Reviews for Ghost in the Shell (8.58)
seamot
Matsumoto Kaoru
Nishikubo Toshihiko
Oshii Mamoru
Mild spoilers ahead. A droning future has been with us since 1995. A scary future, where angel-winged helicopters monitor a restless city that looks like a Hongkong-Venice-Tokyo mashu...
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22.06.2013 08:22 - direct link
(rs9047)
Mild spoilers ahead.
A droning future has been with us since 1995. A scary future, where angel-winged helicopters monitor a restless city that looks like a Hongkong-Venice-Tokyo mashup. Everywhere, stupidly translucent screens shimmer greenly, with random source code snippets on display, controlled somewhere in dimly lit bunkers, where cyborg overlords hack into conscious 'puters at rapid fire speeds.
Good thing then, that section 9, a Japanese Sci-fi NSA-FBI is at the ready. A naked Major Kusanagi, in equal parts existential philosopher and highly skilled military femme fatal is looking for answers. Her brains are real or so it seems, but her body is manufactured in an oddly descriptive opening sequence, where cold and tasteful lady parts dance to Kenji Kawaii's ungodly ethereal chanted wedding tune. After two minutes you are either in love or switched the channel.
Then, a dense story starts to unfold, tangled and bleak, always flirting with incomprehensibility. Too much information comes in too quickly, we need a break or two to write down who said what and why, to follow the conspiracy of sinister forces and their intelligent machines. We get those breaks surprisingly enough, even though there's no time. At barely over an hour long, Ghost in the Shell is compressed story telling that needs all the minutes it got.
But alas, in between a somber and complex cyberpunk world, the viewer is invited to urban scenery porn, swimming in the open sea, drinking cheap beer on a rented boat. The museum scene finally, pulls out all the stops, for some intense moments of exploitation cinema, an explosion of undercurrents in a mostly quiet and cerebral film. The marriage of complex themes and simple things of manly appreciation (tits, guns, car chases) never worked better and to more effect.
And so, Mr. Oshii's biggest achievement to date is to transform a childish, largely dim-witted comic, full of badly drawn gun fetishism and lesbian robo-love into one of the best Sci-fi movies of the 1990s. A dystopian future that many years later, still inspires rambling essays on a vision of tomorrow, that looks still possible and relevant today.
(Join me next time, where I explain all the things wrong with movie number two.)
A droning future has been with us since 1995. A scary future, where angel-winged helicopters monitor a restless city that looks like a Hongkong-Venice-Tokyo mashup. Everywhere, stupidly translucent screens shimmer greenly, with random source code snippets on display, controlled somewhere in dimly lit bunkers, where cyborg overlords hack into conscious 'puters at rapid fire speeds.
Good thing then, that section 9, a Japanese Sci-fi NSA-FBI is at the ready. A naked Major Kusanagi, in equal parts existential philosopher and highly skilled military femme fatal is looking for answers. Her brains are real or so it seems, but her body is manufactured in an oddly descriptive opening sequence, where cold and tasteful lady parts dance to Kenji Kawaii's ungodly ethereal chanted wedding tune. After two minutes you are either in love or switched the channel.
Then, a dense story starts to unfold, tangled and bleak, always flirting with incomprehensibility. Too much information comes in too quickly, we need a break or two to write down who said what and why, to follow the conspiracy of sinister forces and their intelligent machines. We get those breaks surprisingly enough, even though there's no time. At barely over an hour long, Ghost in the Shell is compressed story telling that needs all the minutes it got.
But alas, in between a somber and complex cyberpunk world, the viewer is invited to urban scenery porn, swimming in the open sea, drinking cheap beer on a rented boat. The museum scene finally, pulls out all the stops, for some intense moments of exploitation cinema, an explosion of undercurrents in a mostly quiet and cerebral film. The marriage of complex themes and simple things of manly appreciation (tits, guns, car chases) never worked better and to more effect.
And so, Mr. Oshii's biggest achievement to date is to transform a childish, largely dim-witted comic, full of badly drawn gun fetishism and lesbian robo-love into one of the best Sci-fi movies of the 1990s. A dystopian future that many years later, still inspires rambling essays on a vision of tomorrow, that looks still possible and relevant today.
(Join me next time, where I explain all the things wrong with movie number two.)
