Who you gonna call? The new Ghost­busters: After­life trailer!

Despite the box-office under­per­for­mance and crit­i­cal shel­lack­ing of 2016’s female-led take on Ghost­busters, the fran­chise can­not be com­plete­ly van­quished. Jason Reit­man, son of the orig­i­nal film’s direc­tor Ivan, has whipped up a reboot to the reboot set for a release in 2020 and sub-titled Afterlife.

The first trail­er sur­faced online just this morn­ing, promis­ing a film that will evoke the mem­o­ry of Ghost­busters while being its own straighter-faced thing. The rep­re­sen­ta­tion of some­thing long since past, phys­i­cal­ly re-man­i­fest­ing in the present albeit in a dis­tort­ed form – if only there was a sit­u­a­tion­al­ly appro­pri­ate metaphor for this.

The new take on the mate­r­i­al joins a group of small-town kids as they dis­cov­er and must con­se­quent­ly reck­on with the super­nat­ur­al, fea­tur­ing an ensem­ble of fresh faces that most notably includes Finn Wolfhard (known for play­ing a small-town kid dis­cov­er­ing and con­se­quent­ly reck­on­ing with the super­nat­ur­al in Stranger Things). They receive guid­ance from a kind­ly local sci­ence teacher (Paul Rudd), who remem­bers the ​’80s on behalf of the next gen­er­a­tion, which cannot.

The trail­er stands out from the orig­i­nal, sequel, ani­mat­ed spin-off, and pseu­do-fem­i­nist rework­ing that have come before by virtue of its mil­i­tant humor­less­ness; one with no out­side knowl­edge would be sur­prised to learn that the orig­i­nal Ghost­busters was a com­e­dy, judg­ing by the steady sto­icism of the newest iter­a­tion. The lat­est film goes more the broad route of genre-tinged stu­dio block­buster, with all the CGI cre­ations of a big fan­ta­sy project and none of the eccentricity.

It pos­es the ques­tion of who, exact­ly, this movie will be for. Those with fond rec­ol­lec­tions of the orig­i­nal Ghost­busters may not take kind­ly to this attempt at extract­ing more mon­ey from this vein of nos­tal­gia. The new crop of view­ers won’t have a grasp of the meta-con­text that jus­ti­fies the ref­er­ences to the franchise’s past, such as the spec­tral suit once worn by Bill Mur­ray​’s Peter Venkman and now tak­en up by his son.

Mur­ray and orig­i­nal cast mem­bers Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hud­son, and Sigour­ney Weaver have all been slat­ed to return in this new install­ment, but they’re nowhere to be seen. They’re only invoked, seem­ing­ly the rai­son d’etre of this trail­er and film.

Ghost­busters: After­life comes to cin­e­mas in the UK and US on 10 July, 2020.