Ghost in the Shell: Movie

I tried to write this last night but must have been punch-drunk with sleepiness or something and accidentally glitched it myself by trying to refresh the page before I SENT it because I wanted to see what the comments would be like - BEFORE I POSTED IT.

In any case I do a lot of purchases through Amazon and saw that the DvD for the movie was coming up already so I went for it.

For the short form: I thought it was good. It all looked good, there was plenty of story and action.

Warning: Here be spoilers ahead: Warning

Unlike the original anime which takes place in Tokyo (like basically all modern/future Japanese Anime) this takes place in an unnamed city (I think, I don't remember them naming it in the movie). The city looked a lot like the cities in Blade Runner and Fifth Element with the huge holographic displays and stuff which is pretty cool. The movie all looked very good to me, and it was fast-paced with a solid story. The original anime was a bit hard to follow because you are something like halfway through the series and all of it's (seemingly) unconnected events before you find out that they are in fact connected and the main plot is revealed. This movie has less of that confusion even though the theoretical initial story is just a lead-in to the real story - so that's similar to the anime. Pretty much all of the plot is changed around from the anime. But there was no way they were going to be able to tell the mixed-up and potentially-confusing plot of the series in a single movie.

Ok, so I am a fan of the anime series so don't take those previous comments against me. I liked the anime. It had a story to tell, but it took it's time in unwrapping it. If you are familiar with the Heroes Journey most of the anime is essentially the section on Everyday World with the early stories about cyborgs going amok showing us what our anti-cyberg unit's normal job is like before we reach the Call to Adventure in the series were we find out that all the seemingly unrelated crimes are actually connected via a motivating villain who initiated each of the crimes as part of a greater plan. I don't think it was wrong to tell the story the way they did, but I don't think it would have worked in a normal movie time limit either.

I will say up front that I'm not terribly interested in the complaints about The Major being Japanese and Scarlett not looking at all Japanese. In the movie the city is very racially-mixed and she is a Full-Body-Cyborg - which means that the race of the person inside the shell needn't be reflected in the "race" of the shell she's in, that's part of the draw of being a cyborg, don't like your race? Get a body with a different one. So you are a short fat out-of-shape X and you want to be a tall muscular Y, get a different body. The corporation that built her is multinational and has a multinational staff and they intend to sell her as the combat soldier of the future multi-nationally, so they chose a generic European-type frame. Additionally there is an in-story reason - which I'll spoil down below after my second spoilers warning.

The actor who plays her unit boss definitely looked the part and spoke only Japanese, which again for a multi-racial and cultural city makes sense to some extent. Sort of like how in Firefly everybody spoke both English and Mandarin Chinese.

This next part is an even bigger Spoiler.

Ok, first the in-story reason for the racial change: the corporation that made her erased all of her memories and don't want her to remember anything about her past: because her harvesting for her brain was part of a horrific crime. She was a Japanese runaway living with other runaways when the corporation kidnapped them all to use their brains in their experiment to create a full-body cyborg. They didn't want her to have any connection to her past so they changed everything except that she was female: they changed her name, her memories of her past, and even the race of her cyborg body - to hide their crime from her.

So about fifteen minuets after watching it this occurred to me: the raw plot is essentially the same as Robocop. The Major is the first full-body cyborg in the movie, just like Robocop. She's part of a corporate plan to show off what a full-body cyborg can do as a means to eventually sell many more, just like Robocop. She's part of a police unit, just like Robocop. She spends time chasing criminals only to ultimately discover that the CEO of the corporation that made her is the biggest criminal of them all, just like Robocop. She doesn't kill the CEO herself, but she expressly gives her permission for his termination - not the same but very similar to Robocop.

Now I'm not saying this is a bad thing. After all there are a few dozen different adages that go "there are only X number of story plots in the world, it's all in how you dress them up." And I think that the movie did a very good job of dressing the plot up.

Entertainingly Wiki says the budget was $110 mill, and it grossed $169 mill in the theaters, so it's made back over 150% of it's cost so far, so how does that make it a bomb? yeah, it didn't make half a billion like some other recent movies, so what?

Was it worth purchasing and watching: Totally!