Title: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Director: Tim Burton
Cinematographer: Haris Zambarloukos
Writers: Alfred Gough, Miles Millar; story by Gough, Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith
Starring: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Jenna Ortega, Catherine O’Hara, Monica Bellucci, Willem Dafoe, Justin Theroux
Release Date: September 6, 2024
We are in the middle of an infestation. Hollywood digs up properties last seen decades ago, and produces a film that is equal parts remake and quasi-sequel, with any remaining original cast members returning to find their characters either inexplicably trapped in time, or presented as burnt-out, secondary failures. The movies you think of when you read this aren’t the one I’m thinking of, I promise, it’s simply that common. Like a kudzu infestation, these films choke out everything else. They are the result of a quick, easy, thoughtless template that any past film can be stretched or trimmed to fit.
These are not sequels. Whatever you call them—reboot sequels, legacy sequels, requel—you know them almost by sight, and many imagine any decades-late sequel will be one more for the list.
None of that describes Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. It escaped the Hollywood machine, resurrecting Tim Burton’s enthusiasm, becoming something else entirely.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is surprising: it is an actual sequel. A continuation, which allows the characters to change and grow with the years, presenting new plot threads for them to experience, and expanding the world. Winona Ryder’s Lydia remains our central protagonist; Beetlejuice remains our central antagonist. It is, against all odds, so natural a sequel it feels as though it could have come out 30 years ago (more natural than the sequels proposed at the time, no less).
If you have gothic joy in your heart, or any love for the first film, see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. It is one of Burton’s best: memorable, well-crafted, and charming.
Spoiler Warning: This review will discuss Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in-depth. Twists, characters, and major scenes are openly explored.
The Filmmaking
For the first twenty years of his career, Tim Burton was one of the rare idiosyncratic directors to not only stay within the Hollywood studio system, but thrive with a long series of critical and commercial hits (these films, surprisingly, generally had either relatively little to no executive meddling). In the 2000s, Burton shifted to a series of CGI-heavy, lavishly budgeted adaptations: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and Dumbo. With each film, Burton’s sensibility and style seemed to become more watered down, reduced to make-up effects left without the support of the surrounding physical set design. Color and shadow waned to suggestions, verging on parody.
Is this the Tim Burton who directed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice?
No, it is not.
Through all of this, you could find evidence Tim Burton was artistically alive. Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie, and Big Eyes were recognizable as Burton productions. Even Dumbo shows a pulse—if a slow pulse—as a poison pen letter. “The thing about Dumbo is that’s why I think my days with Disney are done, I realized that I was Dumbo, that I was working in this horrible big circus and I needed to escape,” Burton said in an interview with Deadline. “That movie is quite autobiographical at a certain level.”
The Burton who directed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is recognizably the Burton who directed the original film. We once again have a cast made up of some of the best working character actors, each given something to actually do. We once again have carefully presented shots, dominated by shadow, contrast, and color, often framed by the environment. We once again have a strong focus on puppets, props, and people on physical sets; the CGI is largely limited to a handful of facial make-up effects, which are visually out of place but gone in a blink.
But more than that, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a return to his goth optimism: he doubts organizations, but finds individuals have a surprising capacity for goodness (don’t worry, Beetlejuice himself remains irredeemable). Following corporate film after corporate film which were strenuously planned to have nothing to say, presenting only shades of artificial sanguinity and pop cynicism in lieu of a human opinion, it is refreshing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has a moral point of view representing what Burton actually thinks.
It’s like watching Tim Burton fall in love with filmmaking again. For the first time in years, I can say a Burton production is an attractive, well-directed, well-edited, and well-shot film.
Haris Zambarloukos is quickly becoming one of my favorite working cinematographers. After becoming one of Kenneth Branagh’s key collaborators, he has matured into a real, recognizable style: dominant shadows and darkness that never sacrifice vision and readability, sharp colors, and framing that makes use of diegetic props. A Haunting in Venice proved what he can do with a director who trusts him, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is another showing of his consistent, steady hand. He excels at the macabre, taking clear notes from early thriller and horror cinematographers Arthur Edeson, Karl Freund, and John J. Mescall, as dominating shadows consume individual elements in a scene but never interfere with readability.
The film’s special effects are almost exclusively practical. Make-up and hair effects were designed by Christine Blundell, with creature effects by Neil Scanlan. While the effects were handled by an essentially new team—the key special effects crew has not previously worked with Burton—it not only looks as good as the original film, it feels authentic to its handcrafted style. He told the team that if something can be done in-camera, it will be.
“When a director says that sort of thing to you, you’re just like, ‘Wow, this is great. I can literally go back to when I didn’t have to rely on CGI mopping out wig laces and things like that,’” Blundell said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “This was just stripped back to the bone, and it was just like, ‘OK, what we’re seeing here is what’s going to end up in the film.’”
The practical effects are simply stunning, often surprising, and routinely used to inform you about a character or make a joke. CGI is used as a disposable band-aid in many productions, a fill-in solution that shifts the weight of everything from compositing and (essentially) editing to framing and lighting onto one of the only non-unionized positions left in Hollywood. Most Disney productions, particularly any “prestige” series, are filmed in the green void of The Volume soundstage. It’s a grinding throwaway, instead of magic that takes time to create. In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, you feel the magic in every special effect shot.
Narrative & The Characters
The death of Charles Deetz sends his wife Deila, daughter Lydia, and granddaughter Astrid back to the house from the first film for his funeral and wake. Deila processes her grief with an increasingly wild series of art projects. Lydia’s current partner, and producer for her television series about ghost homes, is pressuring her into marriage. Lydia is also dealing with her fractured relationship with Astrid. This relationship, in a largely separate story thread, shattered with the death of Astrid’s dad, whose ghost Lydia cannot see. Astrid falls for a boy in town, and will do anything to help him. Meanwhile, in the spirit world, Beetlejuice’s ex-wife is back and out to kill him for spoiling her plans for immortally. In order to stop her legal claim to his soul, he’s stepping on the gas in his plans to escape back to the living world and marry Lydia. Wolf Jackson, a dead detective and (in life) B-Movie actor, investigates Beetlejuice’s ex-wife’s murder spree and Beetlejuice himself.
Each sentence is a separate plotline. Over the course of an hour and a half, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice squeezes in nine separate threads. Each one is essential to the overall plot, and the film collapses without it.
Some of the plotlines are resolved wholly satisfactorily. Others only receive exactly as much resolution as required. Getting exactly as much as you need isn’t necessarily bad—Beetlejuice’s ex-wife’s plotline receives everything it needs, including a wickedly stylish flashback shot like a black and white horror film—but it’s hard not to wish for a little more than the strictly necessary. Monica Bellucci and Michael Keaton have great chemistry, but they only appear together for scant minutes. However, this is also one of Burton’s few films to avoid final act floundering or distractions. How much this affects you will be down to personal taste.
Winona Ryder reprises her role as Lydia Deetz, and I do mean reprises. Ryder does not often get the credit she deserves as an actress. In this role, she recreates the performance she gave in 1988, resurfacing mannerisms and poise, and then advancing and evolving that performance to who Lydia is now. It’s incredible, often subtle work.
If Ryder’s performance is incredible for evolving her previous work, Keaton’s Beetlejuice performance is startling for feeling as though he never left the original Beetlejuice set. He is Beetlejuice. There is no trace of the previous thirty years in the continuity of his performance, no sign this is the first time returning to the role.
Catherine O’Hara receives a significant amount to do in a central role, as the heart of the film, and given many of the most memorable scenes. Jenna Ortega feels like a natural part of the family, with a performance as sharp and memorable as the original’s Lydia. The close friendship that Ryder and Ortega struck up gives the characters a genuine bond that bleeds through, giving a sad edge to their separation and making their scenes after their reunion immediately work.
Jeffrey Jones was arrested in 2002 for possession of child sexual abuse material, and for grooming a 14-year-old boy. Appropriately, Jones does not appear in the film, nor is his legal likeness used. However, his character, Lydia’s father Charles, has a prominent role. Rather than being directly recast, his appearances become an ever-mounting joke of how to obscure his appearance: a puppet sequence, a body missing its upper third, a tombstone whose picture etching missed most of his features, and so on. The fact that the film will not use Jones or his legal likeness is a beautiful, outrageous joke—and the ethical choice. But Charles himself, endearingly, is no more of a joke than the original film presented him as: instead, the film treats his loss as something meaningful, and the characters’ grief as genuine. It takes what could have been something cruel that reduces the surrounding characters, and instead makes it distinctly genuine and the real soul of the film.
More Beetlejuice, Not Another Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is not “another” Beetlejuice, tiredly putting on the same show with new set dressing. It’s “more” Beetlejuice, a new film, with a new story and many new characters, that goes in a series of new directions with new narrative elements. Freed from the shackles of being a reboot or legacy sequel, the film is allowed to take most elements in radically new directions: more exploration of the afterlife, more Beetlejuice and his checkered past, more of the Deetzes and the ways the original film changed them. We aren’t trapped.
Alien: Romulus features at least one fanservice reference every six minutes. The movie lovingly presents reused shots, repeated dialogue, and recognizable props framed in such a way that you are meant to ooh and ahh.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is not interested in such games. Apart from intrinsic aspects of the characters and world—for example, the afterlife waiting room—references to the first film are rare, and mainly relegated to the background. “Day-o” appears as a gag. Delia’s sculpture adorns a school’s front steps, without comment. The Maitlands have a quite literally “blink and you miss it” appearance during a flyover.
That’s it. That’s all the “fanservice.” One reference every half hour (and two of the three are easily overlooked). Even familiar denizens of the afterlife, with one exception, don’t appear again. The afterlife changes, and people move on. Everyone except Beetlejuice, perpetually caught in the trap he’s made of his unlife.
Final Score
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a reminder of what Hollywood productions should be. Gorgeously shot, filled with beautiful practical effects, and featuring not only an excellent cast but an excellent cast largely given real characters and something to do. Ryder, Keaton, Ortega, and O’Hara are all outstanding.
Burton’s style and perspective are reignited; he presents a film in step with, and as good as, his work in the 1980s and 1990s. Haris Zambarloukos proves he is fast becoming one of the best working cinematographers, presenting a film cast in darkness without ever losing its color or clarity. Christine Blundell’s make-up effects are impeccable; Neil Scanlan’s effects are the best in his career as lead.
It’s a shame Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was released in early September. It’s the perfect Halloween treat, with just enough ghoulish trick. If you haven’t seen it yet, let the film usher you into autumn.
Featured Image: Warner Bros.
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