Beetlejuice

[Space Suicide]

It exceeded my expectations. I enjoyed it a lot and from start to finish. With that said,


Spoiler: The way they handled the absence of the the Charles Deetz Jeffrey Jones character was pretty neat. It addressed it in a way that was fun but included a character that should have been there but couldn't for the obvious reasons. A good chunk of stuff I seen online is people saying "too many subplots and Willem Dafoe's Wolf Jackson character was so absent he didn't need to be there." Upon my viewing I felt there were 4 main "subplots" - Beetlejuice getting with Lydia to go to the living world, Astrid's budding romance (if you wanna call it that), Lydia's career/life drama and Charles' death. Every other "subplot" is just details to flesh out those events so those have more legs to stand on. Delores and Wolf being antagonists to Beetlejuice, Lydia/Astrid relationship being strained for catalysts for both Afterlife trip and romance/friendship, Charles death being the reasons everyone is together, Rory wanting to marry Lydia, etc.


I felt as if there was a strong cohesive plot in this overall. It had a big cast of characters and never felt like they were misused, ignored or not there unless they had to be for X reason. I wouldn't say she is poor but the Delores character was not as featured as I thought she'd be but her function was to make the marriage to Lydia idea speed up in urgency. It also helped with a Betelegeuse origin story.


Loved the DeVito cameo character too. Was not expecting that hahaha.


P.S. Poor Bob!

[GulDukat]

Happy and surprised to hear a Scott Weiland song ("Where's Your Man") in the film.

[mfte]

[allegate]

Watched it last night and I have some thoughts. First and foremost though I want to be clear that I haven't enjoyed much media lately with the new meds I'm on so I'm not saying it was bad - or good, honestly - so apologies on that front.

Spoilers abound so apologies for the large blocks of gray.

Spoiler: The part where they introduce the relationship with Rory, was it supposed to be glaringly obvious that he was a terrible person? I mean beyond the weird codependency thing, as soon as they said "met in a support group" I got Marla vibes from him that paid off later.

As soon as they showed her hit her head on the tree and it looked like it should have decapitated her I knew the boy was dead. I was less sure on the parents, the scene was filmed in the way of "we're going to be super obvious that you're not seeing something that's important" but it was 50/50 as to whether the parents actually interacted with him. His room was also a dead - lol puns - giveaway with the PS1 on the shelf and all 90s bands.

WHY GOD WHY are there Minions in the movie? Literally and figuratively! They work for Beetlejuice but also are just yellow things that can't talk right and act dumb. Plus they get loose and are somewhat promptly forgotten about?

I had similar thoughts to Deadpool & Wolverine, where even though it hit a lot of things that I should have liked the end product was just middle of the road and there were some choices that seem to be more of a shot at a meme than a good film.

[Jinsai]

Spoiler: WHY GOD WHY are there Minions in the movie? Literally and figuratively! They work for Beetlejuice but also are just yellow things that can't talk right and act dumb. Plus they get loose and are somewhat promptly forgotten about?

I was going to mention this, but I couldn’t decide if it was a spoiler to say that this plot point went absolutely nowhere

[allegate]

Also I forgot one thing: Was that supposed to be Trump in line at that one point? He was golden/orange, had a us flag lapel pin, and the hair was distinctly wavy.

[M1ke]

Also I forgot one thing: Was that supposed to be Trump in line at that one point? He was golden/orange, had a us flag lapel pin, and the hair was distinctly wavy.

I thought so too, but the person was silent, and there is zero chance Trump would have been silent when a female was cutting in line in front of him.

Also, those things were minions? I guess they could have been, but I thought it was a bunch of shrunken head guys, which were in the first one...

[Shadaloo]

Just came out of it and I have the warm and fuzzies.

It's absolutely not perfect and the points made about it above by a few have tons of merit. Dafoe's character is largely pointless, and the movie kind of forgets Monica Belucci for a good half of it.

But it's still really enjoyable on the whole - it just needed tighter editing. Some stuff like the above characters ( no, they're not Minions and that wasn't Trump, he was too generic and if it were he'd be much more comically ecxaggersted knowing Burton's style) are really just there for silly laughs. I've read a few opinions along the lines of it feels like it's drawing from the cartoon a.bit, and that feels about right to me. And I'm fine with that.

Honestly, I'd say it even felt clever at a few points, like how they handled the Charles Deetz character.

It's somewhat messy, but it really feels like it was made with a lot of love. It's nice to get that from Tim Burton again even if it's not perfect. And the memberberries never feel too gratuitous. Close, but not quite. Just enough to make me smile. And that's enough.

Seriously can't express how nice it is to come out of a theatre free of cynicism, just happiness.

[henryeatscereal]

Everyone says that Dafoe was pointless, but at least he's charming, Monica Belucci's character was more pointless by far.

The movie it's "ok", just plain "ok", i didn't hate it, but it's not a classic and it has a bad story with so mucho going on (and not much "paying off").

Hats off to Michael Keaton and Catherine O Hara, both of them helped the movie to be a lot more enjoyable than it had the right to...

I did love the music and the use of some practical effects, some of the new characters are very "meh".

[Erneuert]

Anyone else getting that “I’m seeing her in too many things” vibe from Jenna Ortega?

[Swykk]

Her and Ti’moe’thee’ Charlamagne need to disappear for 2-3 years (or take ONE role per year for like 3 years).

[Jinsai]

Everyone says that Dafoe was pointless, but at least he's charming, Monica Belucci's character was more pointless by far.

This is the thing, and I swear I'm not going to jump up and down bashing this movie over and over, because I already did, and I can see that everyone else is enjoying it more than I did, and that's honestly great. I'm not knocking you guys or saying that there's something wrong with you for liking it. I wish I did.

But when I went off on my rant earlier, I avoided talking about a bunch of stuff because the movie wasn't out yet, and I wanted to completely avoid spoilers. It's been kicking around in my head now for a while though, and where else am I going to put all this.

This is going to be long (maybe the longest post I'll ever make on this board. Actually it's too long, I've gotta shorten it down to meet the character limit), and it's going to be negative, but this is my full "review" of the movie. I'll put the whole thing in spoilers, so if you're sick of my negativity (which I can totally get) ignore it. I don't want to convince anyone to change their mind, or get people to think it sucked as much as I did. What's the point of that. Now that the movie's out there, here goes.

I'd really recommend not reading this if you haven't seen it and want to avoid spoilers
because I'm going to drop em:

Spoiler: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a nostalgia ride that spends so much time checking off the requisite boxes that it fails to assemble a sensible story, and its cast of mostly ancillary characters do little to salvage a purpose from the disjointed narrative. Sure, we could have taken an experimental film that eschews a traditional Hollywood narrative for something surreal and nightmarish (there's even a springboard for that potential with the bizarre nod to Eraserhead here, but ultimately it's as straight-forward as it gets. And... David Lynch is not the kind of movie we're asking for here. If there's a deeper meaning going on here beyond throwing memberberries at the audience, I can't identify it. If anything, I think depth and subtlety are baggage an audience will bring to it, under the influence of its endlessly superior predecessor.

To call the cast of characters a slapdash assembly of cliches with loudly broadcasted personality traits would be an understatement. Attempts to update or age the characters we are familiar with serve only to make them somewhat confusing. Cathleen O' Hara is mostly back, and she's shrill and hysterical as ever... at least as much as she was before her turn at the end of the first movie. Her character might have been the clearest callback to the original movie as far as tone goes, but did her character really accomplish anything with regards to the greater plot?

Lydia is now all about positive thinking, and she somehow seems more juvenile than the 'old soul' occupying her role in the original film. If anything, she's unfortunately colored by involvement in exploiting her supernatural gifts for a tv show, which brings her into moral commonality with the selfish motivations of the first movie's Deetzes and their accomplice Otto (who has now been reassembled as a character into Lydia's love interest), who wanted to turn the haunted house into a theme park experience to enrich themselves. Here, Lydia is now a celebrity version of the kid from The Sixth Sense: she sees dead people everywhere, except conveniently when it would matter to the advancement of the plot, and she cynically cashes in on it.

Then there's Beetlejuice himself, who is just somewhat confounding. He's less playful, less misogynistic, less clever, less adorably detestable, less funny. What side is he on? They invented some lazy 'Sword of Damocles' to motivate him into action but... he's the title character, and I can't even tell what he's about. In the original movie, he played both sides, alternating between villain and anti-hero, and he was fascinating. Here, he's just confusing. And please, just try.... tryyyyyyyy to come up with some funny lines of dialogue for him. "The juice is loose?" Is this an OJ Simpson joke or a reference to Starburst ads? I don't know, I don't think anyone else did, and I don't know if I care.

So let's talk about these new cast members. Monica Bellucci as... whatever her name was. Let's call her Sally; the stitched up deuteragonist from Nightmare Before Christmas. She has about two lines of dialogue in the movie, and both of them are "where's Beetlejuice." She walks around sucking up souls from hapless undead, which we've established permakills a ghost, but we never find out what Bellucci gets out of it, or why she has this unique power. I guess her motivation is to re-marry Beetlejuice, and they invent some forgettable reason to necessitate this. There's her agency in the story: she motivates Beetlejuice to want to get married to someone else. We already had a reason for him to want to get married to Lydia in the first movie, but now he's got another one. Great.

Then there's Willem Dafoe. His jokes aren't funny (he's a dead actor who played a cop!), and he serves zero purpose to the story. So let's move on from him.

There's Beetlejuice's minions, who are cute for five seconds before they proceed to mutely meep around doing nothing. We get familiarized with one of them, only to have him meet some meaningless death at the hands of Bellucci. They serve the story about as much as Dafoe's character. These aren't clever red herrings or fake outs; they're just pointless, and they're not amusing enough to justify their screen time.

Even an essential character, like the ghost kid, wasn't fleshed out, and once he'd accomplished his service to the story they found a quick and uncreative (and anticlimactic) way to throw him out. Really, he's probably the main antagonist in the film (of which there are... three?), and they unceremoniously discard him with a one-liner joke. It's not worth exploring how ludicrous his soul-swapping scheme is. I can't remember how simply this transaction occurred in the film. What did she do to facilitate this exchange? She went to the other side with him, stood in a line with him, and then suddenly they were taking her away (without stealing her life) and the ghost guy gets to go back to the living world... as a mortal? They don't explain this, but I guess they don't have to.

That goes with the territory here. Everything is resolved or developed by clauses in otherworldly contracts. Ghost Kid gets to take Astrid's place in the living world because of some clause in the spooky paperwork. Ghost kid gets dropped into a hellish pit of fire because of some other clause. Beetlejuice can't marry Lydia because of some other clause. I get that in a story where a demon can be summoned by saying his name three times, the idea of contractual obligations could be a running theme, but it feels like lazy writing. Need to move the story forward? There's a clause for that.

Speaking of that, what rule did Astrid's dad break to wind up as a civil servant in the afterlife? I thought that was reserved for suicides. Oh well, I'm sure there's a clause for it, and his character ultimately accomplishes nothing except to have a cute bonding scene, and to offer a tip on how to get back to the land of the living (I think? I don't remember). I guess he's important because Astrid goes over to the undead world to find him (and how awesomely convenient is it that she actually does!), but she didn't need to find him to get her character there. Given how little thought Astrid puts into walking into the undead world (apparently living humans can do this), did we really need to invent a reason for her to do it? We could have just said she was enamored with the ghost kid, and that'd be as satisfying as anything else that's explained here, as far as character motivations go.

I keep saying "this did nothing to advance the story" so it is probably worthwhile to address the actual story. Here's the essential plot boiled down to a couple sentences: Lydia's daughter is tricked by a malevolent ghost teen (that she's crushing on) to trade mortality in the afterlife, and so her mom calls on Beetlejuice to save her, which he does in a casual, breezy way. Beetlejuice then pulls out a contract with Lydia agreeing to marry him, but he is thwarted by a clause in a handbook... a long handbook, which Astrid magically opens to the pertinent passage?

Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci, the Minions, the Deetzes, Lydia's douchebag boyfriend, they all accomplish nothing.

Beetlejuice doesn't even raise any hell. The haunting "dance" scene is recreated here, but to what purpose? In the original, the forced dance was intended to scare the Deetzes.... what purpose does the McArthur Park dance along serve? He pumps Lydia's fiance full of truth serum, and we get the gag where he fully reveals that he was the douchebag we all knew he was all along. Beetlejuice sucks the wedding guests into their phones I guess... by the way, what happened to those people? Did they stay in their phones? Where did they go? I guess that matters less than the other loose plot ends that evaporated into nothingness. I could ask what the deal was with McArthur Park, but maybe I just can't get over my hatred for that song. I'd like to think it's not something personal like that, but whatever, it doesn't work. The ludicrous lyrics aren't funny if you already are familiar with how outrageously stupid they are, and it isn't funny that there's a giant cake that's literally melting.

Compare this Richard Harris stuff to what they're trying to supplant with the Harry Belafonte motif from the original, and cringe at how badly they repackage it.

I guess you could call the scene where Beetlejuice is a couple's therapist some hellraising, but it's just a reset of the scene where Gena Davis and Alec Baldwin first meet Beetlejuice in the town model... right down to the joke where he rips his face open and all the scary stuff pops out. This is par for the course though, as this movie is all about re-using scenarios and jokes from the original movie, right down to an ending resolution that requires the sandworm to barge in as a deus ex machina device.

So what was the point of all the Eraserhead type stuff with pregnancy and mutant-baby Beetlejuice? I'm not squeamish. I get into campy 80s gore horror and grindhouse cinema (to a limit), but come on, this was just a gross-out gag. I know i'm getting redundant with saying something was pointless, but wasn't this? What was it even trying to say with that? Was it going for some Eraserhead homage; something to do with the fear of responsibility and the reality of parenthood being passed on through the generations, as a way to underpin a story thematically tied to female familial bonding and the burden transferred through inheritance to our offspring that.... oh what the fuck am I even trying to say here. It was just a dumb gross out gag, and I didn't think it was amusing.

Think of all the iconic stuff going on in the original. None of the characters were useless props. All the players contributed to an evolving narrative. The supernatural haunting scenes are classic. The bonding between the ghosts and Lydia was heartbreaking. Here the bond between Ghost Kid (whose name nobody remembers) and Astrid is laughably bare, to the point where him kissing her is abrupt and hilariously rushed. In total, she's talked to him for about ten minutes, and she's kissing him (first time kissing a boy?) and then following him into the afterlife... after discovering that he's actually dead?! I know young kids do some dumb things, especially when hormones are involved, but come ON. You can't even insert some kind of connection there, beyond "ooh, they're both so brooding and deep that they read Dostoevsky."

I get that Astrid is a repackaged Lydia, but why is she so goth-adjacent if she actually despises the spooky ghost thing with her mom, and thinks it's all a bunch of bullshit? Wouldn't she be rebelling by being into influencers and listening to Ed Sheeran? Instead, no, she's sulky and demure and she reads Dostoevsky to highlight her bleak existential nihilism or something. She might as well walk around with pancake makeup, saying things like "we are all constantly dying in such beautiful ways."

The soundtrack was serviceable, but it's hard to tell if it's forgettable because the movie is forgettable, and the scenes the music is intended to highlight are emotionally baffling. I guess it follows the modus operandi here and playfully references the original score enough to get through, but I don't see this being one of the more memorable Danny Elfman scores.

I can believe that Burton has put some love into this, but I wonder how much love he has left to give. Some of the stylistic oddness of Burton was there, but not in the way it permeated everything in the original, or in any of his great movies. In the 'good ol Burton' world, there's strangeness in suburban banality. The weirdness is endearing and the calming veneer of homogenized living is lined with an eerie, sinister sheen. Conformity is creepy and cartoonish, while the creepy and strange are fantastic and enticing. Here, all the gothic stylized stuff is reserved for the afterlife segments, and even then, it feels like repurposed sets from the first movie. The real living-world segments feel painfully normal. Nothing is quirky or odd in an ironic way. This touch was effortless in everything Burton made up through Ed Wood, and I feel like he's lost it. Maybe he's trying to hard to put love into things. Maybe when he was younger, this style permeated him on a base core level. Here it feels phoned in. Sure, it was more than sufficiently dark (even surprisingly violent and gory in some spots), and all of that was... fine, if still underwhelming.

Besides the whole gimmick with "the actor who played Charles Deetz is a PDF File, so we need to come up with a clever way to get rid of him" being a pretty good joke, where was the humor in here? I can name a ton of hilarious, iconic, creative scenarios in the original movie, but nothing is coming to mind here. Maybe the sequence that details the origins of Beetlejuice was funny (even if it felt out of place). There were about three instances in the screening I saw where a chunk of the audience laughed. Briefly. No joke soared. In fact, most of the audience didn't seem to think the Charles Deetz treatment was as funny as I did.

I've been thinking about it since I saw it, and I think there's just something about the original movie for me. It's special. I tell people all the time that it's actually a profound film, dressed up as something silly and fun. The seriousness of it is enhanced by the humor. It highlights how grim a lot of the concepts are by lampooning the things we're scared of. The original movie poked fun at suicide! There was edge to it, and the jokes were sinister, but also really smart. Sure, O' Hara's death here was kind of a recreation of the car crash in the first movie, in that it framed something awful and tragic as kind of amusing in its sudden meaninglessness, but it isn't the crux of the film. It's a throwaway joke. Does anyone even react to her death in any kind of sincere way? I expected her presence in the afterlife, waiting in line for service, to go somewhere... of course it didn't.

So much more could have been done here, and I just know if the original writer of the Beetlejuice screenplay was still alive, he'd never have let this sequel settle into this. Maybe there were too many cooks in the kitchen, especially when you're adapting a sequel to a classic (which was written by someone who has passed away), but the pieces are all there! Just...

-Make Astrid a little less gloomy goth from the outset - have her character go through an arc. Have her settle into the role of snarky goth princess, have her develop.

-Make Lydia's boyfriend a little less obviously a dick. Give him some redeeming qualities.

-Have the Cathleen O' Hara character serve a purpose. You've got her positioned in the afterlife, use her!

- Get rid of Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe, or develop them and have a purpose! Don't just set them up to sit there.
Monica Bellucci's character can seemingly speak words; give her some dialogue! Give her a fucking personality if she's going to be your principle villain.

- Have Beetlejuice oscillate between being lovable and off-putting, and for fuck sake give him some actually funny lines to say. He doesn't need a complicated motivation to do what he does, just let him demonstrate his nature while the story's plot points hinge on his involvement as an unknown, unpredictable variable. If you're going to have him doomed to fall in love with this villainous Bellucci character, detail what the love was all about besides sex. Give us a reason for her.
We can't just accept that Beetlejuice fell in love with her for a bunch of unknown reasons, many of which might be disingenuous and only serve to enhance his mysterious character.... Well, I guess we can accept that, but what is their relationship supposed to amount to? What is the dynamic? What is she even going to do now that she's found Beetlejuice at the end? Suck his soul? It seemed like she just showed up to the party and was lost at that point.

- Stylize the normal and the banal in humorously bleak ways! Do the Tim Burton thing!!!

- Get rid of the baby-Beetlejuice stuff.

- Don't directly recycle material from the original movie

- Develop Ghost Kid further, to the point where we remember his name... detail his journey into the afterlife with Astrid. Have some hints at his evil nature spill out here and there, as Astrid grows increasingly wary, but trapped along for the ride with her tour guide. Have some situations with the two of them that either bond them closer or start to drive them apart. Have something happen! Have their repertoire develop! You can make time for this! Cut the Willem Dafoe time from the film and focus instead on this dive into the underworld. Have Cathleen O'Hara's character save Astrid's life or something in the afterlife, so she serves some purpose!

Just... do anything with the material you've got. You have so much to work with, and the best you can assemble is a joyless nostalgic joyride that doesn't know how to pace anything or make you care about its characters. That was one of Burton's strength's in his golden period. Burton's version of the Batman mythos was the most humanizing and mysterious... Edward Scissorhands, even though he barely had any dialog, made every line count, and he broke your heart. You felt that the love between him and Winona Ryder was something real and relatable. You care about Pee Wee and you hope he finds his bike, because he's a good guy with his heart in the right place and he makes you believe in optimism and the goodness of strangers. Ed Wood takes the life of someone widely ridiculed as a failure and reworks it into a story about the triumph of creativity and the persistence of the human spirit despite adversity... to boldly make your way as a freak in a world that doesn't understand you, and to stay true to yourself and the people you love. There's something going on in his best movies.

I walk away from this feeling nothing but annoyance, and some sadness at the lost opportunity. At least the original will always be classic... and if Burton decides to make a sequel to Edward Scissorhands, I'll sit that one out.

2.5/10

[M1ke]

Jinsai, I'll admit that I didn't read your full critique, but I did want to respond to some of it.

Spoiler: You were talking about Beetlejuice not really being that menacing this time around, he really wasn't. He was watered down quite a bit from the original movie.

I grew up watching the movie and the kids cartoon. I loved both of them. The kids cartoon version of Beetlejuice is much more similar to what this Beetlejuice reminded me of, and for me that was OK. That's Beetlejuice too, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe that's part of why I liked it more than you did.

The misogyny would have been par for the course in 1988, these days it'll get someone kicked to the curb immediately. A successful conman is going to know their audience and probably put that away when targeting someone like Lydia. And really, Beetlejuice's ultimate goal is to marry Lydia to get out of the afterlife, just like it was in the first movie.

To do that, he's got to pull her away from her shitty boyfriend. His first play as a fake therapist is probably a good way to do that, because to an emotionally manipulative piece of shit like her boyfriend, that's probably one of the most terrifying things to him, someone who knows human nature better and also wants to take her away. In that scene it felt like he was being a more honest version of the boyfriend, which I adored. If you wanted Tim Burton to "stylize the normal and the banal in Tim Burton ways", I'd argue that this scene of Beetlejuice talking like the armchair psychologist that we've all met and having Beetlejuice parody them accomplished that (though I may be misinterpreting what you're saying).

For Monica Belluci's character, I agree we could have learned more, but I also feel like that's hinting at something that isn't explained. I think Beetlejuice works really well because we don't know much about where he came from, he just kind of exists. And the little bit of backstory we got in this movie, about his ex-wife, there's exactly zero chance that he's telling the whole truth there. In the first movie it was never explained why or how marrying Lydia would get him out of the afterlife, just that it would. So him having an ex-wife who he's fleeing all feels connected to that somehow. It feels to me like there's a lot more to this part of the story than we're being told. This movie didn't really deliver on that, it's true, but I felt like it was part of a set-up for a 3rd movie, where we might get some explanation of why getting married would get him out, and also why Belluci's character is actually trying to catch him again, I think there's a bigger motivation than her being angry at him for having chopped her to bits, though it isn't presented on screen.

And the song at the wedding worked for me, because I didn't really know it very well. I did know the Weird Al version (Jurassic Park), which worked as a comedy song even without knowing the original, and I kept being reminded of it during this scene, which was also enjoyable. And so for me, discovering that the original version of the song had lines about striped pants, and green icing melting just made me think "wait, was this song actually written about Beetlejuice?" -- it just fits it so well, rather than viewing it was a simple re-hash of the original Day-O scene.

Beetlejuice's minions as you put it...I think they're convinced that Beetlejuice is going to unshrink their heads. He's sitting right next to at least 1 of them at the end of the first movie when his own head is shrunk, and it's back to regular size by the start of this movie. They're working for him for some reason, and I'd bet it has something to do with him being able to unshrink his own head. I dunno, they just kind of worked for me too.

For me, this movie added quite a bit to the story, to see where the characters are now, but also left a lot to wonder about, which the original also had.

I'm expecting a third movie at some point, which answers questions, like:
-Lydia's mother is still alive (which Delia mentions), so why isn't she ever around?
-Why would getting married get Beetlejuice out of the afterlife? (And I think Belucci's character has something to do with this)
-Why can Lydia and Astrid see ghosts that others can't?

I'm also willing to bet that the answers to these questions are actually connected too. Maybe Lydia and Astrid are decedents of Belucci's character? Maybe Belucci's actually part of a group that tries to make sure the dead stay dead, and that's why she's after Beetlejuice? Because he's figured out that her family bloodline can somehow bring the dead back to life? I don't know, just theorizing here, but that could maybe explain why the baby Beetlejuice is still in Lydia's nightmares at the end of the movie.

For me this movie successfully expanded upon the world that already existed, and gave some more story while still creating and leaving additional mysteries to be (hopefully) revealed later.

[Swykk]

I saw it last night and found it to largely be fun but forgettable which is a disservice to the original ultimately.

Bellucci’s character is pretty much useless. I didn’t care about it and neither did the movie.

I liked Theroux’s scummy Rory and found him to fit into the Beetlejuice world perfectly. O’Hara is always a treat too. Those two knew what movie they were in. Keaton is great but I didn’t feel the menace in him that the character had in the original. This Beetlejuice is like Freddy Krueger in the post Dream Warriors movies. Ryder is okay but I wouldn’t say she nailed it like in the original. I was annoyed by Ortega mostly…see my post about her needing to fade a bit like that other dude with a stupid name that’s in everything. She’s overexposed.

Spoiler: I found that Astrid’s ability to see ghosts was done so well too. That Jeremy subplot was my favorite in the movie. What was up with why Lydia couldn’t see her husband? I thought for sure we were going to discover he wasn’t actually dead. The Soul Train got a pop from me. Also, were the cops the cast of Supertroopers?

[Jinsai]

@M1ke
I totally hear where you're coming from, and I'm glad you (and others) are enjoying it. I hear you on how the stuff worked for you. This really should have just been a fun movie, and I think I just couldn't help it; my required standard wasn't met. I think I told myself I was keeping my expectations low, but in reality, I probably needed it to be something great to really land well with me. I've considered what people have said in here, and I still think I receive it the way I do. It sucks, but I don't think I can just enjoy myself on a basic level with this source material. I probably demand too much, and I can't help it.

But I'll leave this thread alone. I never wanted to dominate it with my negativity, and I feel like I've already probably gone waaaaaay too far with broadcasting my opinion here. I'm not a film critic; just some guy on the internet with an opinion. Weirdly, I guess I'm much more passionate about this than I realized.

[Toadflax]

Thoughts! (Spoilers)

I really liked it overall. I was pleasantly surprised at how hard it went with the Beetlejuice / Tim Burton / 80s / grossness / stop motion - ness of it all. It felt so much like the kind of movie Burton would make in the 80s and 90s in a way few of his movies have lately. Plus, we've seen how often directors can't capture the feeling of the original when they come back for a sequel (Lucas, Jackson, Scott, Spielberg, etc).

Totally agree with the plot criticisms; too many characters and unnecessary plot threads. There's also a weird POV thing, where I feel the first movie was almost entirely from two POVs, where this one kept jumping around like crazy. It actually felt more like a limited series in that way, where we're going to introduce several characters and follow them over the course of a whole season. That said, I was happy with how all the characters and threads (mostly) came together in the third act. It left me with more of a feeling that they knew what they were doing by the end than I had in the middle.

So yeah, far from perfect, but it was far better and more ambitious than I was expecting.

Some scattered thoughts:

- It was weird that Charles was such a presence throughout the movie. If you're going to write him out for being a piece of shit, then maybe don't remind us he exists every 10 minutes? I get Charles Dietz is not Jeffrey Jones, but why not just kill him off at the beginning and then forget about him?

- Per one of the above comments, I think it's not so much that Jenna Ortega is in everything as it is she's currently the star of Tim Burton's other project, and some of Astrid's character beats felt extremely similar to the first season of Wednesday.

- Speaking of people being in everything, there's a similar thing going on with Willem Dafoe right now, where it feels like every movie has to have a quirky WD character in it somewhere. He and Jenna Ortega are both great, but it's a thing that happens in Hollywood where someone becomes popular, so then everyone wants to put them in their project doing the thing they've become so well known for. Look at Giancarlo Esposito over the last ten years, for instance.

- I thought the song choice of MacArthur Park was really cool and interesting. They could have easily done Banana Boat again or some more obvious or well-known 80's song or something, but MacArthur Park felt like the movie was able to be its own thing rather than just constantly referencing the original.

- I wish Astrid's dad wasn't all fishy. They built him up as such an emotionally meaningful character, but then the way he looked and the fact that they kind of zipped through their reunion kept his character from having the emotional resonance it could have.

- Michael Keaton's still got it.

[allegate]

I saw it last night and found it to largely be fun but forgettable which is a disservice to the original ultimately.

Bellucci’s character is pretty much useless. I didn’t care about it and neither did the movie.

I liked Theroux’s scummy Rory and found him to fit into the Beetlejuice world perfectly. O’Hara is always a treat too. Those two knew what movie they were in. Keaton is great but I didn’t feel the menace in him that the character had in the original. This Beetlejuice is like Freddy Krueger in the post Dream Warriors movies. Ryder is okay but I wouldn’t say she nailed it like in the original. I was annoyed by Ortega mostly…see my post about her needing to fade a bit like that other dude with a stupid name that’s in everything. She’s overexposed.

Spoiler: I found that Astrid’s ability to see ghosts was done so well too. That Jeremy subplot was my favorite in the movie. What was up with why Lydia couldn’t see her husband? I thought for sure we were going to discover he wasn’t actually dead. The Soul Train got a pop from me. Also, were the cops the cast of Supertroopers?

RE the hubbie: he said at one point that he checks on them from time to time but doesn't want to be seen so I guess being seen is a passive ability of ghosts and not being seen is active?

Also @Jinsai and @M1ke : I will try to read all that spoiler text later, it's just a lot of black and white and I will probably copy/paste into a txt document to make it easier.