching ghosts is so PC and unbelievable!") and the nostalgia-entitled ("This isn't Ghostbusters and now my childhood has been retroactively destroyed!") we can start to talk about what the movie is actually going to be like.
To be fair, the trailer doesn't scream classic to me, but then, trailers rarely do. (They can't all be Deadpool). What it does look to me is good fun, with plenty of slapstick humour and above all, plenty of slime. It's colourful and refreshingly free of grimdark, even as it parodies The Exorcist. It doesn't evoke the feel of the original, which is perhaps a good thing. It certainly feels like Paul Feig's other releases, such as the recent, underrated Spy. To me, it also has a feel of the animated series, The Real Ghostbusters, with its cartoonish, primary-coloured visuals.
Wisely, it hasn't tried to shake off the shadow of the original. Everyone knows this is a modern day remake, so to pretend otherwise would be foolish. The opening of the trailer makes it seem that this is actually in continuity with the original films, but this goes against everything else we've been told, and it seems this is just a way of introducing the concept for the audiences. This is a whole new Ghostbusters. Some elements feel very old school. The ghost faced by Kristin Wiig's character in the beginning of the trailer is clearly designed to evoke the original's Library Ghost, while Slimer is present and correct (and looking perfect). On the other hand, the possession angle is quite different to how the originals played it. It's admittedly hard to make a judgment from such scant footage, but it looks like this could be a major plotline in the new film.
I'm not keen on how they've used Leslie Jones. As in the original, it's the three white people who get to be the scientists and the black person who comes aboard later to drive the car. While the other leads don't seem to exactly reflect the original's characters, at first glance it looks like Patty=Winston. Hopefully there'll be more to her than that.
Overall, though, I'm very optimistic about this. Definitely worth a look.
(No dudebro comments please.)
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