I watched this last night with my girlfriend.
Disappointed. If there's any crime a film can commit that's worse than being bad, it's being boring instead. This shouldn't have been a boring film but it was. I can appreciate someone finding plenty of merit in it, especially as a visual showcase, but as far as I'm concerned? - It's absolutely baffling how they managed to achieve something so bland and plodding in terms of story. It's definitely style over substance.
The bits that were good were basically only engaging because the visuals and design were pretty, or because the film was doing a shot-for-shot recreation of something from the original anime. But the visuals aren't consistent in being good either. It's one of those films where I can tell it's gonna age badly. There are times where it's absolutely beautiful, and times where it looks like a videogame cutscene. The opening was exciting, it matched with the original very closely, and with a new lifelike rendering - it also reminded me of the introduction to Westworld. So to begin with I was like - "okay, this is gonna be good!" Then, immediately after that strong visual and aural opening, the guy playing Cutter starts dropping some horrible on-the-nose dialog about her ghost being in a shell and the Major being a company owned weapon. My enthusiasm immediately began to wane. I quite liked the soundtrack, but there was something not quite right about the sound mix.
Kitano as the head of Section 9 was underused. Here's someone who has been a quiet, towering, twitching enigma in so many great films - and he's mainly used for awful radio chatter / mind-comms scenes. Both he and Scarlett Johansson come across as being deliberately directed to act in as wooden a way as possible. And I say that as someone who likes her too.
I liked Kuze. There were a couple of moments where they made him seem ominous, far reaching and dangerous. That really works in a story where you're going to make him more sympathetic later on, and they could have built on that a lot more. Having him take out the scientists and Hanka robotics engineers who worked on him was fine. The glitching memory aspect leading up to the memory reveal would have been okay if more capably executed. Ultimately though it just felt disjointed, flat and odd. The dialogue is awful, and as a screenplay it feels more like a cartoon than the original anime did! When they didn't have a creative cityscape to show us, or a gorgeously designed robot like the geishas, it looked like a TV show.
If you're brave enough to make some of the loud visual choices they made, you might as well be brave enough to play with the concepts at work and trust the viewers to be able to cope with much more dense material. It's not brave though. The Motoko reveal feels like a cop out compromise injected in to the film, like they were deathly afraid of the whitewashing accusation gaining traction.
At the end of the film, Major says:
”My mind is human. My body is manufactured. I am the first of my kind, but I won't be the last. We cling to memories as if they define us, but what we do defines us. My ghost survived to remind the next of us that humanity is our virtue. I know who I am, and what I'm here to do."
Unfortunately, the film didn't give me a real sense or understanding of what she felt she was here to do, and unfortunately, my memory of this experience is quite defining in a negative way.
The original anime isn't something I hold too close to my heart, I was willing to be quite forgiving, but it just feels like the people making it didn't care enough. The Wachowskis or somebody similarly invested would have (and could have) made a cinematic masterpiece out of this. It could have been a modern day Blade Runner. Instead it's forgettable, and I can't see myself ever watching it again. I hope Akira gets a better treatment.
Feels good.
