The Movie
Seriously: Who doesn't like Ghostbusters? Despite some scary images and a few quick allusions to The Beast with Two Backs, there's not much to offend, and so much to entertain. With Bill Murray heading up a highly specialized pest control team, the laughs are plentiful and from the belly, and the script written by fellow "scientists" Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis wears its otherworldly research on its sleeve while leading New York City--and the entire world--to the brink of annihilation. While whittled down from Aykroyd's unfilmably big first draft, Ghostbusters still broke new ground, credited with establishing the large-scale comedy/adventure, and the "horror" aspects gave filmmakers license to tear down the walls between genres once and for all. The gazillion dollars it earned didn't hurt either. Ghostbusters II, however, did.
The Picture
The Oscar-nominated visual effects hold up pretty darned well in high-definition, with more of a hand-crafted feel very different from today's CGI wonders. While definitely a huge improvement from the DVD in terms of the punch of the colors, the sharpness and overall clarity--subtleties of focus are evident, and it's never been easier to read the magazine covers during the montage--the 2.4:1 image is undeniably grainy, with frequent occurrences of video noise. What should be gentle transitions in the shadows are consistently hard and noticeably digitized, and blacks can be harsh, surrendering little natural detail. This title has been a cash cow since Day One, so I have to guess that this is the absolute best that Sony could make the 25-year-old elements look with current technology.
Elmer Bernstein's alternately bouncy/serious score seems a bit more forward in the mix than I remember, with more life and more nuance, too. The real sonic "moments" in this track are reserved for the more extreme instances of the supernatural, when spirits appear or bellow menacingly. There's a palpable bass thump when the boys turn on their nuclear accelerators, and further LFE action and directionality when they shoot. We can hear the occasional off-screen ghost in the rears, and as the movie progresses we're given big-city environmental sounds too.
The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundfield also does a good job selling some of the conceits that are only alluded to, such as the high-energy containment grid. Of course, some of the most exciting audio comes during Act Three, after the spirits escape and all Hell breaks loose. I was secretly hoping for an over-the-top track from start to finish, to drive both the ghostly action and the wild comedy, but that's not the case: During the Slimer sequence for example, when the loaded room service cart slams into the wall, the impact is lifeless.
The Extras
The Blu-ray producers have made a commendable effort not only to include some (not all) of the DVD bonus content, but to do so in a novel way. Via a smart onscreen checklist, Blu-Wizard breaks down these repurposed special features into brief snippets and allows us to create a unique playlist without interruption, only the bits we want to see. The disc can also be set to branch away from the movie to a particular, appropriate clip as it becomes relevant (i.e. the making of a specific shot) and then drop us back in.
Ported over in standard-definition are the vintage 1984 "On the Scene with the Ghostbusters" featurette (ten minutes), the 1999 "Cast and Crew" featurette (eleven minutes), the "Special Effects Team 'Out of the Chaos Came SFX'" featurette (15 minutes), six minutes of multi-angle footage for three key sequences, and six-and-half of storyboard comparisons. The "Scene Cemetery"--ten deleted scenes totaling about eight minutes--is in especially poor quality. Some of these are preceded by an explanatory screen about the reality of lower-resolution versus the desire to preserve the previously released DVD extras.
Director/producer Ivan Reitman, associate producer Joe Medjuck and co-star/co-writer Harold Ramis unite for the ported DVD commentary, here lacking their Mystery Science Theater 3000-style silhouettes along the bottom of the screen, a fairly radical innovation ten years ago. New insights and clips comprise the "Slimer Mode" Picture-in-Picture, which adds not just a simple window but a stylized border along top and bottom edges of the film. "Ecto-1: Resurrecting the Classic Car" (15-and-a-half-minutes), with Dan Aykroyd and others, details the restoration of the heroes' signature ride, while "Ghostbusters Garage: Ecto-1 Gallery" (five-and-a-half minutes) is a still/video collage covering much the same ground. An eleven-minute "Making of Ghostbusters: The Video Game" is followed by a two-minute "Ghostbusters: The Video Game - Preview," both to promote the imminent tie-in game, a brand-new creation featuring almost the entire classic cast. All of these new extras are in high-def. The disc is BD-Live-enabled, with support for Sony's "cinechat" online texting function.
Final Thoughts
Blu-Wizard and Slimer Mode put a fun spin on this '80s blockbuster, making its long-awaited high-def debut in a solid if not spectacular new anniversary edition.
Product Details
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