Disclaimer- I have not seen the original anime, any of the other anime, read the manga, and I don't care about them. I went in knowing nothing except for what I saw in the trailers.

This movie is a piece of crap. It's amazingly bad. It's been a while since I saw something this terribly incompetent, and if this isn't the worst movie of the year, then we're in for some reall shit later on.

It's one of the top contenders for the worst written movie I've ever seen. The dialogue is so bad I still can't believe it. It's so stiff, unnatural and constantly force-feeding the audience the movie's "themes" it's downright painfull to sit through, and there's a lot of it. There are so many scenes that are nothing but just the characters talking again and again in the most awkward manner possible about how Major's cybernetic body is a shell, but her ghost is still human, and again and again, just in case you didn't get the title. Also, for some reason one character speaks japanese, but no one else does, even in conversations with him. Because.

The action isn't much better. Honestly, contrary to what the traielrs might lead you to believe, this movie isn't that good visually. It's chaoutic and cluttered, rarely allowing to take in the sights, and those are not really that great. On technical level maybe, but technicly well done as they may be, there is not much interesting, striking or beautiful things to see. The cinematography is bland and the action scenes are rather poorly shot. Some scenes, possibly the most interesting ones visually, seem to exist for no reason, don't make much sense in context, as if a quarter of the movie was left on the cutting room floor.

Despite the fact the movie is supposed to be all about the main characters identity, we never really learn much about her. At the end, even though she regains her memories, we still don't know anything about her as a person, have no reason to care, and nothing really changes for her- we leave her exactly as we found her, despite all the supposed revelations. Given the terrible script the actors have nothing to work with, and Johansson gives one of her weakest performances, though I can't really blame her, as she goes through the entire movie with the same face of "I'm kinda sad". There never seem to be any real stakes, and the characters are so bland there is nothing to care for in the movie at all, and annoying plot holes abound. Even the futuristic technology is annoyingly inconsistant.

Avoid this movie like the plague. Avoid it like a Katy Perry concert.

There is a legitimate chance he would have done better. I am not kidding. In the Name of The King and Bloodrayne are honest to god better than this.

Tsk, tsk, tsk, shame on you ;-P
There's also a nice revised version from 2008. Alas, that's the real shame. The movie would have deserved better, but after seeing the terrible cast pick, I was pretty sure it'll fail. A shame, really.

That's an interesting point.

Breja!!! Did the casting contribute to how bad it is or did it not really matter?
In your review it sounds like the casts might have been the least of their worries, like complaining about a leaky faucet on the Titanic.

Not in the slightest, at least for me. For one, no actress could have salvaged this. The script and the direction make it downright impossible. I consider Scarlet Johansson to be a good actress, the only thing wrong with her casting here is how painfully obvious it is she is wasting her time.

Also, and here I have to go into major (heh heh) SPOILERS:


There is actually a "twist" explanation of the infamous "whitewashing", in whish it turns out that the character was actually asian and named Kusanagi before she was turned into a cyborg. The change of her name and appearance was part of creating a fake identity for her after taking away her memories. And while I know some are even more aoutraged at that, it actually is one of the few, if not the only element I didn't have a problem with. Given what was done to her, it made sense to me. They wanted to detach her from her previous identity as far as poosible and manipulate her sense of identity.

Ultimately however none of that matters one way or the other. Like I said, she has as little identity at the beginning of the movie as she has at the end, and I can't imagine how having an asian actress would have improved anything.

That is the vibe I got. :P

I will probably watch this on TV eventually but I'm not driving 100 miles for a movie unless it has "Episode VIII" in the title.

If that was the case, Natasha Malthe would be Kusanagi... and I would be okay with that. At least she has Asian ancestry compared to Scar Jo. :P

So, are you ready for Ghost in the Shell Episode VIII? (They decided to skip 2 through 7.)

Good call dt. XD

You think Hollywood would stop here ?

Just look at the trailer of Deathnote.

They messed up every single main character from the manga.

You can count on Hollywood to destroy every Japanese masterpiece ever released including the Dragonball Z film.

I watched it today. Due to unforeseen circumstances I had to watch it dubbed, but the dub was generally good, save for a few terms that sounded a bit too long and unconventional for the amount of times they were repeated.

Funny thing, though: I can see where all of your criticism comes from, seriously, but most of those things didn't really bother me that much.

I enjoyed the movie a lot for what it is and was actually relieved that:

A) it doesn't try to directly adapt the 95 movie, the manga or Stand Alone Complex.
B) Despite all of the Hollywood cliches it adds to the story, they didn't fuck up Section 9's camaraderie.

Yes, it lacks subtlety, and a lot of the narrative techniques it tries to use are done so in such a clumsy way that they end up causing minor plot holes. I think all the emotional scenes fall completely flat due to how poorly timed and arranged they are. And while the visuals are great, they never know when they need to be subdued or properly organized, causing it to feel like clutter very often.

(And I don't think I'd have noticed so much stuff, if I hadn't watched a bunch of youtube videos from Every Frame a Painting some weeks ago. Funny how it affected my response to the movie without me thinking too much about it)

Because of the dub, I can't really judge the acting all that well, but visually the actors didn't seem bad to me. Aramaki was the only one undubbed like it's supposed to be (the movie explains on its first minutes that everyone can learn multiple languages easily, when a character comments that his 4 year old daughter learned perfect french instantly, to justify Aramaki speaking japanese) and he was okay, though he felt more like "Beat Takeshi's badass persona" than Aramaki to me, which isn't necessarily bad (we generally expect certain acting personalities from certain actors), but this made he feel less attached to his team than the manga/95 movie/SAC counterparts even though the script actually observed this characteristic of Aramaki.

I also loved how they replaced Batou's fondness of his Fuchikomas/Tachikomas for a fondness of dogs. Worked very well for the character.

Anyway, T.L.D.R.: I enjoyed the movie a lot, even though it's clumsy as hell and occasionally blatantly bad.

I have an IMAX ticket for tomorrow. Can't wait.

As it happens, today they just showed "Lucy" movie here on TV, which is about Scarlett Johansson becoming kind of a superhuman who can do pretty much anything with her overpowered mind... I just kept thinking how come Scarlett is now scoring futuristic action flick main roles all the time where she has superhuman powers? I used to remember her being in some romantic roles before mostly, now she is (supposed to be) so bad-ass.

I didn't like Lucy that much either. Now, I am not a brain surgeon or anything, but I just didn't find it very believable that taking some drug that lets you use more capacity of your brains gives you superhuman powers that defy the laws of physics and shit.

I think it's her role as Black Widow in the Marvel Universe movies that opened those doors, kinda like Taken suddenly made Liam Neeson into the go-to action movie bad-ass. Only he got (mostly) way better movies out of that.