I really like the Ghostbusters franchise. And I don't mean that like some people, who mean they loved it when they were little and still love the movie now as they look back on it through the rosy tint of nostalgia. I cannot be like that; I didn't see Ghostbusters until I was a teenager, and I did not love the film until I was a young adult. However, once I click with a story, I never let it go and tend to pursue it beyond its most famous and mainstream component. In this case that involved watching "Ghostbusters 2," playing "Ghostbusters: The Video Game," watching all of "The Real Ghostbusters" and "Extreme Ghostbusters," and reading every single one of the IDW comics from "The Other Side" all the way to the most recent issue of "Ghostbusters International." Oh, and I also have a pair of Ecto Goggles which I clip onto my pistol belt and wear with a Ghostbuster zip-up shirt I made with a name badge, no-ghost patch on the right sleeve, pocket on the left sleeve, and velcro fasteners on the cuffs. Those are my credentials, that's the kind of person I am. So the big question is, "What did I think of this reboot?"

This remake of Ghostbusters made me laugh a lot, and I liked the characters. While one of the main characters is clearly drawn to Chris Hemsworth's character Kevin, she is not persistently/creepily perusing him in the same way that Venkman does to Dana in the 1984 film. In fact, she actually keeps enough possession of her sanity to not be mindlessly blown away by his muscles and good looks and instead suggests they not hire him because he would clearly be a horrible secretary. Setting her attraction aside, the movie did not have a romantic subplot, and I think that is fantastic. We got a bit of backstory for a few of the characters, which is more than we can say for the original Ghostbusters film. And despite the trailers' best efforts to convince everyone that Patty was a certain overused character type, I was able to enjoy the character as she actually is in the movie, where she is quite the history buff and actually seems pretty laid-back a lot of the time.

The ghosts felt much more dangerous than they did in the original two Ghostbusters films. For the first time I really felt like this was a potentially lethal line of work *before* we got to the the main enemy at the end of the movie. Some of the ghostbusting sequences were very cool, maybe too cool if you want this movie to be just like the one from 1984, but I think the sillier moments help to balance that out. (There are some situations only Ghostbuster type action heroes find themselves in because all the uber-cool heroes like James Bond somehow manage to avoid being smushed by gigantic parade balloons and the like.)

There were new weapons for the Ghostbusters to use against the ghosts in this film, but I was surprised to find I was okay with that. I suspect this is because I have become accustomed to similar versions of several of them in the fantastic IDW comics continuing the adventures of the original Ghostbusters. (In the comics, Egon invents similar grenades and modifies several of the proton packs to include pistol-style firing mechanisms.) If I have one complaint, it is that I do not think the technobabble was as good in this film as it was in the 80's movies.

This movie may contain the most entertaining credits I've ever seen, and there was an easter egg waiting for fans of the original movie at the very end. When the lights came on, my first thought was, "I hope they make a sequel," which may make me a terrible person in the eyes of some, but I don't get my opinions secondhand from the "cool" people, I try to think for myself.