Our 6 Favourite Moments From the Ghostbusters Trailer

The new Ghostbusters trailer has dropped, and it’s got everyone talking. From our perspective, it thoroughly digs into nostalgia culture, but also shows off the individual personality that director Paul Feig’s injected into the material – and we’re largely on board with the movie, if these 2 minutes and 37 seconds are anything to go on – and here are the 6 moments from the trailer that’ve gotten us most excited.

The tone

We love the fact that the trailer plunges headfirst into a confrontation with one of the ghosts. The short snippet and reaction scene immediately afterward affirms Paul Feig’s hold on the material, toeing the line between scary and funny reassuringly well. Witnessing a stream of bright-green vomit comically spewed over Kristen Wiig’s particle physict Erin Gilbert, and then cutting to a future scene where she reacts to it getting in every ‘crack’; priceless.

The ghosts

From what we’ve seen here, the ghosts look superb. Either fully realised or heavily facilitated by CGI doesn’t seem to have gotten in the way of their deadly charm; they’re neon-hued nightmares that look set to have a whole lot of fun at the Ghostbusters’ expense. Our favourite of the lot? The parading long-legged nasty at 1:48.

Melissa McCarthy

In fine bumbling form once more, Melissa McCarthy has risen through the ranks to assert her place as one of the most reliably hilarious performers working today. The trailer makes a smart decision to focus a lot of its comic moments on grace notes from McCarthy, our favourite being a whispered ‘God, that’s hot’ while preparing new equipment for the Ghostbusters to play with. It’s a modern sensibility of comedy injected into the nostalgic tone of the trailer, and it works wonders.

Character introductions

We get a really strong, if simple, sense of the core Ghostbusters, thanks to the trailer spending time on briefly introducing us to each member. Although massively simplified for the trailer (and hopefully more complex in the actual product), we can clearly see that Kristen Wiig’s the egghead, McCarthy the reliable geeky, McKinnon the wildcard, and Jones the outsider looking in. With this dynamic already visibly at work – a dynamic that will be the most important thing in the movie – we’re cautiously getting our hopes up.

Leslie Jones

Unlike Winston, the sole black Ghostbuster before her, Jones doesn’t just fall into the story like Ernie Hudson’s character does when answering a job call: Leslie Jones’ Patty Tolan claims ‘you guys are really smart at this science stuff… but I know New York.’ Immediately she has more of a use than Hudson’s character (as much as we loved him). Could the movie end up ‘fixing’ a couple other things from the near-perfect original?

The music

Although we’re not a fan of the way the famous Ghostbusters tune is played out exactly the same way the Jurassic Park theme was used in the Jurassic World trailer (i.e. reverb-drenched single piano notes), we do love where it goes: with the melody getting updated with a dubstep-influenced fuzz that somehow sounds both contemporary and ‘80s (probably says a lot about our retro-obsessed culture), the trailer showcases a confident swagger. But will the original Ray Parker Jr. recording make it in, too?

Ghostbusters is released July 15.