Fan-cut Ghostbusters trailer brings back the nostalgia
When you think about what makes a movie successful, you often think of the actors, writers, and director. These people might seem like the backbone of the movie making process, but they're not the only ones that have a large amount of control over the way the final product looks. One way to easily see this is by watching a fan re-cut something such as a trailer.
The trailer for the new Ghostbusters finally dropped yesterday. I watched it a few times, and I was pretty disappointed. Now a lot of people have complained about the cast since the all-female team was announced. That's not what bothered me when I watched the trailer. I rather enjoy Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon in a lot of their roles. What bothered me is that it just didn't feel like Ghostbusters.
Today, I watched a fan cut of the trailer, and I instantly wanted to watch the movie. Well, I wanted to watch the movie that this trailer was trying to convey. Before we get into it any further, here's the fan cut trailer by redditor AbrahamAshley:
It's certainly a lot shorter than the official one, but with only so much footage to work with, you're going to lose some of it on the editing room floor. But what's really different about the two trailers? Well, the biggest thing is that the original song by Ray Parker Jr. was used up until the end. Also, many of the sounds we heard were from the original film. Both the ECTO-1's siren, and the sound of the proton packs were replaced.
These three elements helped to play up the nostalgia. And honestly, if you're going to do a reboot of a beloved franchise such as Ghostbusters, nostalgia is going to help carry your film. But these aren't even the most important aspects that were changed. The biggest change were the cuts themselves.
There's one really bad cut toward the beginning, which I found to be jarring. Unfortunately, after re-watching the original, there really wasn't a good way to get the audio to match up, so that's forgivable. But the nice thing about the fan cut is how much unnecessary dialogue was left out. We don't need to be spoken to about how good someone is at quantum physics, or have other plot points spelled out to us.
One of the things that made the original Ghostbusters such a great movie was the dialogue and chemistry between the characters. Most of the dialogue shown in the official trailer held none of that charm. There were a few good bits, where you could feel that humorous chemistry between the characters. These made it into the fan cut, but as you saw, there weren't many of them.
It's really hard to judge a movie by its trailer. I've seen movies with terrible trailers end up being pretty great, and I've seen the exact opposite. I'm not getting a good feeling about the new Ghostbusters movie from the trailer. But here's hoping that we see a lot more of that comedic chemistry that the original movies had.
For fun, here's the original trailer for the original Ghostbusters movie: