Mamoru Oshii's new movie takes the black-and-gold aesthetic from Avalon, his previous mind-**** and transports it into a grim future of cyborgs and gigantic cities and sex droids and virtual reality and people having their brains hacked-into. I think. In a genuinely dazzling collision of computer-generated animation and traditional hand-drawn characters, Oshii takes us on a bizarre and sometimes baffling journey through a city "peopled" with robots that look like humans and humans who act like robots. Some of the humans are half-robots anyway. Each human seems to have a network port in the back of the neck so that they can plug into some kind of matrix for whatever reason. This also enables the baddies to plug into them and mess with whatever remains of their minds. Things happen. Moody characters behave moodily. The music blares intermittently: Kenji Kawai's compositions are as much to the foreground as they were in Avalon, but unfortunately are nowhere near as memorable. As if to prove correct the cliché that what goes around comes around, the film seems heavily indebted to Blade Runner, which itself was heavily indebted to Oriental popular culture. Also, the often dream-like atmosphere and the way the screen is crammed with as much as possible owe quite a lot to the work of Chris Marker. GITS 2 is not the most exciting film you'll ever see, but it is interesting and it looks fantastic. There is a danger though that some impressionable people will be over-influenced it by it. I worry not that they will go out and start shooting sex-robots, but that they will think the movie is somehow profound and its makers are deep thinkers. It isn't. They might be, but there's not really much deep thought on display here. The characters discuss philosophy between gun-battles, but it's the gun-battles, not the philosophy, that the makers seem most interested in.
Review of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
