I take it you’ve never seen Emma Stone in “Aloha”.
I haven’t seen GitS yet, but honestly it looks terrible. Like one of the Wachowski’s crappy sci-fi CGI fests that WASN’T directly influenced by the original GitS.
Hang on; somewhere around here there’s an award for that post.
Yeah, I thought there was a woosh. Then I realized I was wooshed. Double woosh? Treble? Then my head exploded and I didn’t post.
Looking forward to seeing this, but with lowered expectations.
Because Major is the mighty white hero. Aramaki is the wise old master.
No, he said WITHOUT a screwdriver!
The original manga is, in essence, a long stream of in-depth descriptions of why the women need to walk around mostly naked, why it’s functionally necessary for everything to look awesome, etc. There’s not much story, just tons of authors notes that go through his convolutions behind the look and sexiness of everything you see on page.
I’m sure he mentioned your point at least once, but probably had a few dozen other rationalizations.
The one I recall is that the Major’s sex scene had to be with another woman because it is special android sex that involves directly stimulating nerves or some such that is incredibly painful unless your partner has the same model of body as you (and also the author didn’t want to draw any naked dudes).
Saw it with the wife the other night, we both enjoyed it.
I for one like that they dumbed down/cut down the philosophical debates in this version. I love the first two animated movies, but let’s be honest, the film would grind to a halt whenever they proceeded to lecture each other about these things. The film set up the debate in the first scene, and then mostly just left it to hit-and-run commentary from the different characters to show that different folks had different views on everything for different reasons. For example, Ishikawa mentioning that he got an upgraded liver so he could drink more beer to the mild disbelief of Togusa (“all-natural and proud of it”) before getting on with their work.
I kind of feel like ScarJo was miscast here, and I’m generally a fan of her stuff (to include The Avengers). Not sure if it was just her being a poor fit or maybe some poor direction, but the Major would be kind of a hard role for most people to pull off because she’s supposed to be kind of stiff and unnatural.
Aramaki was a bamf, like he should be, and the film generally needed more Togusa, but I might just think that because between me and the missus, he’s our favorite character (probably because he’s the easy-to-relate-to every-man)
Lots of little nods to previous installments in the franchise, and I feel like the film kind of suffered for that, like they were trying too hard to put in all the indicators that they’d watched the previous stuff and forgot to work more on making their own thing. The 90s/00’s GitS films are not SAC is not Arise, and it seemed like this movie tried too hard to be one or more of the previous things.
I agree with the guy who rated it 8/10. It was solidly entertaining, with room for improvement. I only checked my watch once, about 30-40 minutes into the film.
I, for one, can’t wait till we get giant holographic koi and jellyfish threading around the skyscrapers.
Indeed. One of my favorite effects in the movie was near the start where the Major dives through a holographic billboard during her entry into the building.
My wife and I saw it last night. It was pretty intense, and thinking about it kept my wife up to midnight.
The cinematography was exceptional. So much thought went into some of those shots. The circular floors of the apartment dwelling, for example, and the swim in the bottom of the river.
And the concept was really something. Where do we go to from here as a species? Is cyborg enhancement inevitable to the point of being mundane? What does that mean to our humanity? “Please feed the dogs. I don’t want to scare them,” gave me the chills.
I was not bothered by Johanssen as the lead, and think this was overstated in the press. Clearly the movie was set in Tokyo, but half the characters were foreigners and half not. She kind of fit the role. I think she overacted the walk, though.
And how good to see Beat Takeshi. I haven’t seen him in a movie since *Hanabi * in 1997.
Having said that, I’m not sure I liked the plot. The ending seemed simplistic. This might have been a consequence of remaining true to the source material.
Overall, though, it was worth seeing.
There was some interesting design there, but all in all, it just wasn’t that well written or directed. Other than the “rabbits to hunt a fox” line (which I’m half convinced was a Beat Takeshi ad-lib), there wasn’t any particularly interesting dialog - and that’s beyond the general shallowness and half-baked ideas. As for direction, there wasn’t any real buildup of tension, and the action wasn’t particularly well choreographed, shot or edited. A movie like this, with all of its baggage, needed John Wick-level action scenes, and the film didn’t even come close. I think it’s telling that virtually all of the memorable shots in the film came directly from the anime.
I enjoyed it, and quite surprisingly, so did my wife (she’s not a huge fan of the anime) - she says she found it very moving.
I think Johanssen did fine. I liked her work in this.
Not a fan of there needing to be an explanation for Batou’s eyes. Also, I always wondered - clearly Kusanagi and other androids have humanlike eyes, why does he have to have the shitty fake-looking ones?
In the anime, they’re the eyes that an elite army unit is issued, and him having those eyes identifies him as an ex-member. I prefer that to the one in this story.
I saw the movie this weekend. For the most part, it’s OK. However, whoever wrote 2/3 of the dialog needs to write “Show, don’t tell” about three million times as punishment. The anime has characters making declarative statements, but the conversations at least build to them. This movie has characters just blurting them out in the most unsubtle ways.
Aye; something about her walk bothered me when I watched it and it’s continued to dog me. It actually took me out of the film, it was somehow so wrong.
I agree. I thought this was some of his best work of the last 15 years, too.
I think this was just the source material. I know I felt that a decent writer today could have explored the same theme using these characters in a much better-told and interesting story. For instance, the film does a poor job of setting Cutter up as the real villain; Blade 2 and Ex Machina are films that did a much better job with this kind of bait-and-switch.
But I agree that a large driving force here was prolly to try and true to the source material, to give fans a true live-action film of the original Ghost In The Shell story.
Oh totally worth seeing and I can’t wait for the 4K BR this summer! That’s gonna look AMAZING!
I totally agree, but I found the dialogue in the anime to be equally ham-fisted, so for me it was a wash.
Yes, sorry, I meant an in-movie plot reason - in the anime, he just starts out with them, doesn’t he?
But my RL objection to them looking weird stands. I get that there’s practical aesthetic reasons for it, but if I were designing Spec Ops eyes, I’d make them blend in.
Although this concern does bring to mind the Major’s in-universe reaction to them in the film: “… You chose those?”
Finally saw it yesterday. I’ve not read the manga but I’ve seen all of the animated iterations so you could say I’m a fan.
I thought it worked reasonably well and explored the “what happens to humanity when enhancements become available” meme as much as it could in an hour and a half. Several moments were lifted directly from one iteration or another like Dahlin’s flip-up eyes and her habit of putting out her cigarette in a glass of whiskey (or whatever).
There’s one (over-sized) Tachikomabut it’s not friendly.
The wife and I amused ourselves afterwards with the idea of dubbing over the scene in question with Tachikoma quotes.
Also, pedantic nitpick: Tachikomas are a specific flavor of spider tank, they are distinct from other designs like the Logikomas in Arise.