Here's the really quick and dirty summary:
If you count the first Ghost in the Shell in amongst your top movies off all time, see this one, you'll like it.
If you enjoy watching the TV Series, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, do NOT watch this movie. You will pine for the days when Togusa wasn't a little fraidy cat, and makes non-enhanced humanity respectable.
Here's the more in-depth version:
I thought Ghost in the Shell, the first movie was decent. It was made better by the fact that they had a pretty enjoyable video game that followed it up, but I'm not one of those people that would consider using the word "masterpiece" to describe it without using "not" in the same sentence.
As far as this film, it could do with a bit of dialogue. Apparently, Oshii doesn't understand the difference between having a conversation, and playing a game of "Pretentious Quote Battle 2: Electric Boogaloo". Somewhere along the line he must have gotten the idea that perhaps the audience wouldn't understand how smart his films was supposed to be, so he has the characters repeat the same concepts over and over again, just quoting different authors.
What makes this so horrendously annoying is that the film's concept is so simple. The heart of the film is the question of existence. What is is and do these malfunctioning robots have it? If so, does that cheapen humanity because humanity is capable of being broken down into 1s and 0s?
While this may seem like a spoiler, it's fully explained within the first 10 minutes of the movie, and done so over and over every 5-10 minutes after then, each time with an exchange of literary quotations. Heck, Batou even tells Togusa that it's hard to follow his conversation since all he does is sport random quotes. When you have THAT many quotes in a movie, it's time to rewrite the dialogue...perhaps giving some of the characters their OWN lines.
The movie IS visually stunning, however, it is only that, and the little bits of fun piecing together the connections between this movie and the first that make this movie barely worth seeing. Barely.
5/10.
If you count the first Ghost in the Shell in amongst your top movies off all time, see this one, you'll like it.
If you enjoy watching the TV Series, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, do NOT watch this movie. You will pine for the days when Togusa wasn't a little fraidy cat, and makes non-enhanced humanity respectable.
Here's the more in-depth version:
I thought Ghost in the Shell, the first movie was decent. It was made better by the fact that they had a pretty enjoyable video game that followed it up, but I'm not one of those people that would consider using the word "masterpiece" to describe it without using "not" in the same sentence.
As far as this film, it could do with a bit of dialogue. Apparently, Oshii doesn't understand the difference between having a conversation, and playing a game of "Pretentious Quote Battle 2: Electric Boogaloo". Somewhere along the line he must have gotten the idea that perhaps the audience wouldn't understand how smart his films was supposed to be, so he has the characters repeat the same concepts over and over again, just quoting different authors.
What makes this so horrendously annoying is that the film's concept is so simple. The heart of the film is the question of existence. What is is and do these malfunctioning robots have it? If so, does that cheapen humanity because humanity is capable of being broken down into 1s and 0s?
While this may seem like a spoiler, it's fully explained within the first 10 minutes of the movie, and done so over and over every 5-10 minutes after then, each time with an exchange of literary quotations. Heck, Batou even tells Togusa that it's hard to follow his conversation since all he does is sport random quotes. When you have THAT many quotes in a movie, it's time to rewrite the dialogue...perhaps giving some of the characters their OWN lines.
The movie IS visually stunning, however, it is only that, and the little bits of fun piecing together the connections between this movie and the first that make this movie barely worth seeing. Barely.
5/10.