Okay.
So.
I saw it.
And... well, I walked out of the theater after the movie not regretting the price of tickets and popcorn. It wasn't amazing, I don't think I can say that it was a solid addition to the overall GitS name, but I didn't feel like I wasted time or money and I think I might've actually regretted it if I didn't see it on the big screen.
So... if you get dragged by someone else to see the movie or give in to the morbid curiosity... this isn't a -horrible- movie. There's totally worse out there. Don't go in with the mindset of looking it as a single, whole piece. Leave any views about whitewashing at the door. Try to enjoy each scene as it's own thing, appreciate how they tried (and in most cases succeeded) to recreate iconic scenes. If you can do that, I don't think you'll walk out of the theater regretting the money spent either.
So.
I saw it.
And... well, I walked out of the theater after the movie not regretting the price of tickets and popcorn. It wasn't amazing, I don't think I can say that it was a solid addition to the overall GitS name, but I didn't feel like I wasted time or money and I think I might've actually regretted it if I didn't see it on the big screen.
Show Content
Yarr! Thar be spoilers ahead!So, let's clear the things I found 'bad' about the movie first. Our protagonist is... "Major". She's got a full name, but it's said like twice and very quickly and I never fully caught it; it might have been "Marie", but everyone calls her Major. Major is the first full-body cyborg, the result of a "you see our products everywhere" corporation called Hanka experiment/project, thought to be by her creators to be the next step in human evolution, and she's on-loan to Section 9 as a trial. Major comes off as being a bit emotionally... frail, I suppose, and uncertain as she questions her supposed humanity, as she's aware that she was built as a weapon though she seems somewhat okay with this because her immigrant family was killed by terrorists as they were arriving in what I'm assuming is Japan.
Yep. Kusanagi got turned from the introspective, determined and capable badass to an often meek, borderline emo little slip. My husband compared it to what Fox did to Scott Summers/Cyclops in the first three X-Men movies. Scarlett Johansson is a decent actor, so this has to be more of a writing/directing issue than her performance.Â
The whitewashing debacle left it's mark as well. That program/filter that was reportedly used after to make the non-Asian actors look more Asian... I want to blame that on the weirdness that goes on with eyes in close-ups. It was distracting. It also may have spawned a plot-point that I found distracting: Major's family seemed to have been immigrating to Neo-Japan, their boat was attacked by terrorists, and that Major was the only survivor in the sense that she was the only one who wasn't brain-dead after the attack. Which... turns out to not be the case towards the end of the movie. Maybe parts of this WAS part of the original script, but there's something so heavy-handed about it that I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the parts that was re-written/re-shot because 'whitewashing'.
Alright, so, that's what I thought was truly bad about the movie -- and most of it revolves around this new "Major". So let's move on to the 'myeh...' portion.
The 'villain' and... 'misguided doctor trope of some flavor'. Hanka's... CEO, I guess, is our ultimate villain. He's just your typical corporate bad-guy trope, out to make a profit at any cost and by virtue of his project being loaned to Section 9, feels he can control Section 9; nothing deep about him. Our misguided doctor is one of his employees, who lead the project that created Major. Insert trope where doctor/scientist initially ignores ethics and rights to create something, becomes motherly towards her creation, and ultimately either has deathbed confession/repentance or rebels to save her creation and dies in the process. They serve their purpose, but that's about all they're there for.
So, the good stuff?
Batou. Oh good gods, he was actually -good-, and he was the one I worried about the most. The accent was a little weird, but that 'went away' when they were speaking via "mind link", which I thought was a great touch. In the stills and trailers his eyes often looked like googly eyes, but with full editing and in motion they look amazing. His personality was closer to what I remember from the manga (1995/Innocence, Batou was more serious while SAC he's more... playful but prone to moody), and while how he got his prosthetic eyes isn't true to the source material, I didn't have a problem with it -- it made sense in the setting we get in this movie.
The rest of the Section 9 cast... when you see them. Even in the changes that were made to some of them, when you see them they look good. I was a little annoyed that the few lines that Ishikawa got revolved mostly around him getting a prosthetic liver so he can drink more, but even with his casting choice he looked good. Togusa got matured up quite a bit; he wasn't Section 9's newbie, he was closer to his Solid State Society version. You don't see a lot of them, which is a shame.
So, Aramaki. Initially, I wasn't happy with him. He came off as not having a lot of control over Section 9 -- Major disobeys his orders blithely and Hanka's CEO seems to be dictating to him a lot. More of a doormat than "he's planning for long-term", like Aaramaki typically is. And then we got a scene with a very strong vibe of "... they're going to kill him off at some point...", and then a few moments later we see him get into a car, alone, and another car full of guys in suits pulls up and Aramaki randomly orders everyone to turn on their "mind links"... and then my dread started to sink in. And then the car got shot up. I won't go much further in spoiling it, but he didn't die, got a badass moment, and started being more like the Aramaki we all know and expect.
One last small nitpick about Aramaki: when he "mind links", he still speaks in Japanese. This makes little sense considering that everyone else loses their accents when they're speaking over the "mind link".
Kuze. He was a mix of 2nd GiG's Kuze, Puppetmaster, Laughing Man, and Puppeteer, with some Frankenstein's Monster thrown in. It could be argued that this Kuze wasn't a good character because he's so obviously based on the others, but that's actually what I LIKED about him. This was, in its own way, bits and pieces of random data that assembled itself into its own consciousness -- everything that it's predecessors had been and/or aspired to. Â I enjoyed dissecting him and figuring out which part came from which source.
Which sort of segue's into the next thing I enjoyed. 75% of the movie is pulled in one way or another from the previous movies or series -- there are whole scenes that are either copied almost identically or very heavily inspired by the predecessors. There are characters who are like this new Kuze -- conglomerates of other characters rolled all up into one. There's so much that you can sit back and say "... Yeah, I remember this from this movie or that episode". And I enjoyed recognizing/placing those scenes, because on their own this movie did the scenes very well. Which... yes, I suppose could be argued that this was lazy writing. I'll agree that the overall story was fairly weak and where they did go original, it sucked. But the scenes they recreated/re-imagined, on their own, are impressive.
Yep. Kusanagi got turned from the introspective, determined and capable badass to an often meek, borderline emo little slip. My husband compared it to what Fox did to Scott Summers/Cyclops in the first three X-Men movies. Scarlett Johansson is a decent actor, so this has to be more of a writing/directing issue than her performance.Â
The whitewashing debacle left it's mark as well. That program/filter that was reportedly used after to make the non-Asian actors look more Asian... I want to blame that on the weirdness that goes on with eyes in close-ups. It was distracting. It also may have spawned a plot-point that I found distracting: Major's family seemed to have been immigrating to Neo-Japan, their boat was attacked by terrorists, and that Major was the only survivor in the sense that she was the only one who wasn't brain-dead after the attack. Which... turns out to not be the case towards the end of the movie. Maybe parts of this WAS part of the original script, but there's something so heavy-handed about it that I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the parts that was re-written/re-shot because 'whitewashing'.
Alright, so, that's what I thought was truly bad about the movie -- and most of it revolves around this new "Major". So let's move on to the 'myeh...' portion.
The 'villain' and... 'misguided doctor trope of some flavor'. Hanka's... CEO, I guess, is our ultimate villain. He's just your typical corporate bad-guy trope, out to make a profit at any cost and by virtue of his project being loaned to Section 9, feels he can control Section 9; nothing deep about him. Our misguided doctor is one of his employees, who lead the project that created Major. Insert trope where doctor/scientist initially ignores ethics and rights to create something, becomes motherly towards her creation, and ultimately either has deathbed confession/repentance or rebels to save her creation and dies in the process. They serve their purpose, but that's about all they're there for.
So, the good stuff?
Batou. Oh good gods, he was actually -good-, and he was the one I worried about the most. The accent was a little weird, but that 'went away' when they were speaking via "mind link", which I thought was a great touch. In the stills and trailers his eyes often looked like googly eyes, but with full editing and in motion they look amazing. His personality was closer to what I remember from the manga (1995/Innocence, Batou was more serious while SAC he's more... playful but prone to moody), and while how he got his prosthetic eyes isn't true to the source material, I didn't have a problem with it -- it made sense in the setting we get in this movie.
The rest of the Section 9 cast... when you see them. Even in the changes that were made to some of them, when you see them they look good. I was a little annoyed that the few lines that Ishikawa got revolved mostly around him getting a prosthetic liver so he can drink more, but even with his casting choice he looked good. Togusa got matured up quite a bit; he wasn't Section 9's newbie, he was closer to his Solid State Society version. You don't see a lot of them, which is a shame.
So, Aramaki. Initially, I wasn't happy with him. He came off as not having a lot of control over Section 9 -- Major disobeys his orders blithely and Hanka's CEO seems to be dictating to him a lot. More of a doormat than "he's planning for long-term", like Aaramaki typically is. And then we got a scene with a very strong vibe of "... they're going to kill him off at some point...", and then a few moments later we see him get into a car, alone, and another car full of guys in suits pulls up and Aramaki randomly orders everyone to turn on their "mind links"... and then my dread started to sink in. And then the car got shot up. I won't go much further in spoiling it, but he didn't die, got a badass moment, and started being more like the Aramaki we all know and expect.
One last small nitpick about Aramaki: when he "mind links", he still speaks in Japanese. This makes little sense considering that everyone else loses their accents when they're speaking over the "mind link".
Kuze. He was a mix of 2nd GiG's Kuze, Puppetmaster, Laughing Man, and Puppeteer, with some Frankenstein's Monster thrown in. It could be argued that this Kuze wasn't a good character because he's so obviously based on the others, but that's actually what I LIKED about him. This was, in its own way, bits and pieces of random data that assembled itself into its own consciousness -- everything that it's predecessors had been and/or aspired to. Â I enjoyed dissecting him and figuring out which part came from which source.
Which sort of segue's into the next thing I enjoyed. 75% of the movie is pulled in one way or another from the previous movies or series -- there are whole scenes that are either copied almost identically or very heavily inspired by the predecessors. There are characters who are like this new Kuze -- conglomerates of other characters rolled all up into one. There's so much that you can sit back and say "... Yeah, I remember this from this movie or that episode". And I enjoyed recognizing/placing those scenes, because on their own this movie did the scenes very well. Which... yes, I suppose could be argued that this was lazy writing. I'll agree that the overall story was fairly weak and where they did go original, it sucked. But the scenes they recreated/re-imagined, on their own, are impressive.
So... if you get dragged by someone else to see the movie or give in to the morbid curiosity... this isn't a -horrible- movie. There's totally worse out there. Don't go in with the mindset of looking it as a single, whole piece. Leave any views about whitewashing at the door. Try to enjoy each scene as it's own thing, appreciate how they tried (and in most cases succeeded) to recreate iconic scenes. If you can do that, I don't think you'll walk out of the theater regretting the money spent either.
