Movies just watched - Theatre V1

[Gentian]

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

I remember when the OVA was released in 1995. Anime was pretty much unknown at the time, yet they had television advertisements for this one. Not your run-of-the-mill commercials, mind you, neither of the cheap kind I'd find advertising phone-sex on the public access channels late at night while trying to watch The Miss Nude Tampa pageant, and Lifestyles of the Up and Coming with the volume turned waaayyyyy down after my parents had gone to sleep. No, this was a sleek ad with great sound, smooth editing, that rad 90s narrator telling us how awesome the movie was, and that we should call the toll-free number to reserve our copy today!

Being a tween at the time, I had neither money, nor my parents permission to use the phone without asking first. Heaven help me if I somehow found a way to get their credit cards, so no Ghost in the Shell for me. But I remembered, and years later after growing up and moving out, I found it in a video-rental store (anyone else remember those?) and finally got to see it.

It's awesome. It's not as deep, or mind-blowing as people claim, but it is a good story, and has a great art-style. The animation is smooth, the action, and Not!boobies of Motoko's thermoptic camouflage made it one I was glad to have seen. When I heard they were remaking it in a live-action style I was thrilled. There were doubts, but there are doubts about anything, and most of them I found seemed to devolve to racist arguments about casting Scarlett instead of an Asian person.

Never mind that in the comics Motoko was explicitly said to prefer a caucasian-styled robo-body. Never mind that the same racist shits don't care when a white character is changed to black, or hispanic, or whatever. Apparently it's only a problem when a character "becomes" white, even though she's always been that. So after the 10 billionth time hearing the same racist comments, I stopped looking into the matter.

Well.

The movie was terrible, and not for any reasons having to do with the casting.

Spoiler

In the OVA, and comics, she was an agent working for Section 9, and had been a cyborg almost all her life, following an accident that left her body destroyed, and the doctors no choice but to attempt an experimental procedure of putting her brain in a synthetic shell. In this film, however, they went with the tired, cliche "secret" of her being not the first of her kind, even though they told her she was! They decided to make her a brainwashed political prisoner, whose mind was taken from a perfectly healthy body and stuffed in a bot. They decided to make her creators the bad guys, and the bad guy the good guy! How original!

And I hoped, I hoped, I hoped! That the bad guy was going to be project 2501. I mean, that was the whole point of the series; what does it mean to be human? With Motoko herself they played the Ship of Theseus angle, but 2501 was an entirely artificial intelligence. He was the main plot device that said you can be sapient without biology, and he was the original "villain," anyway. They would have to include him, right?

Ha! No, let's just replace that modicum of intellectual stimulation with a romance! Yeah! And lets make the bad guy her boyfriend, who was also a political prisoner, and made into the model before her, who, surprise surprise was defective! Yeah! Then, lets completely drop the whole point of the series, and replace it with a ham-fisted moral about our actions defining us, and not our memories. I'm not even going to touch how idiotic that "moral" is. Let's also not question what is moral, why it is, or is not, or any other of the extremely basic questions which leap to mind at such an absurd premise. That would be, like, hard for the audience, or something. FFS.

Another thing. The cross-language dialogue was terrible. I get that the Japanese actor can't speak English. He's pretty popular, and I see him on TV here doing guest-spots all the time. I get that Scarlett can't speak Japanese. But damn it, they can't get her to parrot a few memorized lines? It's awkward to have her speaking English, and him replying in Japanese, or him speaking Japanese, and every single other person in the room using English. Though, I admit, it would be a neat little nod to the imminent collapse of the language barrier that translation tech promises, if I thought they put enough thought into this thing for it to be anything of the sort.