Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) #
There are two things to consider here.
First is that this is the story of three generations of women trying to relate to and love one another. And that’s nice.
Second, it feels like a struggle to fit that story into a nostalgic formula. Okay we gotta have ghosts and weird deaths, and we gotta have sandworms, and Harry Belafonte, and we gotta have plenty of visual gags.
It was a little chaotic. There’s the three generations of Deetzes brought together by the death of the family patriarch. (Jeff Jones’s likeness was used several times but Jones himself was, I assume, not invited back on account of being a pedophile and a sex offender and all.) And there’s the teenage love/betrayal story that drives a lot of the plot. And Willem Dafoe’s not-a-cop law enforcement angle that felt simply necessary for plot advancement and not interesting or funny. To say nothing of Dolores, Beetlejuice’s wife, who did …. absolutely nothing? She wandered around and killed ghosts. (Including Danny DeVito.) But she never shared a scene with any other main character until the final confrontation, only to be immediately swallowed by a sand worm. Oh yeah, and the where-is-Astrid’s-dad plot. We never found out why Lydia (and now Astrid) cannot see him when they can see other ghosts. So it was a lot of puzzle pieces that kind of fit together. But again, it’s kind of a lot. It’s been many years since I saw the original, but from what I recall the plot was: dead couple want to haunt the new family who moved into their house; Beetlejuice wants to marry Lydia and get to live in the world of the living. Much simpler.
The most random thing that stuck with me: the cop character at one point says to “comb the sands of Titan” if you need to, and then when Astrid and Lydia land on the sand worm planet, Astrid points out Saturn looming near in the distance and says, “we must be on one of its moons … the afterlife is so random sometimes!” So sand worms canonically come from Titan, Saturn’s largest moon? Random indeed. I don’t know why we needed to establish that so firmly in the lore, but here we are.
Oh and the music. Day-O was a pretty nice hat tip. But the Right Here Waiting For You? And the Soul Train numbers? And the way way way too long MacArthur Park number? It felt like they ran out of movie and had to fill some space. I mean, I guess it’s tribute to Day-O. But that was way better, and this was bad.
I feel like the recurring Beetlejuice infant—especially with it showing up again in the final scenes—leaves the door open for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: Family Values. But, I don’t know if the world is ready for that.
Anyway, it was good! 5/5 stars!