I won't comment on Cinematography as I saw it at a Drive In theater, which tends to muddy things up.

In general remakes and adaptions fall on a spectrum of faithfulness, from the 'lets slap a name on an unrelated property', such as Jem and the Holograms*, to the absurdly OCD shot-for-shot works of Zack Snyder.  Oddly, as a film, their place on the faithfulness spectrum is not a reliable judge of quality. Sure, the 'slap a popular name on an unrelated property' is usually done to salvage a piece of shit, but on the other hand who really cared about the remake of Psycho?

So where does that leave Ghost in the Shell?

Well, if you've seen the Trailers, as I'm sure you have, you're well aware that GiTS was pimped heavily on recreating the iconic visuals from the Anime.

Having seen the film I can tell you that those trailer bait scenes are pretty much the ONLY thing that is faithful to the Anime, which makes this a film written almost entirely around including certain scenes at certain beats, which is almost certainly a recipe for failure. In that regards, this film is actually a marvelous success, the story flowing naturally through the paces to reach those beats and hit those visual cues.  

Now we aren't really adapting GiTS. The original Anime was formatted as a proper film in terms of length and presentation, it was in fact an Adaption of the original Manga.  In order for this film to be an adaption in this age of CGI visual wizardry they'd have to go back to the well of the Manga... and if you've read any Shirow works you'd know that there is plenty of stuff to draw from that didn't make it into the original anime... for that matter there is always plenty of stuff that doesn't make it into the damn panels of the Manga!  This film doesn't do that, though it does take its 'adaption' idea seriously... I can only presume that, at least for part of it, they assume audiences wouldn't 'get it' if they kept the original ideas.  Aside from the monumental arrogance of assuming something as popular as GiTS is impenetrable to fans, in at least one sense they were right. As a film the original GiTS is a failure. Its a glorious overreaching failure, the sort of failure that keeps bringing people back to it because it was so very daring that we admire the beauty of it and imagine "What If" when we see it.  

So in a sense I can see how the studios might not want to recreate that failure, so they went with something much less ambitious. In a way they failed too, but if the original failed because its vision was too great, too grand that it fell broken to earth like Icarus, this is the far less interesting failure of simply failing to launch.  It wants to remind us of those glorious moments of flight before the fall, and the horror of that moment when Icarus Fell... but it doesn't actually attempt to fly.

But enough abstract musings, lets dissect the film a bit more concretely, eh? I'll put the changes from the original and the general plot points after a spoiler alert. I'm going to do this in stages, dialing in as I go.

Visuals:  It goes without saying that they have captured the world of GiTS visually, perhaps even improved on it in some ways.  The 'Nude Suit' is shockingly unsexy, but that's because it is 'real', so more like a whitish-fleshy colored wetsuit, rather than just painting ScarJo's naked body white.  Wisely they don't worry much about capturing the exact details of the various characters perfectly, other than the Major.

Story:  The original GiTS was damn near impenetrable until the end, focusing on plot points and politics that buzzed by, until ending with AI wants to Fuck, which may have been a bit odd, but at least was a rather clear motivation.  The remake has a bog standard Hollywood style plot in too many ways. Its fairly easy to follow once it gets rolling, and you can clearly see who the badguy is supposed to be. It does retain the conceit that the murderous hacker they've been tracking is... misunderstood?... but beyond that, nada.  To be honest, the clarity of the story is a welcome change... though the sheer heaping handfuls of idiot screenwriter cliches I could have done without, but more on those later.

Philosophy/Themes: Normally I wouldn't bother dealing with this as a separate 'tag', but given that we are talking about GiTS, I think it is not only appropriate, but necessary. Whatever other failings the Anime/Manga may have had, Shirow is one of the few modern authors that really seems to have understood the idea that Science Fiction isn't just about the technology, but what the technology says about the people, and the Anime took that and cranked it up to eleven.  GiTS doesn't package it all with neat and tidy answers, it merely presents the questions.... or perhaps just the one question: What is Human?  To be fair to the remake, it doesn't forget the question... but it does attempt to package it up for us with neat and tidy... if not answers, then arguments.   This could be an artifact of their creation of a morally unambiguous plot, with a clear bad guy clearly doing bad things.  Contrast this with the muddled political fighting of the original, with the only clear bad guy being the Hacker, who essentially wins at the end, thanks to Our Heroes.   By dumbing down the plot like that, the film can't help but to dumb down the themes along with it.

Characters:

Major: Most of this is going to go behind Spoilers, but lets talk briefly about ScarJo's performance.  Whatever else you want to say about her, she is a professional, dedicated actress who actually puts effort into her roles.  She looks the part, and so long as you accept the changes to the character and story, she acts the part.  When she's sitting around getting maintenance done, she adopts the posture of a literal doll, emphasizing her inhumanity, which is a very nice touch.  During the early part of the film I was bothered by her general posture, which made me alternately wonder if she'd recently suffered a lower back injury or was shooting with a literal stick up her ass... a sort of weird 'leaning forward at the waist' posture that really bugged me.  I think she was trying to capture that sort of cyborg doll stiffness, in which case I commend her for trying, but I think it was misguided a bit... not the attempt, but the final product.

Aramaki: I pushed him up the list because he is played by one of my top-three Japanese actors, Beat Takashi. Now, honestly, as an actor he's not really 'that good'... I like him better as a director, but he's got an unmistakable presence on film, a charisma, and his Aramaki is true to the character's essence in many ways. While he doesn't get much screen time, and not really any of the politics to play around in, he's still a delight.

Batou: I don't know who played Batou, I'll probably look it up later, but whoever this guy is (and there was a haunting familiarity to him...) I think he, like Takashi, nails the essence of the character if not being 100% faithful to his Anime/Manga character.  His interactions with the Major especially felt true to the character.   In these supporting characters I think we see where remakes do tend to go right, with improving but not replacing familiar characters.

Togusa: To be honest the original Togusa was always a missed opportunity. He was the guy who had the original wetware so he couldn't be hacked, and wouldn't fall into machinelike thinking, and all he managed to do was tag a car with a tracer bullet. In the new film now he's 'Hey, remember Togusa? Yeah, he's in the film!', so... more doubling down on the missed opportunity. Hell, they even gave his gun to Aramaki. You remember his gun, right? It had about as much character as he did. Now Beat Takashi has it, and his Aramaki has so much character you forget the old fashioned revolver was originally Togusa's signature piece.

The Rest of Section 9:  Here we start seeing something that bugged me throughout the film, and that was 'changes that bring 'message'. They pretty much swapped out everyone else and added new characters that don't actually bring anything to the table but 'diverse city'.  Ishikawa, their tech support guy, is gone completely... you know, the guy then name checked in almost every scene, but only showed up on film twice or so, and then either just stood around commenting, or sat in his room full of monitors? Gone.  But we've got a badass chick now who is badass... and she manages to... hand Batou his guns through a window of a yakuza bar. So... yay? Now, for all I know she IS in the original... somewhere, standing in a background shot or something. Still, pointless change is pointless.

The Hacker: This has to go all spoilery, so check back later.

Everyone else: There is no everyone else... everyone else is new, and they are all pretty much good actors, often doing yoeman's work in minor parts.


Alright, alright: SPOILERS FOLLOW







Ok, so lets lay out the bare bones of the plot here.  Scarjo is playing Major Mira Kissante (Or something like that), who was blown up on a refugee boat in the harbor by terrorists (commentary on modern american immigration debates? Really? Fuck off film, this movie hasn't gone on long enough to have earned any credit with me at this point), and is made into the very firstest ever military cyborg... meaning specifically a human Ghost (brain. Literally: her brain is transplanted) in a mechanical Shell.  

Sigh. Okay, sure.  Shirow had the balls to suggest human minds/souls as data, and later you'll want to play with that idea, but you started by literally transplanting her physical brain. In a film where mind-hacking is a major part of the plot/setting.  So right now you are Oh for Two with me, fuckers.

We meet Dr Oulet, played by a famous french actress who I recognize but since I fail at names won't name check here, who introduces Mira to her new body and the concept of breathing. Its a good scene actually, but really? We're doing an Origin Film? Seriously?  We are all heartily sick of Origin Films, and there is literally no reason to make this film a fucking origin film, but here you are doing it anyway? What? Are modern filmgoers really so fuckign stupid that they can't understand that "the Major" was not 'born a cyborg'?

Anyway: Her boss, a Mr Cutter, is the owner of Hanka Corp, which is contracted to the government and this is their great experiment. We clearly see Mr Cutter is a bad guy by his callous disregard for the humanity of 'Mira', and Dr Oulet is our sympathetic insider because she argues weakly with him about it. He dismisses "Mira" as Just A Weapon, and wants her Operational.


Okay: Two points here: First, renaming the character will eventually make sense, and kudos for making a bold choice, but seriously, at this point the film is oh and three for me, and probably every other fanboi is screaming to the heavens about the rename. What a pointless fucking thing to do, right?  Sure, they EVENTUALLY make good on that, but for the first act of the film and then some its a god damn howler monkey on your back trying to rape you.  Second: Mr Cutter's perspective is super important, as he is, in fact, the Big Bad Guy, yet we can never make sense of it because he is so cartoonishly underdeveloped. There is plenty of talk about "Mira" being the first in a new breed of humanity, rather than slap dash augments they can just get a perfect cyborg body that is virtually indestructible, and how this is a sort of future evolution, but Mr Cutter talks about Weapons, and Future of My Company and shit like that, and seems to have no motivation for the project that he is driving with whips and drums, other than hopefully selling the government... one cyborg. Sigh.


Back to Plot:

So we cut to one year later and we get the iconographic image of Major... Mira... (Sigh) on top of a roof talking in her mind. Eventually she will jump off and do some stuff with thermoptic camoflage, which is never called by name by the way, but the details of what is going on in the hotel are radically different. Instead of a diplomatic meeting about asylum for the hacker Diata (who was crucial to the plot of the Anime, but only ever seen in this scene), while government agents try to raid the place, now we have Dr Osborn from Hanka (played by one of my favorite actors whose name I can never remember... the bad guy from the Crow, the pirate captain from Alien Ressurection... that guy), talking with the leader of some African Nation about what Hanka can do for his country, while hints of a deeper theme die silently around them, as the Diplomat points out that everyone getting Hanka Upgraded might not be a great idea just yet... different perspectives and all.

THis is the scene with the creepy Geisha Robot from the trailers, and shit goes south as robot-men (really its not clear, they are probably Yakuza who have been mind hacked, and thus act like robots) with briefcase guns (callback to the Anime...) start shooting their way in as the Geisha Robot goes all mind-rapey on Dr Osborn, while The Major does her famous leap and a sort of slow-mo matrix-esque gunfight to save most of the people in the room, except, apparently Dr Osborn (which... is not clear in the initial scene, but they cut to an after action review).  The Major gets a bit of a dressing down for being a rogue cop, a maverick and all that jazz... only its by Aramaki/Beat Takashi, so its actually subdued and sort of awesome, and entirely in Japanese as Aramaki only ever speaks in Japanese.

Actually: the scene where we meet the entire section 9 crew is pretty well done. Its also completely wasted since we only care about three of them, but it is well done and sets the stage well for the setting, and it smoothly integrates with what they are actually doing, unlike a lot of scenes in films where everyone formally greets everyone by name as if meeting them for the first time. The black guy (who may well be Ishikawa, since I didn't catch his name, and we never see him again) just got an implanted liver so he can drink more, leaving Togusa the only completely biological member of the team, but its handled as completely natural banter rather than exposition.. and seeing that Togusa gets screen time but not one ounce of plot time I guess its only appropriate that they don't waste time expositing why he's there, eh?

I don't think the black guy is Ishikawa, by the way. I think that's the badass chick, Fyedach (), who later gets a couple of shouted lines of hacker-babble, but that is later.

Anyway: We cut to Batou and Major (and seriously: Everyone treats her title as her name in this film. It even crops up more explicitly at the end) driving to Hanka (Robotics?), both so the Major can get a little cosmetic repair to her wrist done and they can question Dahlgren? Danglars?  The films functional equivalent to the ME, I suppose, in our 'Cop Drama', who is a Hanka Doctor, about the forensics on the Geisha.

The car drive scene, like most of the scenes with Batou and Major, is good. Lots of banter, and a great way to establish their characters and relationship.  I'll point out that at this point we've seen Major take some sort of 'cyber drug' through her jacks in the back of her neck, and we've seen a couple of 'glitchy hallucinations'... like a pixellated cat and something that, to me anyway, looks a bit like an old shrine.

Dr Oulet not only fixed Major's arm, but also erases her glitches for her... apparently these sorts of hallucinations are common, and 'Mira' doesn't have any memories of her life prior to drowning in the harbor.

Dun Dun DUNNNNN!!!!

Sigh.

Gosh. I wonder. Did Hanka erase her memories to create a more perfect 'weapon'? Did they... gasp!!!!... LIE TO HER about her past? Is the strange Cyber-drug she takes actually.... gasp!!!... Surpressing her real memories??!!!!!  Does she have some sort of mysterious ties to the Hacker (Kuze) that Section 9 is tracking?

Seriously, they couldn't broadcast these plot points louder if they wrote them on the god damn screen with ninety point font.

That said, the relationship between Dr Oulet and Mira (sigh), is actually very nice and well handled.  Dr Oulet seems to have a maternal feeling to Mira that plays nice.

On the other hand, there is some weird shit where before the Doctor can erase the glitches the Major formally grants her Consent.  If this was done better I might not comment, but by fucking god do they hammer home this formal consent giving, and even have a much later scene where, gasp!, the evil Mr Cutter... via Dr Oulet... reveals that they never needed Consent.

Social Commentary We Much?

That is the SECOND round of pop culture politics hammered forcefully into the film with all the grace of a drunk elephant and I'm just about ready to leave this fucker, but I want to stick around for John Wick 2, so I ride it out.

Its not so much that they included them, its that they do almost nothing at all with them, leaving them there like big ugly eye-sores all over the plot.  If this film was ABOUT refugee immigration and nativists (Say: Gang of New York, maybe), that would be something. If this film was ABOUT Consent... er... devoid of sexuality?... that might be something, but they just slap these nods to the 'issues of the day' and then just.... leave them there, all by their lonesome, stinking the joint up.  

Anyway: Now they go to Daimlier, who is the sort of Hard Smoking, Hard Drinking don't give a fuck about my work but I'm good at it sort of character. She bitches a bit about Major shooting up the Geisha unnecessarily (which, to be fair, she sort of did), and how it will take days to get the data out...which... what?

No, seriously: What?

Its a robot. There are some form of memory storage devices inside of it which are either intact, and thus retrievable more or less instantly, or are not, in which case you've got a project of reconstruction that will range from impossible to more or less 'I got scraps for you'... but the state of the body itself is irrelevant.  Seriously its Current Year, I think its safe to say we all have a decent grasp of computer hardware at this point. My 90 year old grandfather uses computers to facebook for god's sake.  You can't quite technobabble this away. It'd be like trying to explain your awesome idea for a square wheel... um, no. We know how wheels work now, seriously.

Anyway: So "Mira" decides in her Maverick Cop sort of way to do a Deep Dive into the Geisha, despite the risk. What risk? Well, it seems she can't remain encrypted during a Deep Dive (Wut?) and Kuze, the Hacker, may have left traps all up in that bitch.  

You know? Its hollywood. Lets just assume they hire five year olds to check their emails for them or something and they are too elite and rarified to ever actually SEE a computer in real life? M'kay?

Anyway: We get a Deep Dive that would make Saint Gibson himself proud in that its all about visual metaphors with no relation to computers or code whatsoever (And Hey: Gibson had an excuse, writing way back in the early eighties on a fucking typewriter), that looks good on film, and Major (not "The" Major... seriously. I know her having a rank is an oddity of the original, but it IS a rank, a title, and thus when used alone its proper to include 'The' before it.  Fuck it... whatever, film.) sees the shadowy figure of Kuze and some wires and shit just before getting caught up in a scene reminiscent of certain films depitctions of Hell (groping black figures as water swallowing up the main character)...

Oops. It seems she's fallen into a trap without her Encryption. Dahlgren can't do anything to save her, and Batou eventually pulls the plug physically like he was supposed to do, only the timing of the scene is shoddy... like they were trying to milk it for extra tension but overdid it.  Its kinda a standout in this regard... not that the film is wonderfully paced... now that I think about it its actually pretty workmanlike in that regards, but this one is just... bad.

Now, I'm gonna admit that my memory of the order of the middle of the film is a bit weak. Normally I'd just brazen through it but I think its indicative of a weakness of the film here.  While the scenes do flow from one to another in a sense, they don't have to. Not really. They raid a place where Kuze is, and its dark and shadowy and there is fighting with random mooks litering the joint, and later they do the same thing. They have talks with Aramaki, Aramaki talks to Mr Cutter and mentions the Prime Minister...

Its coherent, but nothing really stands out as needing to be in any particular order.  Don't get me wrong... you can't simply swap entire scenes out, as I'll reveal, but chunks of them certainly, and that is weak sauce, my friends... weak fucking sauce.

So. I think we get a bit where Major is castigated for her risky deep dive that was mavericky and unathorized, but that could come later.... and she gets it from both Aramaki and Oulet in separate scenes (bad editing I think... Seriously: were they padding the run time or did the Editor not realize that he's supposed to pick the stronger or more thematically appropriate of these redundant scenes?)

Then they raid the Yakuza Bar that Major discovered on her deep dive.  She goes in undercover trying to find the workshop, Batou goes in undercover to back her up (seperately), and Badass Chick slips Batou his guns through the bathroom window.  Meanwhile Major is trapped in a Stripper Pole room that blocks comms while being interrogated by giggling Yakuza using a shock stick.  The tension rises slightly before Batou has a gunfight and Major kicks ass on the stripper pole, which I think was shown in part in the trailers.  It wasn't very obvious until the end of the scene that she was somehow stuck to the pole (Magnetically?).

Anyway, they go deeper into the bar, finding the hidden workshop, shooting more mooks along the way and somehow (this happens a lot actually) Major gets ahead of everyone and finds Kuze, or rather a hologram/glitch image of him that dissolves. Batou comes in and suddenly Its A Trap! and we get another bad edit or something. This one isn't so much a timing issue as just... a bad edit.

So Major Mira sees the servers lighting up to go Boom and turns and shoves Batou (who is both behind her and something like twice her size), but its sort of a weak ass shove that doesn't do anything. There are some cuts back and forth, then to behind them as the room goes boom with both of them more or less standign in the same spot just before the boom, Batou goes down, holding his face and screaming in a moving bit of 'oh shit, he's hurt!'... but also cued any fans to go "Oh, yeah: Origin Story" because he hasn't had his distinctively weird goggle eyes in this film.

So we cut to The Major (see? That's how its done, film.) getting rebuilt, since her body was... I guess... wrecked by the explosion, while Dr Oulet grills her on her deep dive. Then she goes and sees Batou in the next room, as apparently installing new eyes takes longer than rebuilding an entire cyborg. They've got another nice scene between their characters and he reveals he creepy-ass 'what the fuck, shirow' eyes.  

Cutter and Amamaki have a scene, by hologram, where Cutter threatens Section 9 if they don't do a better job reigning in their maverick cop cyborg, and Aramaki probably dishes some of the best 'fuck you sir' ever delivered on film.  Through subtitles.

Now Kuze murders Daimlier, who is smoking and drinking and not giving a fuck while going over some files ominiously marked Project 2751.  He asks some not at all mysterious questions about 'what he is missing' before ripping off her cyborg face, cuing the off-screen screaming death portion of the film.

Now we find out that Kuze is pretty much killing all the doctors at Hanka, and Dr Oulet is next, only: Shes out on the road so they can't secure her. Cue Hacked Garbage Man bits from the Anime.

No, seriously, only... they did so much wrong here.  They've got the chatty guy talking about his kid's violin lesson and waving a picture, and the don't give a fuck partner... then they are both robot automaton assassins for Kuze, driving their truck into Oulet's car, and getting out with guns to kill her.  Section 9 shows up for one of the only daylight action pieces (because it was daylight in the Anime, right? I'm guessing that the director really wasn't comfortable with his action direction which is why so much of it happens in darkly lit cramped buildings...).

Anyway: There is a whole bunch of shooting that doesn't seem to mean anything as no one seems to get hit at all from either side until Batou sneaks around (somewhere) to shoot the doesn't give a fuck garbage man, which finally drops someone, while the chatty cathy garbage man runs away into the pool of water with his thermoptic camouflage so we can get the trailerbait scene of the Major kicking his ass.

Now, if you recall in the Anime, this guy was actually a third man, and possibly the Hacker Himself (though I don't think anyone actually believed it).  Kusanagi kicking his ass, possibly killing him is fine, since they've got chatty cathy garbage man back at the truck.

Now? Its the garbage man, and this scene and the scene that follows is all muddled by removing the third man from the equation. Its a little change, but in this case I think it throws the tenor of the scenes all out of whack.

Anyway: Cut to interrogation of the chatty cathy garbage man, which is where the film's lack of devotion to its theme starts to show through the fabric a little. Mind you, the set up is fantastic, he's in this glass cage and the Major is in there with him, but like... digitally or holographically or something and he shuffles about trying to avoid confronting the fact that he isn't himself anymore.  The film makes a second adaptive choice that really works here too, as they have our Chatty Cathy work as the conduit for the Hacker, rather than introducing the half wrecked blonde cyborg.  It then shits itself twice over, first by having Kuze just say some cryptic shit rather than explaining himself properly, and then having the chatty cathy commit suicide at the end.  Meanwhile our Badass Chick gets to shout some hacker commands as they trace the signal, Mal.

But lets talk about the film shitting itself for a moment.

At this point in the Anime, our first true confrontation between the Hacker and Section 9, the Hacker actually explains himself, getting the viewer caught up in the plot for the first time. This leads to more weird political infighting, of course, as the body is taken from Section 9 by Section 6, leading to chase scenes and culminating in our climactic fight with the Spider Tank, and the Major getting laid.

Here, despite the superior set up and without the pressing need to actually tell us what the fuck is going on (Though, yes, it DOES NEED to tell us this stuff, its just not as pressing... mostly because anyone who has ever watched a single film already has figured out most of it), they just sort of waste the chance. Now, Kudos, I guess, for not wasting time with brute force exposition, but this cryptic bullshit is getting tiresome.

The second, and subtler 'shit your pants' moment comes from having the Chatty Cathy kill himself at the end. It seems like the Hacker does it himself, but I suppose you could read it as the man confronting the fact that his whole life is a lie and just offing himself rather than live with it... either way its a fillip on the scene that is not only unnecessary but tonally off.  In the Anime the garbage man's growing realization of his 'reality' is a moment of existential horror... that he is going to have to live with not only the fact that everything he knows about himself is a lie, but also the consequences of his actions while he was hacked.  There is a great deal of ambiguity left regarding his fate that makes the entire scene much stronger.  Clearly: He's dead, no ambiguity.  Now it is about here in the film that I realized that this film did have a sort of thesis statement for itself... again, unlike the Original posing its difficult questions for us to resolve on our own, here we are told repeatedly that  "Memory is not who we are, what we do is who we are."... which is gibberish if I have to be blunt. It sounds like a bad riff on Batman.   Anyway: Batou manages to ass pull a bit of hope for this film by commenting (again; taken from the original) that at least the guy got to remember having that great life, which is to say "embracing the illusion".    

Anyway, thanks to Badass Chick's Hacker Shouting they've tracked Kuze again, to another Yakuza bar....thing. Body shop or something.  This goes more like a traditional police raid, with lots of shouting and shooting and SOMEHOW Major gets separated from the group (seriously: How BIG is this place supposed to be) and finds Kuze on her own. There is a thing where he's using networked human minds (buddist monk looking dudes in a circle wired up to the ceiling) to create his own network, or something... which I guess explains how he is so awesome at being hacker-man... and so she, again... alone... (sigh) tracks the wires to another part of the building where no guys with guns are raiding the place (sigh), where she is captured by dudes wiht shock sticks and wired into the Network... or something... so Kuze can talk to her without being attacked.

So Kuze reveals himself (he's been a hooded shadowy figure until now) to be a glitchy robot-guy, talking about 'knowing' the Major by feel, about Hanka being non-specific bastards, and more specific bastardy, such as being awake and aware as they cut his brain out of his body and stuck it in this machine cyborg....

Okay.

So I'm going to leapfrog the movie reveal a little bit here.  The Major is the first successful integration of human brain into cyborg body, and this guy was the project before her (98 failures we learn, fun trivia fact of the film). Fine, so he's glitchy and crazy and talks like he's got a digital stutter. Buy why is his body all junky? I mean: its not like Hanka was experimenting in building robot bodies?? Also, what the fuck is he going on about with Evolution and uploading into his personal network? I mean: His personal Network is RIGHT THERE IN THE BUILDING BEING RAIDED. Its about to be dismantled. You know... like Servers and shit? Yeah, buddy... just lost all that.  Fuck. I was going to stop talking about Hollywood and computers, wasn't I?  Sigh.

Anyway: The Major say's she'll kill him because; Terrorist, and he... lets her go. Seriously. To be honest? I sorta like Kuze now that he's not being all cryptic and shit. The Actor does a good job given what he's got to be doing, and despite being pretty murderous (far moreso than the original) he's actually pretty relatable in some respects. He's certainly more understandable than suddenly sentient AI trying to get a hot date, if less thought provoking.  Kuze is a man on a revenge mission, a man who literally had everything taken from him, including his identity... not just his body but his memories.  Its an extra strength version of that age old question 'Who Am I?'. So, yeah: I like what they've done here. I just wish they'd supported these hard questions better, but the ideas are there.

Anyway: AT LAST Batou shows up to rescue the Major, has a pointless gunfight with Kuze, who escapes, and the Major flees, confronted at last with questions about her own identity.... catching up to the audience at last, somehow 'Going off the Grid' so she can't be tracked. This leads to Cutter telling Aramaki (I'm skipping ahead I think...) that she/the project is going to be terminated and he better not interfere.

Anyway: The Major confronts Oulet at home, and Dr Oulet more or less reveals that, yup, we lied to you about everything... but frustratingly doesn't bother revealing anything new, claiming ignorance about the details. She DOES give us that wonderful fact that Hanka cut up and disposed of 98 people before they managed to succeed with "Mira".  Think about that for a long, quiet moment. Just think about a corporation, a major government contractor, surgically mutilating and murdering almost a hundred people in an R&D project... not even one driven by any sort of ideological vision for the future of humanity but just trying to create a better combat robot (no, really).  Let that simmer for a while until we get back to it.

Anyway: Batou knows where to find The Major, because Iconic Scuba Diving Scene! Only, again, they set this one at night for some reason. The Major is very temporarily convinced that Batou is there to kill her for Section 9, which rightfully annoys and/or digusts him. He even offers her a beer, but then we never see her eating (Cyborg, yeah) so of course she doesn't accept.  They have a watered down (heh) conversation about scuba diving cyborgs that actually touches on some interesting ideas, some of which are actually new to this take.  She throws away her cyborg-drug and gets dressed and... walks down dock where Hanka security guys are waiting to take her in. Batou and the boat? No idea.  

So she is sedated and sitting in her medical bed/chair thing while Dr Oulet is given the order to terminate her as a failed experiment. Cutter seems to have decided that the goal of the project is to us human brains to bypass all that pesky AI research, but to eliminate the human mind in the brain (the Ghost)... and since 'Mira's' Ghost keeps surfacing, all those human emotions and memories, the project is a failure adn time to move on to the next subject or whatever.

Seriously.Underwritten.Badguy.

Apparently terminating her involves injecting a red liquid into her brain jacks, and Dr Oulet injects an orange liquid instead, which undoes the sedative effect, and she follows this by unstrapping (seriously: cyborg bodies that can be turned off require prisoner restraints?) Mira and pressing some sort of... thing... into Mira's hand, which I'm just going to call a business card, since it seriously only seems to have a tiny bit of information on it. It looks vaguely like those plastic 'wings' that airlines used to give to little kids to make them feel like pilots.

Anyway: 'Mira' Escapes, shooting a few security guards along the way in a lazy but well performed action hallway piece, and Cutter (naturally...sigh) kills Oulet.

Seriously: If I never, ever ever again, see a bad guy shoot a disloyal minion to death it will be way too fucking soon.

This is especially egregious in a vaguely modern/future society with, like, laws and investigations and shit.  Anyway: He naturally blames Mira and orders a death hunt for her, but again: She is off the grid.

Anyway: We finally meet our second japanese character** in a Mrs Kusanagi, whose young daughter Mokoto ran away to the Lawless Zone to live in some sort of anarchist commune (they don't call it that, but seriously: She was writing Manifestos about the evils of modern society and technology... you do the math) and supposedly killed herself one year ago.

At last, we can refer to Major Mokoto Kusanagi!!!

Or, not. While clearly this is who Mira really is... and film isn't shy about it in any way... they never actually have her call herself by her 'real name', except for one bit where she helps Kuze work through his own missing past, where she refers to herself in the past tense.

Anyway... I suppose this scene is better than could be expected, in part due to how very restrained it is. Its a quiet scene, no big reveals, and the actresses both handle their parts well... better than written if I had to guess.  ScarJo barely says much of anything and pretty much acts like an alienated doll-thing who knows the truth, but can't remember any of it, and the other actress is playing a woman who can't believe her daughter would kill herself, and suddenly has hope that this stranger is somehow her missing child, but can't actually say it because it sounds too absurd.  

So... well done. And yes, I suppose this is a good payoff for jerking us around with that whole 'rename the main character' bullshit. But if it wasn't so patently obvious and cliched I don't know how many people would have waited for this payoff... and its a bad sign when your big payoff is only made possible by how fucking lame your setup is.

Anyway: Kusanagi (at last!!!) contacts Aramaki and asks to be put back on the grid, because god damn if Cutter doesn't need to pay for his crimes!

Of course, Cutter is somehow hacked into the Section 9 comms, because OF COURSE!  Well, actually: given that he MADE Kusanagi's body, it does make sense, but they don't bother explaining that. Fine.

Anyway, Aramaki comms the rest of Section 9 as he gets into his car and is SUDDENLY ATTACKED by masked men with assault rifles!

Of course, this is Beat Takashi Aramaki, so he not only survives, he calmly kills the fuck out of them with his old fashioned (Taeba?) revolver and his bulletproof breifcase, explaining that you don't send chickens to hunt a fox.  Yeah, Buddy!

And apparently Cutter has it in for pretty much all of Section 9, since we see both Togusa and Batou getting 'snuck up on' as they handle their own assassins with panache and a bit of off-screening.

So, good on Togusa for getting his own moment of badassery? For proving he is still in the film?  Extra character is extra.

Anyway: Our next stop is the Lawless Zone, which as you must have guessed is where the Spider Tank scene must happen. They don't recreate the iconography here, falling glass and camouflage... and though I did see the Tree of Life symbology, its not a major feature of the architecture.

Anway: Kusanagi (At LAST!!!) meets with Kuze, presumably by going back On the Grid (which she asked Aramaki to do for her when they talked) let him know where to find her, and she has a flashback of the Hanka/Cops attacking the place, savagely beating people on fire as they brought them back to be turned into cyborgs.  Then she tells Kuze his original name and points out where they used to sleep and stuff, and how they were all a family (all... 99 of them? That's not a family, that's a fucking Cult, honey!)

Then the Spider Tank shows up and shoots a bunch of holes in Kuze so he looks more like the blonde cyborg from the Anime. Of course Cutter is piloting it (via remote control) because OF COURSE HE IS!!!!

The fight is a decent matchup for the anime. A bit less stylized and a lot more cramped feeling, but it ends, as you expect it to, with the Major in Thermoptic Camouflage tearing her own arm off ripping the tank open in Iconic Homage to the original, so she can lie there crippled and artistic next to the wrecked body of Kuze while he offers to take her to His Network...

Uh...

Organic brains in their shells, people. This idea would work better in the original work, where the Ghost of a person was more or less Data.  Whatever. So she refuses, because she has work to do in this world (wut?!), a sniper blows Kuze away, then another sniper blows Sniper One out of the sky. I want to say Togusa is Sniper Two, but that wasn't the name I heard in the film (was it Ishikawa? Please tell me it was Ishikawa, that would be the perfect cherry on this shitstain of character abuse!),.

So Batou walks in really late to reveal that all ScarJo needs is a hand (heh) up, because she was just lying there being all vulnerable so Kuze wouldn't feel bad about being shot to pieces earlier or something.   The Major gives Aramaki her Consent to kill Cutter, which he does.  This is odd twice, because again: The whole Consent thing is just shoehorned into this fucker like a bad rash anyway, and she gives her consent as... not as Mira of course, but also not as Motoko Kusanagi, but just as Major. Not The Major (of course, they NEVER, not one fucking time, get that simple fucking rule of grammer correct....) just Major, like that's her new name or some shit, and Aramaki pumps Cutter full of lead, because Action Movie Resolution... though at least here they establish that Aramaki had, in fact, just come from the Prime Minister's office, so presumably this is at least been cleared at the highest level, by Top Men.

And Major (fuck that irritates) visits Motoko Kusanagi's grave and tells Mrs Kusanagi, who is also there, that she won't have to visit the grave anymore... touching and slightly unnecessary.

Then we get voice-out narration as we recreate teh jump off a skyscraper Iconic Homage, as Major (fuck) tells us, one last time, that Memory is not who we are, what we do is who we are, and credits, with no end credit scene, thank god.



Now, remember that simmering bit about 98 surgically mutilated and murdered experimental subjects?

Yeah...

So its not like they quietly gathered these people from hospitals and volunteers... or in fact sunk a boat of refugees in teh harbor (an event that we are eventually told never happened... like, at all???) to get them. No, they sent an armed strike force to collect up a major gathering of teenage malcontents, complete with burning down their commune home and riot cops and savage beat downs, like all at once.

Now, maybe you believe the very worst of major corporations, but doesn't that strike you as just a little too blatantly, over the top and in your face sort of evil and don't give a fuck? I mean: If Hanka has the power to pull that sort of out in the open shenanigans, what the fuck does Cutter think he's covering up?  Who the fuck is going to punish him because ONE of his test subjects got away from him (or, two I guess?). I mean; In this context, Kuze's revenge plan not including exposing Hanka as the murderous fucks they are actually makes sense: Hanka don't care. Hanka is more blatantly don't-give-a-fuck than Umbrella Corp, for fucks sake.  I mean: Even the Nazi's knew to put their murder camps out in the boonies, away from the common man, and to call them something innocuous sounding. If Cutter ran the Nazi Party he would have called those camps: People Murdering Factories or some shit.

Frankly, its so cartoonishly over the top evil corporate shenanigans that it goes from horrifying to absurd and funny.  It leaves me wondering all along, from the earliest part of the film in fact, why they were lying to 'Mira' at all. I mean: If you want a military commando cyborg for elite urban operations, wouldn't you try to find a volunteer, maybe an injured veteran, from the existing police and military? WHy would you take a refugee* of any sort to put into a top secret intelligence/police force that operates in deepest secrecy?   DO you even logic, brah? Cause if you logic, why do I have to ask if you fucking logic?


So, in the final analysis...

What we've got is a visually stunning take on a classic beautiful failure that manages to be inferior in almost every single way.  Its not a bad film in most sense of bad films... the actors and characters all do their part, the story is servicable... in fact thats one thing the movie does better... but it fails to live up to the ideas of the original, in some ways as if it is so afraid of failing the same way that it doesn't even make the attempt, and in other ways simply by not being smart enough to 'get it'.  It not only weakens the high conceptual ideas of the original, but then it muddles them with a mix of ham handed hack cliches and even worse attempts at squeezing message into the film where it doesn't fit.  

I can say that I think the script writer was simply not tall enough for this ride. He struggles manfully with it, but just isn't smart enough to see where he is going wrong, then the director or producer decides to toss in some pop culture political bones, but doesn't quite want to jank up the script to make them fit, so they just sort of bolted them on top.  All in all it was an interesting film, but winds up being shockingly shallow.  I'll probably pick it up on DVD and watch it again, but I'm not going to praise it to the heavens.

On the other hand, John Wick 2 was awesome.










*I only know this exists thanks to the Nostalgia Critic, so don't get mad at me if I'm slandering your girlish fandom.

** Well, I mean there is Togusa and some rando yakuza guys, but they hardly count

* Or for that matter, an anti-technology anarchist?

Wall. Of. Text!

I only know of GITS from the first movie, and reading Shirow's other works. (Dominion Tank Police, Appleseed, etc.) So I'm no expert on the source material, but-
My impression was that this would likely turn out like the Aeon Flux live action movie, where they don't get* the source material, and slap in a lot of hollywood action tropes.
So, sounds like that was pretty much on target.

*pretentiousness ahoy!

What can I say? I hate reviews that more or less say "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" and leave you wondering... why?

 I mean, I'm a big fan of the David Lynch Dune movie, and I've seen the Siskel and Ebert review of it from when it came out, and I was left wondering if Siskel was a blithering idiot... not because he panned the film, but because he couldn't actually say anything about it other than "I don't get it".  Geezu, I got it when I was fucking ten, man, and I didn't even know there was a book to read about it back then.

So when I review.... I fucking review.

Quote from: Spike;954928What can I say? I hate reviews that more or less say "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" and leave you wondering... why?

 I mean, I'm a big fan of the David Lynch Dune movie, and I've seen the Siskel and Ebert review of it from when it came out, and I was left wondering if Siskel was a blithering idiot... not because he panned the film, but because he couldn't actually say anything about it other than "I don't get it".  Geezu, I got it when I was fucking ten, man, and I didn't even know there was a book to read about it back then.

So when I review.... I fucking review.

I'm not complaining. Just making a joke. I appreciate the depth you went into.

I keep hearing complaints that the characters were "whitewashed". Do you think that this was the case with the movie?

Do not care.

Actually its more complex than that, I guess. This is 'globalist world', I guess? I mean Hanka (robotics?) is run by a white dude but sounds like a Japanese Corporation and sells to 'The Government'... no nation specified... but that white dude is the idiot-ball villain of the piece. Dr Oulet is a big feature of Hanka, but she's french.

THen you've got The Major, who is both a white jewish(Azkenashi or however its spelled) girl (Scarlet Johanssen), but is playing a robot body that looks pretty close to the Anime, and is both a Refugee from where-everistan named Mira Somethingorother, and is ALSO a Japanese girl named Motoko Kusanagi... who may or may not be from immigrant parents in whereever.

The only Japanese people we see are Aramaki (played by a Japanese guy), the Mrs Kusanagi (played by a Japanese girl), and Togusa played by some asian dude who is probably japanese.

Batou was pretty white looking in the Anime, with blonde hair and here he is some sort of maybe British/Australian or American with Fake Accent of Unknown Origin and a bleach job.

SO first we have to know the proper ethnicities of the characters, and the proper location (assume Japan, but evidence?).






At some point you go with the Deadpool against girl assassins schtick  (Is it sexist to hit you? Is it sexist NOT TO HIT YOU???!!! I'm so confused!).

The question of whitewashing is, functionally, a catagory error.  Is the film well cast? Absolutely.  Do they capture the characters within the framework of the story they are telling and the theme they are trying to convey: Certainly.*






*Note: I do hold that this complaint has validity in some cases, for example the Avatar: Teh last airbender movie... though not for the reasons the average person who uses the term whitewashing would necessarily have.  The term itself is vapid, shallow grievance mongering, and should never be used by anyone with a real case to make.

It was pretty much a given they were going to botch this. Least it isnt the abomination that was Speed Racer or the 90s US Godzilla movie.

But still its some plot for god knows what, possibly a pirate movie, thats been reskinned as a cyberpunk movie with lots of nods to some anime and manga from way back.

I glanced at the reviews on IMDB and the sheer amount of shill reviews extolling how perfect and true to the original was hilarious.

Do they even have the  tachikomas? How badly did they butcher those?

To be honest the GiTS movie, where tehy ripped all the Iconic Visual Homage moments for teh trailers didn't have Tachikomas, so we're not exactly missing them here.

I don't think this is a reskin, I think this was an honest effort to recreate the Ghost in the Shell Anime Movie as a Live Action.  Did they fuck it up? Yeah, but if I'm honest I think they fucked it up with the best of intentions... even if some of those intentions were 'Audiences are Dumb as Shit, so lets make this more accessable', while others are, as I said: The Writer is Not Tall Enough for This Ride... being smart enough to get the original, but not smart enough to adapt it/recreate it... to understand it.*




*Avoiding long digression on the difference between getting a concept and understanding a concept.

Dammit. I was really hoping that just once Hollywood wouldn't screw up. I guess I'll see it on DVD. Thanks for the review.

So let me try and get this straight.  They took elements from both the original Anime, the Stand Alone Complex and 2nd GiG anime seasons, and they tried to bend those elements around their own ideas, without in anyway whatsoever understanding why those original elements were liked?

I really hate hollywood sometimes.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;955437So let me try and get this straight.  They took elements from both the original Anime, the Stand Alone Complex and 2nd GiG anime seasons, and they tried to bend those elements around their own ideas, without in anyway whatsoever understanding why those original elements were liked?

I really hate hollywood sometimes.

I can't talk to the Stand Alone Complex or GiG (whatever that is...). I watched three or four episodes of SaC years and years ago and I liked it, but I was cutting way back on Anime at the time and just never got around to following up with it, so if you can add to the topic, I'd love to hear it.

Quote from: Spike;955533I can't talk to the Stand Alone Complex or GiG (whatever that is...). I watched three or four episodes of SaC years and years ago and I liked it, but I was cutting way back on Anime at the time and just never got around to following up with it, so if you can add to the topic, I'd love to hear it.

I'll dive in after work.

Alright, I've recorded my video for the night and I've got some whiskey in.  Let's do this.

Let's tackle the biggest elephant in the room, the Major.  In the movie she's the first successful full body cyborg.  KILL ME NOW!  In the anime, there are tons of full body cyborgs, although it is believed by people in universe that have an interest in such things that the Major might be one of the youngest full body cyborgs, having undergone the procedure at the age of 8 or something.  But she's hardly the first. Most of Section 9 is FBC, with the exception of the Chief, Ishkawa and Tougason (sp?).

The Puppet Master, being portrayed by Sir Not Appearing in the Film, is a American Empire (there's 3 Americas after Nuclear WW3) hacking AI that gains self awareness and decides that getting laid is more important that pulling a Skynet and killing all humans.  He (it) has been replaced by Kuze, the decoy villain from the second season of the anime series.  Who also has the honor of being the other person to be the young full body borg, and a childhood friend of the Major's.

I can't even.  I'm super glad I skipped this one, since I'm really Really REALLY tired of hollywood fucking up easy cash-ins that literally write themselves.

Quote from: Spike;955416To be honest the GiTS movie, where tehy ripped all the Iconic Visual Homage moments for teh trailers didn't have Tachikomas, so we're not exactly missing them here.

I don't think this is a reskin, I think this was an honest effort to recreate the Ghost in the Shell Anime Movie as a Live Action.  Did they fuck it up? Yeah, but if I'm honest I think they fucked it up with the best of intentions...

1: So they replaced them with cars, motorcycles or something I assume...

2: Nothing you've described makes it sound like an "honest attempt." Theres just too much changed and the changes sound either astoundingly stupid or just pointless. It reads like the script for something else.

Not as long as I expected, Warboss, given the buildup, but interesting none the less.  At lease in the Movie (the Anime Movie), I don't think its implied most of Section 9 are Full Body Cyborgs, per se, but rather that they are all (except Togusa especially) augmented in some way, which given the plot of the movie (The Anime) with the Puppet Master (thanks, I'd forgotten his moniker) being a brain hacker implies at least in part they all have some brain augments that could then be hacked. Here (live movie) its that they are worried about being compromised by Hanka, who makes all their implant, even Token Black Guy's 'Drink All Night' cyber-liver... a common Cyberpunk Trope that actually makes less sense the longer you look at it....  implying perhaps shades of subtle blackmail?


Omega:

1: Yes, cars, like a sensible police force and like the Anime Movie, which seems to be the big inspiration here, and while I like motorcycles personally, if I don't see another I'm an Iconic Heroic Maverick, so Of Course I Ride A Motorcycle scene in a movie, it will be too soon. Sadly, like the 'I'm a Bad Guy, so OF COURSE I shoot my subordinate in the face in this film', i know that I will, in fact, see it again.  Again: No Tachikomas appear in the Anime Movie

2: Dumbing down the plot isn't a pointless change, as a good chunk of the original film turns out to be entirely pointless political red-herrings that you, the audience, lack the context to follow even if you try.  Much of the plot hinges on the actions of a hacker named Daita, who appears almost in teh background of one single shot for about 15 seconds... utterly dwarfed by the blustery political type who's about to be assassinated by Major Kusanagi in about one minute, and gets name checked one other time... just before the Puppet Master checks in with Section 9 to reveal the entire political plot is, in fact, irrelevant, because it's about cyber-god AI's getting their Swerve On... though he holds that tidbit until after the Spider Tank.

In other words the Original Plot is a damn mess, so yes, dumbing it down and changing it does seem like an Honest Attempt rather than repurposing Some Other Script.  The care the took putting those Iconic Visual Homages together despite the vastly different storyline... not just the visuals themeselves but their role/relation to the new plot is futher evidence, to me, that this was always planned to be Ghost in the Shell.  

So the failure comes down to two separate issues.

Over-reliance on ham-handed, hackey cliches that make the film feel incredibly stupid and bland, because no one working professionally as a writer today seems to Get It... something becoming increasingly obvious as I watch the shit-show unfolding around Mass Effect Andromeda, a series I deeply love and must now painfully shun, though it hurts me to do so.

And more importantly in this case: The Junior and Missess Department of deep metaphysical philosophy, which is where the Writer clearly isn't tall enough for the ride.  In some ways the changes are good ones, or have the potential to be good.  Having the Major be the first, and for the first half of the film the Only, Full Body Cyborg isn't a bad choice in and of itself, though it is a powerful change. There is plenty of development of the idea in the film, more than is called for by its mishandling in 'trite plots for dummies 101' script.   It does put the focus on the Major and her character in a way that is lacking in the original, and the idea of being an Evolutionary First is given more than lip service... the disconnect between Kusanagi's isolation at being a singular being is contrasted with Dr Oulet's excitement at the possibilities for Humanity, which is itself contrasted to Mr Cutter's inability to see beyond her use as a weapon system, utterly dismissing her humanity. Now: one leg of that tripod/point in the circle being reduced to a comically evil cartoon villain is itself a bad thing, but the effort is there.

But I'm going to defend this change a little. When the movie was released it was twenty years ago, when the manga was written it was closer to twenty five years ago or more. The mind blowing cyberpunk ideas of vast layers of data connectivity have caught up with the film, and revealed themselves to be slightly more, and less, than anticipated. We're ever closer to cyberlimbs thanks to long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our attitudes towards these prosthetics aren't shaping up as the old visionaries anticipated, so revisiting the old cyberpunk tropes of the late eighties and early nineties simply won't cut it.  Is the new stuff up to snuff? Maybe not in the visionary sense of the original, but its not all bad for all that.  Guys like Batou literally treat their bodies as simply upgradeable tools for the job, which is incredibly true to the original character and yet a refreshingly new look at how our attitudes towards prosthetics/cybernetics have evolved over two plus decades.

The other big change, and the one they fall down on, is the whole Ghost bit, the part that gets in the name, but I have to stress that it is not for lack of trying. The idea of who we are being linked to memory is an old thread, but one made more powerful in a world where memory is just (or mostly just) data that can be deleted if inconvenient, and can be utterly pliable in the face of a powerful hacker like the Puppet Master, or Kuze.   The Original focused its emphasis on this topic in the detrius of the Puppet Master's wake, then overshadowed it with bigger questions about the nature of life itself. The symbology of the Tree of Life being shot up by the Spider Tank that was hiding over the Puppet Master's body, leading up to AI/Kusanagi mackage, is a bit on the nose perhaps, but relevant.  Here it is all Memory/Identity, which is frankly admirable... except for that idiotic faux-quotable faux-batman bullshit they tie it to, or how they eventually revert to the understated mean when it actually matters.

When it matters:  The Major, having shed her false identity/memory of Mira Nobody-gives-a-fuck, hugging her 'mother' at her grave.  Probably missed by everyone: The Major doesn't actually remember being Kusanagi beyond a few impressions and instinctive connections (which are bullshit tropes, like the cat recognizing her... what? Her soul? She's a fucking robot with a brain and I'm sorry, but Cats don't read minds, and even if they could, they are assholes and wouldn't bother except to force you to feed them).  This is why she gives her 'consent' to kill Cutter (which makes no sense) with no name at all, just her rank.  Kusanagi is as dead as Mira in a sense, is a ghost.

When it doesn't matter: When Iconic Visual Homage posing on a rooftop to give your batman bullshit about how Memory doesn't define us.  In fact, the movie's entire premise contradicts this brass-balls level bullshit.  The Chatty Cathy Garbage Man with his make-believe wonderful life? His Memories, real or false, DO IN FACT DEFINE HIM. His 'actions' are Kuze's, not his own.  The Major? As Mira, deleting uncomfortable glitch memories, editing who she is into a comfortable, incomplete, identity or the 'real' Major, with emotional connections to people and places she can't remember, all point to the importance of Memory to Identity... IN THE FILM.  

In the original we could say that memory is pretty much all that defines us, for the Full Body Cyborgs, which is why it is so interesting that at the end Kusanagi is no longer in her body, but in a childish doll-body that Batou bought on the black market. Her mind is compromised by AI-sexing, adn her body was destroyed by the fight with teh Spider-Tank and Section 6's aerial sniper team. Of course its also murky as hell, because its only obvious she's in a doll-body and not her own because the dialog tells us, otherwise it looks a lot like Kusanagi cos-playing as Wednesday Adams.




I don't know why I'm going over this so deeply, since I've pretty much agreed with most critical reception of the film: Its a weak action movie with stunning visuals and ultimately more of a curiousity than a 'must see' film.  The philosophy was too ambitious for the writer to handle*, and the action was too ambitious for the director to handle, solving either problem would make the movie more noteworthy, solving both would elevate it to a modern masterpiece.





*Stray thoughts: Maybe the cartoonish villainy is because the writer was working so very hard to be deep that he didn't have any energy to spare on the bad guy? I mean, you've got two bad guys here, and one of them is actually reasonably well done, but then he's the sympathetic 'misunderstood' bad guy... and our Current Year does seem to be infested with a strain of thought suggesting that everyone you disagree with is cartoonishly evil, so maybe he thought he WAS doing justice to real life evil people?