I didn't see this in the theater in part because people kept saying it was trash. Those people don't know what the fuck they are talking about because Ghostbusters is the greatest movie of all time. I feel if you didn't like this fun ass movie, then you are a fucking hater and should be murdered. Female companion says this is coming on a little strong. I think she is coming on a little strong. Murdered I say!
Anyway, when compared to the 1984 Ghostbusters this probably isn't quite as good we are all binary here, baby, and this new one, as of this writing, is the greatest, I tell you. We pretty much know the storyline: sort of the same as the original (ish) with ladies instead of dudes and a vastly different villain as well as ending. I'm not exactly sure if the four women (Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Kristen Wiig) line up with their male counterparts (Dan Aykroyd as Ray, Ernie Hudson as Winston, Bill Murray as Peter Venkman, and Harold Ramis as Egon), but if I had to I'd say Wiig is the straight man Akroid type, McCarthy is the Peter Venkman, McKinnon as the goofball in glasses one, and Jones as the black one (the early hate on her in this I'd guess has turned around). And Chris Hemsworth is in it and totally ridiculous.
Rotten Tomatoes Consensus: Ghostbusters does an impressive job of standing on its own as a freewheeling, marvelously cast supernatural comedy -- even if it can't help but pale somewhat in comparison with the classic original.
Pros: Hilarious. Casting is flawless. Cameos are fucking solid. Storyline is decent.
Cons: So much fucking CGI. Some really shitty jokes mixed in there. Slimer is terrible.
Notes: Some stuff I liked in no particular order. The ladies make a bunch of references to the YouTube hate they got when they dropped the first trailer to show, “hey, we are in on it. We are meta and postmodern.” It's not particularly clever but it's there. In the movie they read the comments related to their ghost videos and they aren't kind. They keep saying stuff like, “you can't pay attention to what crazies say on YouTube,” wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Sort of overdone but it gets a pass because I am being generous and my eyes having been rolling enough as it is.
The guy that plays Sam Adams in Making History is just too weird to live, man. He plays this creep named Rowan North. He is the antagonist in the film. His thing is that he wants to usher in the apocalypse for whatever reason. Find out it's the old “garbage that needs to be cleaned” motive. He really comes on the scene when he plants some ghost summoning device at a concert and all hell breaks loose in probably the coolest scene of the movie. The Ghostbusters luckily capture the apparition and it goes viral. This brings about the best cameo as Bill Murray comes in as a paranormal debunker. He is such a dick and talks the ladies into releasing the ghost from its trap. It flies out and immediately kills him by throwing him out the window. The death was laugh out loud funny.
The most cringe-worthy joke comes when we get the “guilty as charged” bit which I apparently hated enough to jot down without any context. When I Googled the phase and “Ghostbusters” I got a lot of people also hating that line which was featured in the trailer. I am only guessing here, I actually watched this weeks ago but I'm a backed up on writing about all this shit, but I think it was something like “if it's crime being sexy, then guilty as charged.” Die.
Other than the little nitpicky things I just listed, the giant Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons that show up out of nowhere which goes unexplained, and the CGI heavy corny-ass fight scene at the end, this was a solid movie with lots going for it.