Post by ravenwithoutcause on Feb 3, 2005 14:40:45 GMT -5
I did not love Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence for any of the usual reasons. I didn't love it for its flashy visuals, though it certainly had them in spades. I did not love the movie for its visual inventiveness or great action scenes. I did not love this film for its cute basset hound, though the dog was a definite deal-maker. No, I actually loved Innocence for it sheer pretense; it is a movie that works painstakingly to communicate its high-minded central idea, and then presents it in as silly and overwrought a manner as possible. It's like Alphaville, a movie I'm fond of citing for its weird visual charm, giddy pseudo-intellectual dialogue, and glibly amusing protagonist-- only in Innocence, director Mamoru Oshii abandons the single protagonist from the first film completely, moving forward in the story and giving central roles to Batou and Togusa, two jaded Section 9 officers who trade quips like Lenny Briscoe and Ed Green on Law & Order.
Section 9 gets all kinds of juicy, high-tech cases, so Batou and Togusa are hardly alarmed when hooker-bots start murdering their johns and uttering cryptic cries for help before being destroyed. It's business as usual to start assembling the case and figuring out who's programming the pasty geisha-roids to kill their masters. But Togusa, even after years serving as a cop, is still coming to grips with his own frailty (he refuses to get the extensive cyborg replacement parts that officers like Batou have), and Batou can't stop thinking back to that time, years ago, when his old partner Major Kusanagi turned her back on her old life to merge with an AI and become an all-seeing, all-knowing virtual life form. Much of the movie's first half sees Oshii cementing the men's partnership, as they crisscross the city in Batou's stylishly vintage car; they're fond of throwing bits of philosophy and famous quotations at each other, an entertainingly pretentious gag. Oshii uses it so excessively that I kept waiting for Bartlett's Book of Quotations to fall out of Batou's coat pocket. It's like the guys are spending their downtime reading fortune cookies to each other.
Fortunately, the movie's midpoint is punctuated by the kind of insane, balls to the walls yakuza shootout that would have had Seijun Suzuki and Kinji Fukusaku trading high-fives in the audience. Just when you think it's all over, Oshii hilariously sneaks in a "boss" villain that looks like he was airlifted in from Oshii's Dallos, or perhaps some other cheeseball 1980s OVA. At that point, Batou and Togusa have an angle on the source of the murder-bots, and it's not long before they close in on the suspect and try to establish a motive. All the while, the two men ponder the nature of their humanity in the practically post-human age that Innocence inhabits.
In the pages of Giant Robot magazine, Hayao Miyazaki has noted that Mamoru Oshii ought to make a movie about his dog, since the director so obviously loves his pet. There's a strong case for Miyazaki's idea here, as Batou is frequently shown interacting with his pet basset hound, Gabriel. (Not surprisingly, Oshii also has a pet basset hound named Gabriel.) Oshii's depiction of the dog is the most consistently fun part of Innocence to watch-- he gives the animal the same sort of authentic-cartoon manner as Sylvain Chomet gave to the creaky, phlegmatic Bruno in The Triplets of Belleville. And using the dog, he really hammers home how a person like Batou can be a cyborg, yet still retain his humanity-- he may be made mostly of robot parts, but Gabriel still recognizes him instantly when he enters a room.
It's nice to see that Innocence easily retains the same cast from the original. I don't like Akio Ohtsuka all that much (his performance as Blackjack in the OVAs of the same name was a disservice to the character), but he does fine with Batou, and it's great to hear Koichi Yamadera back to his same snarky, world-weary self as Togusa. I was actually a little surprised that this film has been screening in subtitled form, as the original film was released to theatres dubbed. I'll assume that Richard Epcar will take up the fantastic reading of Batou he's been giving since the original film (he was also Batou in the Playstation game and TV series) once again, though I can only hope that Crispin Freeman, who's been so convincing as Togusa in the TV series, will be taking up the mantle again.
It's weird to think that the original Ghost in the Shell film is nine years old. It's a movie that I saw back when I was still new to anime fandom, so a great deal of the movie seemed fresh and new to me. Innocence, in many ways, follows its predecessor in grand fashion-- it really does look great for most of its runtime. Incredibly great. Insanely great. The only thing that tarnishes its greatness is that its cyberpunk settings have lost some of their luster-- the futuristic mishmash of neon Chinese characters and dingy shanty towns that Batou stalks through was compelling in 1995, but looks like par for the course these days. Also, while I can't get enough of the intellectual gymnastics that Oshii puts the characters through (I really dug how Maj. Kusunagi kept quoting Dawkins in the first movie), it's going to make them seem impenetrable and uncharismatic to anyone who doesn't pay very, very strict attention to the dialogue.
More than anything else, what strikes me as odd about Innocence is the fact that it's cost something like $18 million to produce. It's a good film, one worth watching again and again, but anime has always inhabited a realm of appealingly low budgets-- after all, the original GITS was eked out for $3 million. Innocence is excellent animation, but $18 million is an awful lot for a movie that bears little direct relation to its predecessor and that will probably alienate a lot of moviegoers with its pithy dialogue. Still, I'll take it.
Bottom line, a 8.5/10
Section 9 gets all kinds of juicy, high-tech cases, so Batou and Togusa are hardly alarmed when hooker-bots start murdering their johns and uttering cryptic cries for help before being destroyed. It's business as usual to start assembling the case and figuring out who's programming the pasty geisha-roids to kill their masters. But Togusa, even after years serving as a cop, is still coming to grips with his own frailty (he refuses to get the extensive cyborg replacement parts that officers like Batou have), and Batou can't stop thinking back to that time, years ago, when his old partner Major Kusanagi turned her back on her old life to merge with an AI and become an all-seeing, all-knowing virtual life form. Much of the movie's first half sees Oshii cementing the men's partnership, as they crisscross the city in Batou's stylishly vintage car; they're fond of throwing bits of philosophy and famous quotations at each other, an entertainingly pretentious gag. Oshii uses it so excessively that I kept waiting for Bartlett's Book of Quotations to fall out of Batou's coat pocket. It's like the guys are spending their downtime reading fortune cookies to each other.
Fortunately, the movie's midpoint is punctuated by the kind of insane, balls to the walls yakuza shootout that would have had Seijun Suzuki and Kinji Fukusaku trading high-fives in the audience. Just when you think it's all over, Oshii hilariously sneaks in a "boss" villain that looks like he was airlifted in from Oshii's Dallos, or perhaps some other cheeseball 1980s OVA. At that point, Batou and Togusa have an angle on the source of the murder-bots, and it's not long before they close in on the suspect and try to establish a motive. All the while, the two men ponder the nature of their humanity in the practically post-human age that Innocence inhabits.
In the pages of Giant Robot magazine, Hayao Miyazaki has noted that Mamoru Oshii ought to make a movie about his dog, since the director so obviously loves his pet. There's a strong case for Miyazaki's idea here, as Batou is frequently shown interacting with his pet basset hound, Gabriel. (Not surprisingly, Oshii also has a pet basset hound named Gabriel.) Oshii's depiction of the dog is the most consistently fun part of Innocence to watch-- he gives the animal the same sort of authentic-cartoon manner as Sylvain Chomet gave to the creaky, phlegmatic Bruno in The Triplets of Belleville. And using the dog, he really hammers home how a person like Batou can be a cyborg, yet still retain his humanity-- he may be made mostly of robot parts, but Gabriel still recognizes him instantly when he enters a room.
It's nice to see that Innocence easily retains the same cast from the original. I don't like Akio Ohtsuka all that much (his performance as Blackjack in the OVAs of the same name was a disservice to the character), but he does fine with Batou, and it's great to hear Koichi Yamadera back to his same snarky, world-weary self as Togusa. I was actually a little surprised that this film has been screening in subtitled form, as the original film was released to theatres dubbed. I'll assume that Richard Epcar will take up the fantastic reading of Batou he's been giving since the original film (he was also Batou in the Playstation game and TV series) once again, though I can only hope that Crispin Freeman, who's been so convincing as Togusa in the TV series, will be taking up the mantle again.
It's weird to think that the original Ghost in the Shell film is nine years old. It's a movie that I saw back when I was still new to anime fandom, so a great deal of the movie seemed fresh and new to me. Innocence, in many ways, follows its predecessor in grand fashion-- it really does look great for most of its runtime. Incredibly great. Insanely great. The only thing that tarnishes its greatness is that its cyberpunk settings have lost some of their luster-- the futuristic mishmash of neon Chinese characters and dingy shanty towns that Batou stalks through was compelling in 1995, but looks like par for the course these days. Also, while I can't get enough of the intellectual gymnastics that Oshii puts the characters through (I really dug how Maj. Kusunagi kept quoting Dawkins in the first movie), it's going to make them seem impenetrable and uncharismatic to anyone who doesn't pay very, very strict attention to the dialogue.
More than anything else, what strikes me as odd about Innocence is the fact that it's cost something like $18 million to produce. It's a good film, one worth watching again and again, but anime has always inhabited a realm of appealingly low budgets-- after all, the original GITS was eked out for $3 million. Innocence is excellent animation, but $18 million is an awful lot for a movie that bears little direct relation to its predecessor and that will probably alienate a lot of moviegoers with its pithy dialogue. Still, I'll take it.
Bottom line, a 8.5/10