Hal Isaly

Betlegeuse, Betlegeuse, Be…warned of some mild spoilers of the new Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice movie. I went to see the new Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice movie two weekends ago and needed some time to simmer on my thoughts and opinions. 

To be honest, the new movie was made for Gen-Z people who have shorter attention spans, need more things explained to them and need multiple things going on simultaneously. The first one was made for the older generation who wanted quirky, campy and a little strange in a smaller dose. To me, the second one was more interesting because it had a deeper plot, but the first one is still more nostalgic.

 A lot of people’s critique of this new movie is that it is nostalgia bait which is defined as, “a marketing strategy that relies on fond memories of the past to sell something” by the Hubspot Blog. I have felt that with a lot of the new Disney movies happening, but with this it was more of a Halloween nostalgia, if that makes sense. Another major thing in the movie that I fell in love with was the fact that my girl Jenna Ortega was in it! She did such a good job, and I feel like the fact that she was Wednesday Addams was a big factor in the creepiness of her character Astrid Deetz.

The second movie was a lot less campy, however, and more just like a lot of the movies we see today that try and get through their “bullet points” of things they want to happen in the movie. For example, a love interest, a tragedy, a dead dad, a rebellious daughter who hates mom, etc. When the second movie suddenly gave Jenna Ortega’s character (Astrid Deetz) a love interest, it made parts of the movie cringe in my opinion, and didn’t seem needed for the plot whatsoever. For me, if they had made it a gay love interest I wouldn’t have been so mad, but it was a MAN. Although, I may be biased because I want to see gay horror movies and there are not enough of them.  Like, can we not have original ideas any more? I felt like this could’ve been a better movie if it had been original and still had that campy feel to it. 

On the other hand, another thing that makes the second movie intriguing is that they use many of the same actors as the characters they played in the first movie. Winona Ryder is still Lydia Deetz (just older now), her parents are the same, and obviously, Beetlejuice is the same. That is something I admire about prequels and sequels is when they keep the actors the same.

To conclude, the first movie is better and if you haven’t seen it but want to see the second, please watch the first one first. The second movie was overall really good, but I had a lot of critiques that were stated, but I gave some good feedback as well. My rating would be a 3 / 5 and I feel like that is pretty good because I do not usually like the newer movies coming out. Go see for yourself because, like Betlegeuse always says, “It’s showtime!”