PG-13 and, for my money, it might be the most family friendly of all the Ghostbusters movies. One of the lines that Ghostbusters movies have to tread is that trifold line between horror, rebellious comedy, and being family-friendly. It's managed to pull it off every time, to various degrees of success. While still holding true to all three elements, Frozen Empire was way less scary than I thought it would be. It's got language. It's got some inappropriate jokes. They went over my ten-year-old's head. If the kids can handle other Ghostbusters movies, this one is less offensive.
DIRECTOR: Gil Kenan Okay, the reviews are just upsetting me. It's kind of like being a Snyderverse fan right now, only a lot of people don't like the Snyder stuff. I don't know. Because I'm being super cryptic, I'm just going to spell it out. I don't honestly know how you can detest Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. I can see how you might not be in love with it. It takes a lot to win love from an audience. But considering that the reviews for this movie are abysmal, I'm going to question what is happening. Now, I'm playing subject to algorithms. From my perspective, there's a very loud audience who says, "This movie was super fun and the critics are wrong." I happen to be in that camp. That's a problem because the algorithm might be feeding me what I want to see. I can't definitively say that audiences like this movie and it's just the critics because, honestly, I really liked the movie. So I went to the mattresses and read the criticisms. Most of them are very odd. I want to talk about those in a second. There is one review that is incredibly illuminating. The review, which may have been the New Yorker, stated that the movie is too Gen X for its own good. This brought up a paradox. The thing about that review is that it is accurate. I can kind of get behind that read of the movie. The reasons I loved Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Ghostbusters: Afterlife is because they felt like really authentic Ghostbusters movies. But the reason that they feel like real sequels to the original movie is that they use the original movie as a template. To a certain extent, there is some degree of nostalgia fandom happening. I can't deny that. I do argue that Frozen Empire is not a nostalgia movie so much as it is understanding that there is a way to make a Ghostbusters movie and they use the foundation to do that with these newer sequels. But the problem with attacking Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire by saying it is too Gen X for today's market is saying that they fundamentally don't want Ghostbusters. I'm all about changing things up. Growth or death. But it isn't like we've been getting Ghostbusters movies every year and that we're saturated with this franchise. A lot of people keep pointing to the 2016 Ghostbusters: Answer the Call as wokeness destroying a franchise. First of all, if you say "Wokeness ruined something," I automatically write you off. It's not female ghostbusters that make a movie bad. I wanted to like Answer the Call so badly. It was bad because it missed out on some of the specific tonal issues that make a movie a Ghostbusters movie. I hate to be advocating for a formula when it comes to making movie, but Ghostbusters is a tough nut to crack. The thing about Ghostbusters is that the original movie has the weirdest strucutre of any big budget movie. I remember watching a Cracked video where they dared someone to tell me what the movie is about. IGN came out very loudly and started saying that they actually wanted ghostbusting in their Ghostbusters movie. That's actually a pretty hot take, because that's not what the original movie did. A lot of both Ghostbusters 1 & 2 are the guys investigating this big bad on the horizon. There are small moments in the story where they confront the forerunners of the big bad, but ultimately the third act is the confrontation with the beast. Ultimately, the movies are based in a lot of exposition and character, leading to the duel between the ghostbusters and the well-explained evil. Guess what Frozen Empire does? Exactly that. Part of the problem with people advocating that Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has is that there isn't enough action. These aren't action movies. These are horror comedies that have some action in them. I adore that thing that I only get out of a Ghostbusters movie. I honestly don't know another franchise or film that nails exactly what it means to be Ghostbusters. A movie like Frozen Empire is a rare film that isn't afraid to be with its characters through silly and serious times until the final act. Now, all of this sounds like that Gen X criticism is accurate. The criticism that this is just another nostalgia trip seems like it might carry some weight. I would argue against that. While I adore Afterlife, I can give you some points that say that Afterlife is just fan service. (I really can't. I think it's perfect. I want to take that sentence back, but I'm making a point about Frozen Empire.) Structurally, Frozen Empire owes a lot to the original films. But in terms of actually straying from what is safe, Frozen Empire should get a medal for not checking boxes. I'll give you one moment that I think is a bit of a sin: the explosion of the containment unit. Okay, you're calling back a little too hard and I don't love that. But Frozen Empire is establishing that there is a wide world of old gods who are willing to destroy the world and they're not all named Gozer the Gozarian. On top of that, we don't always need proton packs to solve the problem. One of the things that the previous films established pretty early on was that Egon was going to save the day through inventing a gizmo. They might have to misuse that gizmo, like crossing the streams, but that was going to solve a lot of the problem. Instead, Frozen Empire establishes that everyone can't be Egon Spengler. Sure, there's an entire science division. I love that because it gives Winston agency over this entire franchise that he absolutely needed as a character. But I like that a different group of heroes has a different approach to beating the bad guy. Sure, we still have Phoebe who has a very Egon approach, closing her character arc showing that she can hold her own when everyone doubts her. I like that. But the real resolve comes from the other nerds in this group who have different approaches. One of the hearts of the Ghostbusters is Ray. Ray, despite being the drive behind the entire franchise, both in-universe and out, really kind of gets ignored in terms of how to handle things. Ray's the guy who believes from moment one that the lore is real. He's the guy who isn't trying to science everything away. Instead, it's his passion for the history coupled with Spengler's obsession with numbers and facts that makes the entire concept work. Having the ending that this movie does gives Ray a lot more credit than he's gotten in the past. But the best part about Frozen Empire is the human element of the whole thing. For a second, I want to talk about how Walter Peck, who worked for the EPA and was basically disgraced in the '80s for his annoying (albeit, real-world hero) views on ghostbusting. For a while, I thought that he couldn't possibly be elected mayor, but I'm literally sitting and waiting for Donald Trump to lie his way back into the Oval Office. So I guess Walter Peck makes sense. But the human element is just all of the emotional connections that this movie makes. Phoebe is in isolation and she almost gets into a relationship with a ghost named Melody. I love that, because she's alone, she can't have a sounding board for bad ideas. I also really dig that I didn't see the value that Melody has in the movie. That's something that seemed pretty sick. But then there's all of the commentary on aging and finding value plus the nature of the new family and the found family. All of it works. The B-plots work fabulously with the A-plot and I don't get how people can detest this movie. The pacing is weird because that is the pacing of a Ghostbusters movie. I don't want a super action movie where everything is tongue-in-cheek. That's not the franchise that we're trying to sell here. You can say it's copying too much, but that's only in terms of where things fall, not what things fall there. It's a significantly better movie than critics made it out to be. We, as a culture, seem to be done with a good time. I'm not saying that every movie has to be a good time. Bummer films are great. But Frozen Empire delivers on everything promised and more. It's a great movie that checks all the boxes. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
February 2025
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