Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire – 2024
Frozen Empire is the latest Ghostbusters installment. That makes it the fourth film in the series. The first two were made in 1984 and 1989 respectively, and the last one just a couple of years ago, in 2021. I was a fan of the first movie when it came out. But when the second one came out back in the day, I can’t remember seeing it. I have done something about it since then, but I still don’t have any lasting memories of it. The previous film? I wasn’t too fond of it. I mean, it was entertaining but it added nothing new. The thing it did and that might be a product of its time, was that it changed the gender of the Ghostbusters. We got to see totally new characters while we waited for guest appearances from the original cast.
Family
Now, there’s kind of a family taken over the old fire station and busting ghosts in the environment we should be in – New York. We’re thrown right into the story when the teaser is over. It’s a fantastic teaser by the way. Special effects at its finest. It’s not an action teaser at all, but we start with a flashback to the early 1900s. There we witness a room completely frozen over. And it’s been frozen in a heartbeat. We can see that people have frozen in the middle of a discussion and so on. I remember a chair being knocked over but being frozen in the fall. It’s really beautiful. I don’t have the practical special effects knowledge to know how hard it was to create. But I guess most of it was made with computer graphics and the movie industry is really getting good at that these days.
Skip forward to the start of the movie. The Ghostbuster vehicle is in high pursuit of a monster/ghost. They catch it of course, but parts of the city also suffer havoc, as it should when these futuristic weapons are used. There are people in public offices that had made it their lives work to stop the Ghostbusters and they take every opportunity to make their voice heard. When it’s revealed that one in the team is only 15 years old and a minor there are also legal actions to be made. It’s clear however that she is the true talent of the Ghostbusters in Frozen Empire. She’s a genius in all the technical sense of the word. She may not be the best catcher but when it comes to technical innovations she’s the gal.
Classic Cast
We don’t have to wait very long for the classic cast to come into the story. At least not for Dr. Stanz which is Dan Aykroyd’s character. He plays a pretty big supporting role in Frozen Empire. Now, Dan Aykroyd was never a particularly good actor. The same applies here. What you see is what you get. He can deliver his lines but that is about all. He’s as eccentric as ever in the part and maybe that’s all that we need. This isn’t his movie after all. Ernie Hudson also appears quite early in Frozen Empire. There’s not much importance to his part I think but the fans of the original film want to see the original cast, and that’s it.
Overall I think this is a fun movie. It suffers a bit from the same thing as Axel F did, it depends on nostalgia. It flirts with the old movies and it’s entertaining for us who grew up with them. I’m not sure how those without any connection to the older movies will interpret it. We, who loved the original recognize places and monsters as we saw them all those years ago, but I’m not sure a younger audience “gets it”. But everyone is closest to themselves and I enjoyed Frozen Empire. And finally, Annie Potts and Bill Murray appear. I get the feeling that Bill Murray wasn’t very interested in appearing at all but I have nothing to back the claim with, apart from a feeling.
Haris Ramis obviously doesn’t appear since he died in 2014 and the film is dedicated to Ivan Reitman, who directed the original film and co-wrote this one. He passed away in february 2022.
