How ‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife’ pulled off tribute
Guiding principle: What would Harold Ramis think?
This article contains a spoiler or two about the plot of the new movie “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.”
Going way back when he was an impressionable 6-year-old visiting the set of his father Ivan’s 1984 smash “Ghostbusters,” Jason Reitman’s favorite member of the team of proton-pack-wielding specter-catchers was always Egon Spengler.
So when Reitman decided three years ago to pick up the torch of the beloved franchise, he knew that he wanted to pay loving tribute to the man who had brought the bespectacled, socially awkward Egon to life: comedy legend Harold Ramis, who died in 2014 at age 69 from complications from inflammatory vasculitis.
Reitman and his co-writer
Gil Kenan constructed the new film “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” around Spengler’s estranged family. Egon’s single-mom daughter (Carrie Coon) and her two children (Mckenna Grace and Finn Wolfhard) have inherited Egon’s decaying farmhouse in Oklahoma
— and, as they soon discover, also unwittingly taken on his responsibility for keeping the world safe from malevolent spirits.
“Ghostbusters: Afterlife” opened in theaters last weekend.
Placing Egon at the heart of the film offered a way to bridge the ’84 “Ghostbusters” — co-written by Ramis and Dan Aykroyd — with a new younger generation that hadn’t yet been born when the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man first terrorized New York. But with Ramis, who also directed such classic comedies as “Caddyshack,” “National Lampoon’s Vacation” and “Groundhog Day,” no longer here, Reitman knew he needed to handle the character with great sensitivity.
“The film’s journey is very much about the Spenglers, but it was also very personal for me,” says Reitman, who shared the script before shooting began with Ramis’ widow, Erica, and daughter Violet. “The question was how to be really respectful to the character of Egon Spengler. The question that Gil and I would ask ourselves the most is: What would Harold think of this? And are we actually capturing the voice of Egon, particularly through his granddaughter, who is modeled after him?”
In the film’s final scenes, the