Review of the movie Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Funny guys (and recently, girls) in firefighter overalls, carrying proton backpacks and shooting ghosts with proton guns, are back on the screen. “Frozen Empire is the fifth film in the Ghostbusters franchise, which was launched by the late director Ivan Reitman in 1984. After the third film (a feminist remake with adult jokes) caused outrage among fans, Ivan’s son Jason Reitman took his father’s legacy into his own hands and returned the franchise to the tone of classic family entertainment without ideologies or trends.

Nostalgia became a proton weapon for catching old fans and new teenagers behind the backs of the creators of the last two films. And in Frozen Empire, it fired even more powerfully, with all the charge in the morning.

The heroes returned to the legendary New York City firehouse; the streets of the Big Apple were once again filled with ghostly pests, chased by a vintage 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor ambulance with a crossed-out ghost emblem on the trunk; the container holding the otherworldly evil was overflowing with disgruntled prisoners; miniature versions of the marshmallow man were once again on the rampage; Licker smeared everything with ectoplasm and ate all the snacks; veterans Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, and Ernie Hudson were back on the case; even skeptical secretary Janine Melnitz, played by Annie Potts, joined in; the pain-in-the-ass mayor returned; and the super-smart glasses-wearing Egon Spangler, who could no longer be portrayed by the late Harold Ramis, was replaced by his equally super-smart glasses-wearing granddaughter Phoebe Spangler, played by McKenna Grace.

Murray, Ackroyd, and Hudson went beyond the cameos they made in the previous installment, Ghostbusters: From Beyond,” but returned to full-fledged acting, albeit in the background. In general, despite the humor (for which this time a new character was responsible in the person of not an old-school, but a modern stand-up comedian Kumail Nanjiani, a kind of New York slacker who, after his grandmother’s death, sells his grandmother’s mothballs for a few bucks), there was a subtle grief for those who are not on the screen, but in real life have left and become ghosts. Not the ghosts that scare the living, but the ones that may be wandering alone in some astral plane. This sadness of ghosts, which actor Harold Ramis and director Ivan Reitman became, which 80s cinema and old cinema in general became…, was personified by a ghost girl who died in a burning apartment and for many years wanders lonely and aimlessly around the big city with the last match in a worn-out box, designed to reignite the spark of an old adventure.

It can be said that this time Jason Reitman (who gave up the director’s chair but remained a writer and producer) found a happy medium between a throwback to the canons of his father’s classic dilogy and the reforms and revisions introduced by Paul Feig with the female version in 2016. Unexpectedly, he singled out a lyrical solo for McKenna’s character Grace, who, against the backdrop of standardized confrontation with a new otherworldly megalomaniac, plunged into the drama of growing up and sexual identity, first love and first disappointment, first emancipation from home and family, and the first feeling of harmony with herself after a swing of inner turmoil. So, both adulthood and feminocentrism are reflected here as well.

However, the most interesting thing was the authors’ reinterpretation of the classic children’s fairy tales, rather than the classic Ghostbusters (because all old and new stories are somehow derived from stories from ancient and ancient fairy tales). And it is Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales that have always been too adult and sometimes too sad for children and even teenagers. For example, the ghost with matches is an allusion to The Little Match Girl (only here, fortunately, no one dies of cold, and it is the last match that defeats the cold, although it also symbolizes death, just like in the Danish storyteller’s tale). And the villain, who turns everything living and warm into prickly dead ice, is an allusion to The Snow Queen.

Well, the delicate romantic line that was not destined to come true and take place may be a paraphrase of The Little Mermaid. Not the Disney one, but the one by Andersen. After all, there is a scene in the movie where Phoebe Spangler decides to conduct an experiment on herself and separate her spirit from her body, all in order to spend some time in the same dimension with her beloved ghost. Isn’t this the same story where a girl with a fish tail dared to vote for human legs in order to be with her beloved prince on the same land? And, like the Little Mermaid, young Phoebe was betrayed by unequal love…

But no, don’t think that instead of a fun ride with a dash of light positive horror, the creators have resorted to melancholy and a deep dissection of wavy puberty feelings. The slides remained in the best American traditions. But if you wish, between the circles of fun and the lines of the unchanging song “If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who are you going to call? Ghostbusters! If there’s something weird and it don’t look good, who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!” can be read as a subtle and well-hidden drama about the pain that people, children, and families inflict on each other and themselves, because mental mutilation and self-mutilation are in our nature. However, since American entertainment is supposed to be ultimately painless, the only people who self-mutilate are marshmallow men who love to make fried marshmallows out of themselves.