Talking remakes with my uncle changed how I see the 2016 Ghostbusters

I was over at my uncle's place last Saturday helping him paint his garage, and somehow we got on the topic of bad remakes. He's 68 and not really into movies, but he said something that stuck with me. He said the original Ghostbusters was a movie about regular folks getting paid to do a weird job, and the remake was about celebrities being celebrities in Halloween costumes. At first I wanted to argue because I remember enjoying the 2016 one when it came out, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. The new one had all these big names and cameo gags, but none of the simple teamwork that made the original work. It made me wonder if I was just defending it because I wanted to like it, not because it was actually good. Has anyone else had a conversation like that where someone older pointed out something obvious about a remake that you completely missed?

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jesse_fisher20d ago

Ha, your uncle sounds like a sharp guy. But here's the thing nobody mentions: the 2016 movie was basically a love letter to the cast of SNL, not to the idea of ghostbusting. The original had four guys who felt like they could be your weird neighbors. The remake had Kate McKinnon doing a bit, Kristen Wiig doing a bit, and so on. It was like watching a bunch of comedians take turns doing impressions of each other, not a team. And the cameos? Those were just winks at the audience, like "remember this thing you like?" instead of earning any of it. So yeah, you probably wanted to like it because the cast was likable, but the movie never gave them a reason to actually be a team.