In a brief video message that played before press screenings of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, director Jason Reitman shared three key pieces of information.

1. His father, Ivan Reitman - director of the original Ghostbusters (1984) - was literally by his side every day on the set. Audiences need not fear that the surviving Ghostbusters stakeholders left the younger Reitman to fly solo.

2. The movie is a start-to-finish “Easter egg hunt.” In other words, the more intimately you know the original movie, the more references you’ll spot. Superfans need not fear their dedication will go unrecognized.

3. “No spoilers.” You, dear reader, need not worry that I’ll divulge any of the top-secret shenanigans the movie has in store.

If Reitman was looking to reassure old-school fans that his new film would have the heart of the original Ghostbusters, he was speaking to me. I wanted to go see Gremlins for my ninth birthday party, in 1984, but my parents (correctly) guessed that movie would be a little much for a group of fourth graders. Instead, we went to see Ghostbusters.

I can’t remember what I made of the scene where one of the eponymous working stiffs receives fellatio from a literal stiff, but I was absolutely enthralled by the sweeping special effects and the Ghostbusters’ swaggering attitude. I opened my own ghost-busting business (who you gonna call? not me, it turned out) and tried to get my family to call me “Ray” (Venkman seemed too cool to even aspire to emulating, while Egon seemed too nerdy, and as actor Ernie Hudson has pointed out, his character Winston was suspiciously absent from most of the era’s marketing materials).

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I’m not by any means a purist, any more than Bill Murray’s character was a purist about science. (Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the new film is its repeated salutes to STEM, given how the original Ghostbusters largely made a mockery of any institution that would have them.) I enjoyed the gender-flipped 2016 reboot more than the wan 1989 sequel with the original cast; if anything, the most recent Ghostbusters felt hamstrung by the filmmakers’ decision to hew so closely to the characters and structure of the first movie.

The charm of Afterlife lies in its willingness to pay homage to the original - extremely elaborate homage, in fact, as the director hinted - while owning its status as a new movie for a new generation. The stars of the film are kids, all but inevitably including Finn Wolfhard, the designated nostalgia whisperer of gen Z. (With his cheekbones rising and his curly mane growing, he’s becoming a one-man argument for a Who biopic in which he’d play Roger Daltrey.) He’s good, but he’s upstaged by the endearing duo of Mckenna Grace as his younger sister Phoebe and Logan Kim as her school friend Podcast, fastest shotgun mic on the Great Plains.

Yes, we’re not in New York anymore. Rather, we’re in Oklahoma, where subterranean rumblings cement the Stranger Things similarity. As much as any other factor, the change of setting from the gritty Koch-era Big Apple to the amber waves of grain gives Afterlife a very different energy, one that builds to a climax somewhat more contemplative than “this chick is toast.” Among the film’s many beats of ‘80s nostalgia - we also get some Goonies and even some Gremlins, in the movie’s most unabashedly wicked scene - is a nostalgia for the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Wolfhard has a romantic subplot involving, wait for it, a roller-skating server played by Celeste O’Connor with great aplomb, even when she has to deliver an excruciatingly misjudged throwaway gag line that should definitely have been thrown away.

The kids do have a little adult supervision, from Carrie Coon (as the mother of Grace and Wolfhard) and Paul Rudd (as the kids’ summer school science teacher, a seismologist who parks his charges in front of VHS horror flicks in an unconvincing attempt to make him seem rakish). All the actors have fun with the material; writers Reitman (the younger) and Gil Kenan hew to the classic Hollywood family-film premise that only the kids really understand what’s going on.

Yes, Afterlife is a family film; not something, as referenced above, that could truly have been said of the original, though I was far from the only minor who was captivated by it. (There was even a cartoon series from 1986 to 1991, titled The Real Ghostbusters after a copyright dispute with the producers of a ‘70s series called The Ghost Busters.) It remains to be seen whether today’s tweens are as motivated to experience Afterlife as we gen-Xers; you can watch a lot of TikToks in 124 minutes. But then, my partner, a high school teacher, reports that her students are weirdly knowledgeable about Alien, so maybe the nostalgia factor will hook them too.

Oh, the plot? I’ll obey the anti-spoiler injunction, but in broad strokes it turns on the Coon clan, who relocate to rural OK when an absentee grandfather dies, leaving a collection of lovingly recreated relics that will be very familiar to anyone who’s seen the first film. (Watch it again before seeing Afterlife, if you have time.) It’s no spoiler to divulge that ghosts eventually appear and require busting; as Chekhov said, a P.K.E. Meter in the first act always goes off in the third.

Although Afterlife strikes some notes of wry comedy, don’t expect the kind of laconic wisecracks that filled the first film. Instead, settle in for warm nostalgia, quips that pop like bubbles of melted marshmallow, some thunderous special effects, and finally a welcome splash of acid that’s diluted, but not by much.

Director Jason Reitman will appear for a livestreamed Q&A before a special Nov. 19 screening of Ghostbusters: Afterlife at AMC Rosedale 14.