Maybe I had my hopes too high for this one. Like many other fans of the original material, this adaptation has intrigued me since the first trailers were available online, because it really looked nice visually, but, Is this movie worth to be part of the GitS universe?
- Short answer: Not really. Not even nice try.
- Long answer: The cinematography its truly remarkable, it somehow reproduce the atmosphere of the original anime, the decaying, depressing, dark megalopolis is correctly reproduced here (despite the giant weird advertisements that are spread around, that doesn't really make any sense, and didn't appear in the anime, what are they trying to sell?), the costumes, robots, and the general look and feel of the characters are quite satisfying and solid. The music is not bad at all, includes some of the original score and it work towards creating a dense and dark environment. The acting is standard, not bad at all. The script is.... ohhh boy, let me breath... to use nice words, the script seems to be written addressed to children or to very 'slow' people. All the rich complexity, all the mature and philosophical themes, all the sides of the story that the original material let out to be imagined by the viewer, all that is gone here. Here you can find a bland, generic script, that explain a generic origin story, that never tries to get into the philosophical or ethical implications of human body enhancements or AI. Where the characters are one-sided, good vs bad people. We are use to that over-simplification of a movie plot, since we sadly live in a world conquered by the 'marvel'/'batman' method of making a movie, where the plot should be simple and thin, the characters shouldn't have any grays and the action should be convoluted and confusing, full of minions to destroy for the sake of fill 100 minutes (well at least this adaptation has correct action scenes, that are easy to follow and most of the time are not annoying). To wrap up, a correct movie, that shines in the visual and action sides, but has a forgettable script and characters. It will probably perform good in the box office, and that worries me because what could come next, it will be really sad to see how they reduce Akira, Jin-roh, Evangelion or Cowboy bebbop to a generic action blockbuster without any of the things that made those stories great.