Watched the U.S.A.'s 2021 Ghostbusters: Afterlife  (2:03:04), which gives closure to the Ghostbusters quartet and nostalgically brings us full circle to the beginning. It was great to see the original cast in cameo roles. What it failed to accomplish, however, was weave in the third, all-female, Ghostbusters movie.

The opening sequences were as boring as Shyamalan's Signs; a third into the movie and nothing is still happening except for the apparently heritage-conservation unearthing of old Ghostbusters props and gizmos. The adolescent characters are too offbeat for young audiences to identify with, especially when they unbelievably mouth exposition about the ghosts and the overall, semi-mythological situation that serves as their context. The possession of the mother and the science teacher is awkward, and the ending is mawkish and contrived. Though the climax is as spectacular as in previous Ghostbusters movies, there are no crowds bearing witness to the destruction of the ghosts and providing justification for the existence of ghostbusters to "save the world". Indeed, in this movie, all the ghostbusters really saved was a small farming town.   

I believe that the problem with all four Ghostbusters movies is that each one of them seems to have been conceived backwards, i.e. from a colorfully explosive climax all the way back to the beginning, with a lot of compressed scenes worked into the last quarter of an hour. Very formulaic yet also very Procrustean. I wonder if the characters and plots could have been more dynamic had they been allowed to develop in chronological sequence.