I'm still wary about undermining the experience for people yet to see it, so spoiler tags just in case!
Shandor's presence in the film is one of the things that bugged me. He invested all that time, money, and energy into building a giant temple in New York to summon Gozer, then decided to wait... in the bottom of a mine over a thousand miles away? Shandor would have his body kept in the New York temple ready to greet Gozer on their arrival and so he could hand her a city of millions to destroy as a "welcome basket".
Fighting the same antagonist can be risky, but again the narrative makes sense here. The team repelled the first attempt, but Spengler realised it took more than just closing the door to stop an ancient and ridiculously powerful entity, so he set out to end the threat for good. That works for me.
What doesn't make sense at all is why the other Ghostbusters wrote his theories off (or why he didn't explain them properly at least, they seem to suggest he kept being unnecessarily cryptic). The bad guy's name is quite literally written all over the town and the mine, the mine is the known source of material for building the New York temple, and there's another temple (not to mention a body in some kind of suspended animation) at the bottom of it. Spengler really wasn't asking them to take a leap of faith based on flimsy evidence or gut instinct; it's completely unbelievable that a short letter and two or three photographs wouldn't have convinced the rest of the team to at least investigate. Or even a 30 second phone call to be honest, can't imagine they'd need him to provide photographs to back up his eye witness account. Apparently they'll do it on the basis of a short cryptic phone call from a young girl that none of them knew existed at that point, but not on the word of a trusted colleague with proven knowledge and expertise in occult matters.
People are still arguing even now over why the Beatles split up. One or two fuzzy throw-away lines during an exposition dump doesn't really sell the audience on why Ray (of all people!) would turn his back on Egon (of all people!) because of a weird theory. I could understand the team splitting with Ray supporting and following Egon, Peter not really being interested, and Winston just keeping his head down and getting on with life. I struggle to understand how the situation in the film could come about, or at least not without inventing additional head-canon to make it work. The film needed to sell that idea but missed the mark.
It was great to see the old team together again but let's face it, they were massively wasted. Turning up at the perfect moment to save the day was just lazy, lazy cliche. They didn't really have much to do, they were just given a throw-away line or two then left to stand in the corner looking heroic and waving their wands around. I get that it's a handover film with the old guard giving the new guard their blessing, but it could have been handled without feeling so... cheap.
Also - and this REALLY, REALLY bugs me - if the traps were powerful enough to split up and suck in a god-like being along with every ghost in the area... why was Egon's ghost still there at the end?
Oh, and while we're at it, I think it would have been useful to throw in a line to explain why trapping one of the keymaster/gatekeeper pair weakened Gozer (unless they explained it and we just missed it). The person I saw it with asked a quite sensible question - "now the door's been opened and Gozer has come through, why does it matter what happens to the dog creatures?" My head-canon is that Gozer can project itself into this plane but needs a lot of bandwidth to do it. Zuul and Clortho are less powerful entities that can slip in to this plane through the smaller cracks and then act as big phat data pipes for their master. Trapping one of them essentially reduces the bandwidth and interferes with Gozer's ability to project itself into this plane.
I still loved the film and will be watching it again, just some little bits that I felt were disappointing.
****ALL KINDA SPOILER-ISH****
if an evil creature really, really wants to come to our world, I am sure they wouldn't just try once.
If someone wants to assist that creature, why not make multiple avenues for it to happen? There may be thirty more gateways set up...not that I want see thirty more Ghostbusters with the same baddie.
fighting the same foe can be risky...but it actually helped flesh out the story to me. A new villain could be perceived as more credible by the rest of the team.
I don't know about you, but I see a common antagonist happening over and over in the world nowadays, and some folks freak out like they did on day one, and some are over it. Experts on BOTH SIDES. The ghostbusters are a group of extreme personalities (cept Winston, but he wasn't their leader). I actually saw how it made a very timely point.
Why didn't the traps get Egon? It seems like the traps go for twisted, evil energies. Egon was none of that. He looked like Egon --not like the ghosts in the courtroom of Ghostbusters 2. He wasn't staying on Earth to create problems, he was there to help.
THE MOVIE IS ABOUT PEOPLE HUNTING GHOST!!! It takes a certain mindset to do that.
First pulse to check at a crisis, YOUR OWN. Could you imagine if everytime they saw a ghost, everyone pee'd themself, crawled under a desk and decompensated?
And someone being stable in a raging hurricane of crazy can help everyone else behave. Traumatology. When the initial group had their major boss battle, they had been seasoned.
It's a light movie, not a serious documentary.
Loved the movie. Laughed, cheered, I got teary-eyed, even though I knew they were preying on my love of the first movie.
