Sequ-ill

A great flurry of opinioning has arisen in the wake of the first trailer to the new Ghostbusters movie, released this week.

See, the difference is that this Paul Feig-directed movie will have lady Ghostbusters instead of men. Although Dan Aykroyd and the late Harold Ramis had worked on different script ideas for some time that would reunite the original team, and Ernie Hudson from time to time said he would be interested, Bill Murray had never been on board with the idea. Ramis' 2014 death seemed to shut the door on a another round of bustin'.

But the studio execs still smelled signs of life (i.e., money) in the concept and signed Feig to create it. According to him, he went with the all-female team because he wanted the funniest people he could enlist, and the four actresses fill that role. All three living original Ghostbusters, along with Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts, are supposed to have cameos in the movie. Rick Moranis' "little guy" will once again be left out of things, it seems.

The all-female cast stirred notice, and there is apparently a vocal set of folks who think the reboot is going to be awful just because of the all-female team. It's tough to determine their number, because I hear about them mostly when they are mentioned by folks who think the reboot is going to be awesome just because of the all-female team.

Even stranger are the people who think that the reboot -- with Chris Hemsworth as their receptionist -- is Something Very Important, just because of the all-female team. Hemsworth, best known as Thor in the Marvel movies, is supposed to represent the inverse version of the eye-candy secretary that populates many movies. I'm not sure about the "inverse" part. I always thought Annie Potts and the character she played in the original movie were cute, but I don't recall any of my male friends responding to her presence the way that many women today respond to Hemsworth.

The Very Importance of the reboot softened a little as it became clear that the sole African-American member of the all-female team was going to be the only non-scientist, The trailer, in which she showed herself to be loud, violent and ready to see this supernatural stuff as the work of "the Devil," didn't help the people wondering about her role. As stereotypical as some folks today view Ernie Hudson's character from the first movie, Leslie Jones' character seems almost deliberately so in her scenes from the trailer. Although there is still plenty of internet chatter about this Very Important reboot.

The trailer created a different problem for me in regards to the reboot: I didn't laugh much. Most of what I did laugh at were callbacks to either the original movie or other supernatural touchstones (like one character's head turning all the way around on her shoulders, a la The Exorcist). Feig was entirely correct that the humor of the 1984 Ghostbusters was driven almost entirely by the cast members and their responses to the supernatural shenanigans in which they were enmeshed. Aside from the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man, it's hard to think of too many ways in which the jokes are separated from Aykroyd, Hudson, Murray and Ramis and, to a lesser extent because she has a smaller role, Potts.

But that leaves Feig and his new cast with the problem of convincing people they'll be funny too. The trailer didn't do that. Now, maybe later trailers will help. Maybe they'll offer some evidence that Jones' character will be something other than a collection of stereotypes that we're supposed to overlook because the all-female team is Something Very Important. They'll need to, because they've got something really big to overcome in order to convince people that this Ghostbusters reboot will be worth seeing: Ghostbusters II.