Not a bad call…

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that I’m all for portraying ladies as badasses, or comic relief, or any number of character types that we still to this day don’t see very much of in mainstream media in female form. “Male as default” is a powerful, deeply ingrained trope, so much so that any attempt to portray women in what would be traditionally considered male roles often gets labeled as an agenda.

The most recent example of the phenomenon has finally debuted this past weekend, after many months of controversy:

Now before we get down to business, I’ll establish some context. The original 1984 version of Ghostbusters is and remains a thing of joy to me, perpetually in my top ten films of all time and certainly my favorite comedy of all time. Dawn loves it, too. Any doubts? She’s the one who had this done to our convention-going car several years ago:

So what was our reaction to the news of Paul Feig doing a maybe-reboot-remake of the concept, this time with four ladies instead of dudes? Hm. To be perfectly honest, it was cautiously supportive. Then that first trailer dropped, and to be even more perfectly honest, it had both of us pretty worried. I still don’t think it deserved to be the most downvoted trailer of all time on YouTube, that was the obvious work of a certain group of people with an–ahem–agenda. But it cooled me down some despite the talent involved and that we’d enjoyed Feig’s previous films like Bridesmaids and The Heat. Several of my friends had become angry enough over the past couple of months to delcare their intention to see it opening weekend just as a backlash to the backlash, but shelling out the cash for a movie in a theater remains expensive enough to be a commitment, and I wasn’t sure if it was worth doing so on mixed feelings. Waiting until the comfort of a home viewing, with beer and no extra financial commitment would probably be the better strategy, wouldn’t it? After all, the circumstances can matter. Especially once we got the last-minute news of being able to exhibit at SDCC, taking time out for the movie in the middle of stress prep sounded like a bad footing to start with.

I reckon fate had other ideas:

Last week someone anonymously put a $20 AMC gift card on the Ghostbuster car. We didn’t have to use it on the movie, but…

So in the midst of our whirlwind of activity, we dared to take some time out on Thursday night to watch, and you know what? I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wasn’t expecting to hate, nor was I expecting to love, but in our final opinion it’s nowhere near the disaster we feared (and some would have you believe). We still had to fork over some cash beyond the gift card but it felt well worth having gone.

The next few weeks will tell the story of how much or how little the general public agrees, and how much this might or might not advance or set back the cause of more prominent women’s roles in big screen entertainment, but it’s certainly no Catwoman, and deserves to exist a lot more than that Robocop reboot ever did. So if you’re on the fence, you might consider giving it a chance, whether or not you have a gift card all but fortune-cookieing your ass into a theater. We still don’t know who put it there, but we thank them.

The original is still tops, by the way, but this new iteration easily floats into place above Ghostbusters 2. Now excuse me, I’ve got a Ghostbuster car to pack so we can still fly the colors proudly on down to San Diego.