{"id":551,"date":"2017-03-31T13:36:32","date_gmt":"2017-03-31T17:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anthurian.com\/?p=551"},"modified":"2025-04-22T22:58:50","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T02:58:50","slug":"ghost-in-the-shell-is-a-huge-let-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anthurian.com\/staging\/551\/ghost-in-the-shell-is-a-huge-let-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghost in the Shell is a huge let-down"},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven’t been this disappointed since Episode 1. Thankfully there’s no Jar-Jar but the live-action version of “Ghost in the Shell” misses all of the philosophy and depth of the original. And the whitewashing<\/a>…good God. I won’t give any spoilers but they seem to have taken bits from the 1995 original, tossed in a bit of Innocence, shaken and stirred with some of the Stand Alone Complex characters (mixing Project 2501 — renamed to Project 2571, for some reason — with Kuze from SAC: 2nd Gig). I don’t understand why they didn’t just go with the original idea of Project 2501 being an American AI program that gained sentience and is now seeking asylum in a robot\/cyborg body. And the original Kuze was trying to get refugees to leave their corporeal bodies behind to join their souls\/minds in cyberspace. There was so much wasted opportunity; you can almost hear the dropped plotlines thud as they hit the cutting-room floor.<\/p>\n

They never explored Togusa’s lack of cybernetic enhancement and why the Major wants a human on the team.<\/p>\n

Saito gets a brief nod but no backstory.<\/p>\n

They did get the actor choices right for Batou, Togusa, and Chief Aramaki, though. And Batou has a basset hound (a nod to “Innocence” and Momoru Oshii’s need to insert basset hounds in nearly all of his films).<\/p>\n

I was already setting my expectations low<\/a> knowing that a lot of the scenes from the original GitS film were copied (almost verbatim) in The Matrix and any copycat sci-fi film made since 1995. But they didn’t quite do justice to the original source material, either. “The entire film takes a dump on every cool, intriguing, and subtle concept in the 1995 film.<\/a>”<\/p>\n

So yeah…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven’t been this disappointed since Episode 1. Thankfully there’s no Jar-Jar but the live-action version of “Ghost in the Shell” misses all of the philosophy and depth of the original. And the whitewashing…good God. I won’t give any spoilers but they seem to have taken bits from the 1995 original, tossed in a bit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekdom","category-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthurian.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthurian.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthurian.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthurian.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthurian.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/anthurian.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3870,"href":"https:\/\/anthurian.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions\/3870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anthurian.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthurian.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anthurian.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}