Time for The Ants to Revolt?

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The best kind of bright early summer's day spoiled by the worst kind of dark imaginings: Is it possible that in this season, otherwise so full of innocent promise, Hollywood executives banish all thought of us as audience -- discerning, judicious, culturally literate? Does the solstice induce in them some Kafkaesque mental process by which we are converted, for purposes of contemptuous calculation, into some lower life-form? Do moviegoers suddenly seem to them to be, say, a vast colony of ants mindlessly munching through forests of Roman numerals, unconcerned about the taste, good or bad, of anything placed in our path? (Yum -- Indiana Jones III; slurp -- Star Trek V: The Final Frontier; burp -- Ghostbusters II.)

This grim fantasy is engendered by exposure, in rapid succession, to the films underlying those last two presold titles and by the prospect of The Karate Kid III, Lethal Weapon II, Nightmare on Elm Street V and, heaven forfend, Friday the 13th VIII. Not to mention James Bond umpty-ump. The basic criticism of sequels is as familiar as it is correct: they represent the triumph of commercial caution over creative daring.

Take Ghostbusters II, for example. Once again the psychomagnotheric slime is flowing in Manhattan. Once again spooks are aloft among the other pollutants in its atmosphere. Once again paranormal phenomena (this time in the service of Vigo, a sometime Carpathian tyrant, whose spirit inhabits an antique portrait) have singled out Dana (Sigourney Weaver) for special attention. Once again the old team of exorcists -- wisecracking Venkman (Bill Murray), absentminded Egon (Harold Ramis), earnest Ray (Dan Aykroyd) and stouthearted Winston (Ernie Hudson) -- is ready to deploy its pseudo science in the service of exorcism.

But that pileup of "onceagains" finally undoes this sequel. For if writers Ramis and Aykroyd have slightly altered the circumstances of their central figures, they have not bothered to develop their characters any further. Dana, for example, has a baby and a tangle-tongued boss -- marvelously played by Peter MacNicol -- who is madly in love with her. The ghostbusters themselves are suffering, to good comic effect, from celebrity burnout and municipal ire over their failure to clean up the mess that they made the last time they saved the city.

But the movie and everyone in it remain, under Ivan Reitman's determinedly casual direction, very loosely organized. They amble agreeably, but not necessarily hilariously, from one special-effects sequence to the next. These are not better, worse or even different from the original's trick work, and their lack of punctuating surprise is the film's largest problem, especially at the shamelessly repetitive climax.

Still, it has moments of wayward life, especially in contrast to the smug torpor of Star Trek V, which William Shatner directed from a script by David Loughery. That "final frontier" mentioned in its title is nothing more than your standard black hole, through which the starship Enterprise is commanded to navigate by a not very menacing religious fanatic named Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill). He imagines he will find God lurking back of this particular beyond. What he finds instead is, of course, a false deity manifested in the form of an unpersuasive special effect.

This story is treated pretty much as an obligation, a formal requisite of big-budget sci-fi. What really interests the creators of this movie is the middle-aging process as it affects Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and "Bones" McCoy (respectively, need we say, Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley). Good of them, on the one hand, to acknowledge that the boys aren't getting any younger. Bad of them, on the other, not to acknowledge the possibility that after being cooped up on a spaceship for almost a quarter-century, they might be a trifle tired of one another's company. A little scratchy, say, over Spock's unending reasonableness, Kirk's sententious habit of summing up the moral of every adventure. But no, the atmosphere on this voyage is a lot like a late night at an Elks' smoker, all bleary sentimentality and nostalgia for the past. Maybe we will never find God, Kirk suggests at the end, but, by golly, male bonding is a swell substitute.

This is a thought only a Trekkie could love. But it does get one to wondering what these boring guys see in one another. And, even more subversively, what did we ever see in them? It is, one suspects, a notion that may recur as we glumly chomp our way across the bleak summer-movie landscape. Anybody up for a consumer revolt? Come on, folks. What are we, men or . . . ants?