*Beware. This article contains spoilers for the new Beetlejuice movie.*
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has taken the box office by storm. The Tim Burton directed film made 110 million dollars over its opening weekend. The long awaited sequel to the 1988 classic movie brings back some cast members but also introduces a new set of characters.
There would be no Beetlejuice movie without Micheal Keaten, so he reprised his role as the comedic dead man whose job is to cause chaos. Catherine O’Hara came back to play Lydia’s stepmom Delia Deetz and Winona Ryder became Lydia Deetz once again. Unfortunately, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis do not reprise their roles as Adam and Barbra Maitland. Davis says that this is due to the fact that ghosts are not supposed to age and Bladwin and Davis have aged since 1988. Charles Deetz is also not in the movie. He gets eaten by a shark after landing in the ocean after his plane crashed. Some new characters include Lydia’s daughter Astrid, played by Jenna Ortega and Lydia’s finance Rory, played by Justin Therox.
Like many sequels, the movie is filled with callbacks to the original. Beetlejuice is still content on marrying Lydia, and Delia is still Delia. We also learn how Beetlejuice died. He was poisoned by his wife, played by Monica Bellucci, who was not mentioned until this movie. His wife’s name is Delores, and she is a part of a soul-sucking cult. She poisoned Beetlejuice after their wedding, and he chopped her up with an ax. The boxes holding her body parts are opened after a janitor, played by Danny Devito, falls on them. She staples herself back together and goes on the hunt for Beetlejuice. I enjoyed her character, but I will not forgive her for killing Bob.
Many wonder why Bellucci’s character was included in the film. If you take her out of the movie, there will be almost no change to the plot. That may be true, but maybe it’s just the reader in me speaking when I say that I believe the point of her character is to throw you off track so that you believe that she is the villain instead of Jeremy, the boy that Astrid meets. This was done deliberately to connect to the unpredictability of life and death.
Astrid was a very interesting character for me. When Jenna Ortega was announced to be in the movie, many expressed annoyance because she has seemingly been in every movie for the past three years. Ortega, in my opinion, was perfectly cast for this part. Astrid has a very dark persona like her mother did in the original. Ortega is known for playing characters with dark auras. I could not imagine anyone else in this part.
I loved that they made Astrid see ghosts like her mother did. The plot twist of the boy she liked being a psychopath who murdered his parents is great. This also expands on unpredictability and the fact that you never know who you meet and that person you meet could be a murderer, but that is probably unlikely to happen.
When Jeremy said that Astrid could help him get his life back, I assumed that he was going to marry her like Beetlejuice tried to do, but I was wrong. He wanted her to exchange her life for his, which I was very confused about. They never mentioned anything about this in the original, but then again, there was no mention of hell in the first movie and that is where Jeremy gets sent.
The best part of the movie was the mother/daughter relationship between Lydia and Astrid. We see Astrid start out as a closed-off, moody teenage girl who thinks that no one understands her. She even has her mom’s name listed in her phone as “Alleged Mom.” Astrid seems to hold a grudge against her mother for not being able to see her dad. It is revealed later, however, that he made sure that they could not see him. By the end of the movie, we see their relationship become better, and Lydia even ends her talk show so she could spend more time with Astrid.
Beetlejuice was of course causing problems. He tricks Lydia into signing marriage documents because she wants him to help her go into the afterlife to help find Astrid. Later, at her wedding, he makes sure that she does not marry Rory. Beetlejuice later reveals to Lydia that Rory was never interested in her romantically, and he just used her to get famous. This seems to be a lesson about how you never know who you are dating. Delores shows up and tries to take Beetlejuice back but then Astrid opens the portal to the sandworm and it eats Delores and Rory.
At the end of the movie, Beetlejuice implodes and we can assume that he is not dead. If they make a third movie, then it will most likely have three Beetlejuices in the title, and I can assume that they want to have that for marketing reasons.
There were many other characters and plotlines that I could not cover because I do not have that much time. The movie seemed to have a lot of plotlines that got resolved way too quickly. I get that they had a time limit, but some plots could have been saved for later. Overall, it was a good movie, but it will never be as good as the first one.
