K-SCORE: 69
Director: Rupert Sanders
Writer: Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Michael Carmen Pitt, Pilou Asbaek, “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, Juliette Binoche
Spoiler Level: Minor
Manga and anime have insane plots. I’ve seen the original Ghost in the Shell that was made in 1995 because it’s lauded by film critics as a triumph of the genre, and I remember thinking when I watched it - this is crazy, too much, and basically makes no sense. Manga writers don’t stop adding characters and plot elements nearly soon enough and the results are, well, these:
Strange events begin to occur as a withdrawn girl named Lain becomes obsessed with the interconnected virtual realm of The Wired.
Brothers Alphonse and Edward Elric lose parts of their bodies in a horrific alchemical accident trying to revive their dead mother. In an attempt to find the Philosopher’s Stone and undo the damage, they must battle homunculi embodiments of the seven deadly sins.
A thousand years after the destruction of Earth by giant aliens called Gauna, mankind is largely asexual and can photosynthesize, living on the giant spaceship Sidonia, and must defend itself from further attacks using Garde pilots and their champion Nagate Tanikaze.
On a future Earth secretly populated by thousands of aliens, Baka, the prince of Dorga, crash lands and forcibly moves in with a high school student.
Hartland, an artificial paradise for Earth’s chosen leaders becomes the target of viral attacks from the Lee-yo, a resistance movement of militarized mutant surface-dwellers.
See? I made that last one up and you couldn’t fucking tell the difference. If, unlike me, you can easily wrap your mind around these high concepts, I bet you still can’t help but be confused when the writers periodically throw in anthropomorphic bears that espouse wisdom and run hotels. It’s because of these tendencies, that I’m actually strongly in support of Americans buying the rights to some of the best manga and anime and remaking them for our audiences. Illogical, cratered, tacky, wacky, and stupid though many of our plots tend to be, we have a greater tendency to tone things down and explain circumstances than the Japanese do. Think I’m racist? Maybe. But Ghost in the Shell cast Scarlett Johansson as a girl named Motoko.
“ a brain-transplant patient finding her identity in a synthetic body before exacting vengeance on the company that twisted her memories and stole her life”
Ghost in the Shell is pretty good. Yeah, alright it doesn’t make perfect sense and even when it does there’s not much depth to the base conflict of a brain-transplant patient finding her identity in a synthetic body before exacting vengeance on the company that twisted her memories and stole her life. But it has an old Japanese gunslinger who surprises and impresses at every turn. I thought he was going to die about twenty scenes before he put bullets in the final villain. And, best of all, Ghost in the Shell goes further than any movie I can remember since Star Wars with regard to putting random, crazy, unexplained sci-fi shit in the background. They have holograms of women the size of skyscrapers doing weighted squats in their establishing shots. Part of me wishes the “story” (or whatever) was better. But a more real part of me just wants to watch like a hundred hours of this kind of thing, constantly going, “Whoa, did that woman just take her own face off?”