| It’s been around 30 years since I last watched the original Beetlejuice, but I don’t remember it having so much nonsense. I remember Michael Keaton’s Betelgeuse, the larger-than-life demon, and Wynona Ryder’s goth girl. Both of whom, plus Lydia’s mother Catherine O’Hara, have returned for the sequel. Keaton warned producers that he can’t be in the movie too much or else his character gets over-done, which is why the first worked so well. They get the ratio right again, but the rest of the afterlife and underworld is just so ridiculously filled with nonsense that goes nowhere. | | 2024
Directed by: Tim Burton
Screenplay by: Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith
Starring: Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, and Jenna Ortega
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Above ground there are a few solid plotlines and new characters, but we have to start the movie underground with Betelgeuse’s ex-wife stapling herself back together and sucking the soul out of other underworld demons. The movie is just so proud of its weirdness that it often forgets that there has to be a purpose. We spend a bit too long with the dead and their gory nonsense before we get to the living characters who actually have a point.
Lydia is now a TV show host where she talks to the ghosts of people’s haunted houses. She has a daughter, named Astrid (Jenna Ortega), away at a boarding school who hates her. Everything about that character, her name, the casting, her personality, is all perfect. Astrid hates her mother, does not believe in ghosts, and never wants to step foot in Winter River or that awful house on the hill ever again. Until her bereft grandmother shows up at her school screaming that her grandfather has died. The three Deetz women, plus Lydia’s new new-age producer boyfriend (Justin Theroux), return home to mourn the recently departed patriarch.
I’m going to jump ahead to my favourite part. The one central part of the story that ties the whole thing together and doesn’t get weighed down with nonsense which so much of the rest of the movie does. Astrid meets a boy (Arthur Conti), they bond over their shared love of Dostoevsky and finally a person in this awful town that she likes. There’s a twist which I very satisfyingly predicted and I assume most people will because it fits the story so perfectly.
Betelgeuse and the living characters who keep summoning him are the best parts of the movie. But there are so many more characters all from the underworld who just pad the movie with gory nonsense. It’s a very vibrantly crafted movie, and occasionally there are small touches that add a lot (Betelgeuse’s look-alike (kinda) named Bob), and the music as it was previously is perfect, but then there are big touches that add nothing (everybody else from the underworld) and it just creates a mess out of the whole movie.
Younger me always wondered why his named is spelled Betelgeuse but the movie is spelled Beetlejuice, so adult me decided to spend some time delving into that lore which I don’t think has ever been officially clarified. Common theories include that he created a phonetic spelling of his name otherwise it would be mispronounced, or he doesn’t know the spelling of his own name, but I quite like the simple fact that if he isn’t allowed to say his own name, then he’s not allowed to spell it either and has had to come up with an alternative spelling loophole. He does love loopholes. I like thinking of Betelgeuse as the character and Beetlejuice as the movie to differentiate the two.
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