Before you get all defensive about it because this is a favorite move of so many, myself included, take a deep breath and think about what it means to start with. There’s nothing saying that the movie isn’t a classic. There’s nothing saying that it’s a pointless film that shouldn’t have been made. What it’s saying is that the theme, the driving purpose behind every film, is simply not there. Ghostbusters is one of the only movies in creation that does not have a strict, ironclad theme to it, and somehow it still works. You could claim up and down all day and night that there are set themes within this movie but you’d talk yourself blue before you could convince someone that’s actually taken the time to look through it and determine that no, it does not have a unifying theme.
There’s little to no real character development since Ray, Egon, and Peter are all the same people at the end of the film as they were going in. Even Winston doesn’t change except for the sake of necessity. Dana is really the only person that changes since in the beginning she thinks of Peter as a nuisance and by the end she’s grown to like him. But that’s such a minute change that it should have happened somewhere in the middle of the movie, but the fact that it happens at the end is no problem.
There’s no religious theme since the worship of Gozer and Christianity are both mentioned and shown in the movie but have no real bearing on the outcome. Gozer worshipers are mentioned but never seen, and the only real representation of Christianity is a church being stepped on by the Stay Puft Man and a cardinal in the mayor’s office. Aside from that faith and science are free to intermingle throughout the film.
It’s not about redemption since as I’ve already mentioned there’s really no change to the characters. Nothing they do from the beginning to the end changes, so redemption isn’t really needed. They have nothing to atone for, not getting kicked out of Columbia University, not the explosion in the firehouse, and certainly not the fact that the ghost activity kept accelerating until finally Gozer was ready to appear.
The mere fact that Ghostbusters is really not about anything is kind of liberating really. It means that it’s not tied down to a single theme that, like the sequel, could have bogged it down for its entire length. Really, not having a theme allowed the film to simply flow as it was intended and create a story that was almost universally loved by anyone that watched it. As one of the greatest comedies ever made Ghostbusters still stands out among the rest as a movie that is in a class by itself. Film students actually continue to analyze this movie in an effort to find out if it was really about something or if it had a unique formula that let it just settle out of the box where it stayed.
Remember, a film about nothing can still be a classic.
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