‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’ Review
Nostalgia, the scariest specter of all.
BEFORE WE GET TO Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, I’d like to take a galactic detour.
I didn’t watch the first two seasons of the Paramount+ series Picard because I was told by folks in the know that it, well, wasn’t that good. Life: it’s too short to waste on bad streaming series. However, those same folks were loving the third season. Like, really, really loving the third season. So, I threw it on one afternoon to see what all the fuss was about, and it became very obvious very quickly why these folks were so into it even though they hadn’t enjoyed the first two seasons. Whereas the first two seasons, apparently, tried to distance Picard from the exploits of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701D during the seven-season run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the latest season of Picard leaned into the mythos of that show (and Deep Space Nine). Hard.
And sure enough, it was smorgasbord of references—from the evil android Lore to the sentient Holodeck program Moriarty to the shape-shifting Founders to the malevolent Borg, every episode and plot arc was suffused with callbacks to famous moments and characters from the show’s history. I can’t say this for certain, but I imagine the show would be almost impenetrable to Star Trek novices.
I mention this because I started wondering the same thing during my preview screening of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. If you had never seen Ghostbusters (1984), what would you make of the random moments when people in the audience started clapping? Why are they cheering the appearance of this elderly librarian? Why are they clapping for this Mayor Peck fellow, he seems like he is the villain? Why are they laughing at the people being sprayed with pink slime in an underground laboratory? Why are they hooting for this disgusting green ball of ooze stuffing its face with Cheetos?
(You know the word “clapter”? Tina Fey credits the portmanteau to Seth Meyers; basically, it means “a joke that doesn’t make someone laugh but does make them clap because they agree with it.” Think: Jon Stewart during the Bush years. We need a word for nostalgia-based clapter: a reference that makes those familiar with a previous entry in a series cheer with delight. “Cheer-stalgia,” maybe. I dunno, that hyphen is kind of ugly. I’ll keep workshopping this.)
Like the previous entry, Afterlife, Frozen Empire is saturated with callbacks and references and beloved characters—or, really, just characters, people who are still alive and able to show up for a minute to remind folks that, yes, they were in the original film. The whole thing is like Where’s Waldo? for anyone who grew up with a VHS of Ivan Reitman’s classic. How much you enjoy the film will depend on your tolerance for cheer-stalgia (eh) and the audience’s response to it.
Anyway, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire returns the action to New York City, where Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) and Callie (Carrie Coon), Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and Phoebe (McKenna Grace) Spengler have taken residence in the firehouse headquarters of the original team. The containment unit is getting full, which is a problem since a demon from the Sumerian days who is so evil that he can use fear to turn everyone to ice is about to rear his ugly head. Only the Ghostbusters—old and new, there are now something like a dozen people running around the city with proton packs strapped to their backs, though, notably, the 2016 crew headed by Kristen Wiig is entirely absent—and Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani), a mysterious grifter with an even more mysterious bronze orb, can stop the impending disaster.
My biggest issue with this film is that it’s so overstuffed—there are so many Ghostbusters all of whom have so little to actually do; there is such an overwhelming amount of nostal-cheer (no, cheer-stalgia is better)—we lose sight of the best part of Afterlife, which was the family dynamic between Callie and her kids and the delightfully named Gary Grooberson. Phoebe’s resentment of her mother feels emotionally unearned, a mere plot point to separate the 15-year-old girl and get her involved in what can only be described as a curiously sapphic relationship with a teenage ghost who died in a tenement fire decades ago. Callie has almost no screen time. Trevor barely exists. We’re given no real reason to care about any of them, though Rudd’s Gary makes the most of it as the “boyfriend trying to fill the role of a father figure.”
Moment to moment, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is fun. Nanjiani is delightful as always; Patton Oswalt has a fun little cameo; the ghost design is wholly original when it isn’t leaning on cheer-stalgia (it’s growing on me). But the movie as a whole is much less than the sum of its moments, and you can’t help but feel as though everyone involved hoped the audience would be clapping so hard that it wouldn’t notice.