By: “The Watchman”
I’d forgotten how good the original Ghostbusters is. Or, rather, I don’t think I’ve ever really noticed. Not having gotten into Ghostbusters much as a kid (it released a year before I was born), it was just this weekend when I sat down with a critical eye to watch it that I realized just how perfectly crafted and clever it is.
The pacing is excellent. The jokes are funny. The characters are all memorable, while being very distinct from one another. Even the special effects don’t look too bad after all these years. I almost wish I had realized sooner how wonderful a movie this is, except that it would have taken from the joy I felt this weekend watching it for, what felt like, the first time.
The movie was genuinely funny. Several times, I repeated scenes to watch them again, especially the final scene in the mayor’s office, because they made me laugh and I wanted to go over them one more time before continuing the movie. Every scene has a point, and every plot point has a purpose. It laid the groundwork for an excellent science fiction universe.
While, admittedly, it didn’t easily lend itself to sequels, as the cast and crew had no idea, at the time they were making it, that the show would be such a standalone hit, it still has a lot of interesting ideas that I wanted to see more of after the movie ended. Hence, my continuation to the next entries in the trilogy.
Bill Murray really steals the show in many of the scenes. While Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis are excellent (and wrote the script), Bill Murray’s charisma shines brightly throughout its most memorable moments, and his interactions with Sigourney Weaver were both genuinely engaging and also quite a bit odd. Rick Moranis’ character was a bit strange, but never really bothered me. Somehow, he always stayed believable, even while the unbelievable happened all around him.
I could continue rambling on about this movie for a while, but that would miss the point of a comparative three part review! I’ll just go ahead and grade this movie with the incredible 9.5/10 that it deserves, and let you go on to the next movies in sequence, now that the benchmark has been set by this irreplaceable piece of science fiction history. Let’s see how well the next two movies in the universe hold up to the original.
Final Score: 9.5/10
“Perfect in nearly every way, this movie’s greatest fault is making it difficult for writers to expand upon the narrative of its universe, and even more difficult for them to try to surpass it.”
What’s next? “Who you gonna call?”