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Moving this over from General Chat.SuperMechagodzilla posted:As noted in the official thread, this is a straight-up Malcom X reference. She makes a conscious choice not to 'go back to her origin' as a lame "gently caress you, mom!" wastoid anarchist after she loses her slave name, but instead chooses to become this universal "X". Something alien. I don't know if it's quite a Malcolm X thing, since she didn't pick the name for herself. The name/title Major was given to her by Section 9. I think it's more that she was given this dual fake identity: Major Mira Killian, and decided to keep the part of it, the Major, that she associates with the people who actually care about her. Ghost in the Shell separates out the augmentation/robotics company from the security company as compared to RoboCop. But her signing onto that identity, and the job that comes with it, because the people were personally nice to her doesn't sit easily with me. Darth Vader at least took out the corrupt Jedi order. And there's the idea that the Emperor actually means something as an individual. Whereas the executive that gets killed in Ghost in the Shell is just one bad dude.
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Apr 4, 2017 02:13
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Sir Kodiak posted:Most people in the world of the film don't have cybernetic eyes yet and, even if they did, there would be value in making things visible as part of actual reality, not something you have to convince people to view. Well, sure, some of them don't have cybernetic eyeballs. Most of those are just jacked in 24/7 and not looking at fundamentally meaningless images designed for a helicopter shot. The reason HYPER-REALITY is interesting and Ghost in the Shell isn't is because HYPER-REALITY is speculating on functionality and showing you things that have clear basis for existing--by those facts themselves making social commentary. Despite the fact that we have Adblock and pop-ups are no longer "topical," they are seeping back in through the cracks because the Internet can't survive without them. The Internet is re-distributing this old 90's idea through your phone (which serves you pop-ups constantly) with an artificial "gig"-based socialization. Everyone is making comments everywhere that no one else ever reads, and an entire generation is growing up on points-based validation based on nothing, that signifies nothing, and is just a thin veneer over your shame. Ghost in the Shell isn't talking about anything different; in GitS people just attempt to derive personal validation, however unsuccessfully, from physical artificiality. Everyone in this movie is ready to endorse and accept ascension into godhood, but the representation of that is just weaksauce--people saying they are ready. There's no intoxicating element to it, everyone just says it's intoxicating because that's the level this movie operates at. You can install the French language in your children, even though the Internet already grants you telepathy. You can get an artificial liver to sustain drinking binges, even though that won't do anything about alcohol poisoning. In its stupidity, GitS '17 confuses this for the technological dysphoria it thinks that it is about. Mostly it's just "thought-provoking" pieces of concept art edited together badly. quote:Like, why do billboards exist when you can't read them up close? Doesn't make sense. Actually, you can, and they're more informative than this alternative at any distance, too!
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Apr 4, 2017 02:46
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I thought the movie was entertaining but left me wanting. Like this future city has huge skyscrapers and there's callbacks to the 1995 film with shots showing the huge apartment complexes, but where are the people in this metropolis? The streets are not bumper-to-bumper with cars and the sidewalks are not crammed with more folks going about their lives. I think how the film addressed the whitewashing is... Interesting. That said, I think they should have been more faithful to the manga/1995 movie and had The Major's body severely damaged from the fight with the spider tank, to the point her ghost gets put in a completely different body. African male? Twelve-year old Hispanic girl? Why not? You already established the outer shell doesn't have to match the original ghost.
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Apr 4, 2017 02:52
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dont even fink about it posted:Well, sure, some of them don't have cybernetic eyeballs. Most of those are just jacked in 24/7 and not looking at fundamentally meaningless images designed for a helicopter shot. It's not so much telepathy as just next-generation subvocal mics. I'm pretty sure Takeshi Kitano is still broadcasting in Japanese, such that that they need to understand it to to be able to communicate with them. The movie is not opposed to the concept of artificial livers or machines to aid with learning and does not use the existence of such things as a basis for indicating a dysphoria. Your jump from ads on mobile devices (note: ad block is moving there) to "artificial 'gig'-based socialization" is bizarre. The latter seems like a mash-up of two different ideas, and neither of them having anything to do with implying a future in which people choose to live in a world that looks like this:  Or use interfaces that look like this: 
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Apr 4, 2017 03:16
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Sir Kodiak posted:Moving this over from General Chat. There is a lot implied in the ending. The presumably-illegal execution of the CEO implies that Beat Takeshi is now using Section 9's status as a counterterrorism organization as cover for anti-corporate subterfuge. Better, we could read it as a sort of overidentification with the counterterrorist cause; what, after all, is the root cause of terrorism if not these Tony Stark motherfuckers? (Another plus for the writing: the subtle irony that HANSA Corp literally did kill Mira's parents with a terror attack - like Day Of Reckoning!) And since Major is repaired at the end, I'd go so far as to presume that HANSA Corp got nationalized after Cutter was cast into the void. The film doesn't end with full communism now, but the idea is there. Nothing in the 1995 film is as brutal or succinct as the image of the black prostitute who dolls herself up with (white) plastic lips because she can't afford a bionic throat. 2017 is legit scary in parts, without needing an R.
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Apr 4, 2017 03:19
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Android Apocalypse posted:I thought the movie was entertaining but left me wanting. Like this future city has huge skyscrapers and there's callbacks to the 1995 film with shots showing the huge apartment complexes, but where are the people in this metropolis? The streets are not bumper-to-bumper with cars and the sidewalks are not crammed with more folks going about their lives. It was pretty dense when they were in the bits shot around SoHo and Causeway Bay, and sparse in the bits shot around Lai Tak Tsuen, which is representative of the real locations. You don't really get the shoulder the shoulder density on the street that Blade Runner predicted unless you're in a touristy spot like Mong Kok, or if you take a photo at the exaaaact right moment at one of the busier crosswalks.
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Apr 4, 2017 03:24
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Junior Jr. posted:Well what do you know, GITS only made $18M this weekend and IGN are already calling the shots this flopped hard. I'm sure Hollywood has learned its lesson. Going forward, instead of casting white actors in asian roles in anime adaptations, they will just not make anime adaptions.
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Apr 4, 2017 03:28
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General Dog posted:I'm sure Hollywood has learned its lesson. Going forward, instead of casting white actors in asian roles in anime adaptations, they will just not make anime adaptions.
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Apr 4, 2017 03:31
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:There is a lot implied in the ending. The presumably-illegal execution of the CEO implies that Beat Takeshi is now using Section 9's status as a counterterrorism organization as cover for anti-corporate subterfuge. It's definitely notable that it avoids the RoboCop solution of killing the executive in an act of self defense. He's just straight-up executed and specifically on Major's orders. And, yeah, Hansa seems to have been cut out of things, leaving just the government organization, now in full control of the combat technology. I wish we saw anything about the mission we were leaving them with, though. Feels ambiguous to me just what their future is. This works with RoboCop because we saw the way that Murphy's prosecution of his job led him inherently to the corporation. Unless I'm misremembering, Major didn't get to Cutter as part of an official investigation. Agreed on the prostitute. The production design and costuming was all fantastic.
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Apr 4, 2017 03:32
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So what was Section 9's tie with Hanka? Did they specifically commission a robot cop to be designed, or did Hanka just approach them and say, "hey, we'd like to field test this lady terminator, would you like to give her a spin?"? Either way they're fairly complicit, either in that they had an idea of what was going on, or at least didn't do their due diligence when it was well within their ability to do so. I thought it was kind of weird that that never came into play.
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Apr 4, 2017 03:39
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Sir Kodiak posted:
This isn't even theoretical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EvNxWhskf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyRJG2rrw0E
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Apr 4, 2017 03:44
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If you want something that's actually good and cool that deals with AR, check out Denno Coil.
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Apr 4, 2017 03:46
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dont even fink about it posted:This isn't even theoretical. What's the timestamp on those videos where someone has a few dozen graphics floating in front of them, most of them advertising elements forced upon them? I'm not denying the basic concept of a heads-up display.
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Apr 4, 2017 03:47
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Sir Kodiak posted:What's the timestamp on those videos where someone has a few dozen graphics floating in front of them, most of them advertising elements forced upon them? I'm not denying the basic concept of a heads-up display. The fact that you can't distinguish advertising from information means you're already lost, buddy.
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Apr 4, 2017 03:52
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dont even fink about it posted:The fact that you can't distinguish advertising from information means you're already lost, buddy. A video about this distinction could be interesting. Instead, Hyper-Reality shows a blatant advertisement for Silky Soymilk hovering in the air.
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Apr 4, 2017 03:55
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Sir Kodiak posted:Unless I'm misremembering, Major didn't get to Cutter as part of an official investigation. Major wasn't, but Beat Takeshi definitely was. The ending here is much closer to that of Robocop 2014, where the robocop technology is likewise nationalized. But there's a key difference: 2014's Robocop is programmed solely to enforce the law, which gives that ending a fascist bent. He can only fight 'criminals', and can't do anything about legal forms of injustice. Major has no such limitation. She's an avatar of Justice beyond mere legality.
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Apr 4, 2017 04:09
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Major wasn't, but Beat Takeshi definitely was. Was he? I'm not remembering that bit, which doesn't mean it didn't happen.
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Apr 4, 2017 04:16
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Sir Kodiak posted:A video about this distinction could be interesting. Instead, Hyper-Reality shows a blatant advertisement for Silky Soymilk hovering in the air. Without being flip, the point is that the ads in Hyper-Reality are obscenely obtrusive to you and I; but they've been normalized to the person receiving them, and intermixed with information she actually needs to do her job as a disassociated serf. It's probably worth noting also that most Internet users are not power-users like presumably you and I; even with Adblock supposedly being ubiquitous, it's estimated that only 10% of browsers are using it. Your grandma's virus-infested botnet contribution is more the norm. Today's Silicon Valley CEOs very much have their eye on the third-world market depicted in Hyper-Reality. Google Glass failed because it was perceived as too obvious a gateway into voyeurism, and was also defeated by its own poor marketing. It might have been different if they could have communicated out ways to enhance your driving experience or your grocery shopping, and foreseen the objections. Speaking as a person who worked on Field Trip (one of those two Google ads), it was conceived as a competitor to Yelp, not what it was advertised as--an AR tour guide. The tour guide was just a component to justify getting the rest of it fed to you. Successor attempts at the hyper-connectivity of Google Glass (Alexa) have already emerged. Perversion of the supposed functionality is inevitable.
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Apr 4, 2017 04:38
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dont even fink about it posted:It's probably worth noting also that most Internet users are not power-users like presumably you and I; even with Adblock supposedly being ubiquitous, it's estimated that only 10% of browsers are using it. Your grandma's virus-infested botnet contribution is more the norm. It's rising rapidly and the feature set of power users is where this technology keeps going. Grandma's ignorance is going to die with her. Anyways, the plausibility of that particular video is an irrelevant tangent of the point that the world of Ghost in the Shell doesn't assume that everyone is wired in like that and complaining about the holograms being inconsistent with a world the movie doesn't depict is silly.
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Apr 4, 2017 05:01
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Sir Kodiak posted:It's rising rapidly and the feature set of power users is where this technology keeps going. Grandma's ignorance is going to die with her. I've demonstrated that this is not the case by pointing out how this problem endemic to connectivity is advancing to match our supposed mastery of it. And that's not even getting into truly malicious phenomena that are also increasing in complexity. quote:Anyways, the plausibility of that particular video is an irrelevant tangent of the point that the world of Ghost in the Shell doesn't assume that everyone is wired in like that and complaining about the holograms being inconsistent with a world the movie doesn't depict is silly. Actually, the world of Ghost in the Shell explicitly states that--your inattentiveness and unfamiliarity with the subject matter is showing.
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Apr 4, 2017 05:14
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I got real Equilibrium flashbacks from this movie, in the sense that it looked and felt a lot better than it actually was, was similarly overwrought and self-serious, and I ultimately really enjoyed the movie in spite of itself, and its obvious flaws.
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Apr 4, 2017 05:14
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dont even fink about it posted:I've demonstrated that this is not the case by pointing out how this problem endemic to connectivity is advancing to match our supposed mastery of it. And that's not even getting into truly malicious phenomena that are also increasing in complexity. What's "this problem" in your sentence? Grandma? What in the movie am I missing? I don't recall anything showing the typical person having cybereyes.
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Apr 4, 2017 05:21
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This is getting silly, because people are operating under the weird premise that the ads are only visible from the air. The ads are plainly visible to the poorer communities living on the other side of the bay, whose apartments face this distant skyline. The ads are also visible to people on the street, looking out of skyscraper windows, driving along the elevated freeways, and so-on. We have like dozens of shots of characters walking near these very-readable ads. Sir Kodiak posted:Was he? I'm not remembering that bit, which doesn't mean it didn't happen. When he comes to arrest Cutter, he says he's there on behalf of the government. But when Cutter pulls the gun, Takeshi presumably uses that as an excuse for the execution. The other possible interpretation is that Takeshi was under orders to assassinate Cutter the whole time, but either way.
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Apr 4, 2017 05:24
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I feel like the ads being, of course, readable in various pedestrian-level shots is a separate point.SuperMechagodzilla posted:When he comes to arrest Cutter, he says he's there on behalf of the government. But when Cutter pulls the gun, Takeshi presumably uses that as an excuse for the execution. He maneuvers himself to being there as part of his job. There isn't the clarity as in the RoboCop reboot of Murphy following the chain from a murder up to organized crime, to police corruption, then to the CEO. Even if it's Murphy's murder, it didn't have to be. There's a sense that the CEO being found out is inextricable from his quest for justice. Ghost in the Shell has everyone operating purely based on personal motivations. It makes it hard for me to see her as an avatar of some abstraction.
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Apr 4, 2017 05:35
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Just watched this movie and realized they literally white-washed the Major. LOL!
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Apr 4, 2017 06:37
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I've mentioned it before, but when you're in a city as vertical as not-Hong Kong those ultra tall ads are perfectly visible from the other skyscrapers as well as from across the Bay. Hong Kong already has skyscrapper sized ads, as well as billboards on top of the skyscrappers for that reason. The hotel the Major dives off of in the intro uses the Times Square mall as it's it's plate, which is right next to another vertical mall and several hotels in real life. As a result, the buildings around it have giant ground to roof ads, some even being massive video screens, perfectly visible to the shoppers and tourists inside those buildings. It they could be holographic, they would be, and it would look just as it does in this film. The elevated highways added to HK in this film add even more opportunities for high elevation advertising.
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Apr 4, 2017 07:16
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is getting silly, because people are operating under the weird premise that the ads are only visible from the air. As Bugblatter already pointed out, if you've been to Hong Kong you'll realize they already have ads on the entire sides of skyscrapers for the same purpose, and do a bunch of weird lighting and laser show poo poo that doesn't look like anything from below but is visible across the bay. This isn't speculative, the billboards are just holograms now cause it looks cool. edit: lol I could have just refreshed and seen him repeating himself
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Apr 4, 2017 07:27
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Well, point taken, the projections are plausibly visible to others.
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Apr 4, 2017 09:51
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Did she even hack to control anything in this movie? I always thought that was a big part of GITS. In 95 she took control of the car from Togusa, SAC she made Batou punch himself, New Movie hallway fight, Innocence loving with the Yakuza's vision. It seems like all she did was flippy gun fu and trace Kuzes location.
gohmak fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Apr 4, 2017 |
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Apr 4, 2017 15:41
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I don't remember RoboCop hacking anything in the original...
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Apr 4, 2017 15:45
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gohmak posted:Did she even hack to control anything in this movie? I always thought that was a big part of GITS. In 95 she took control of the car from Togusa, SAC she made Batou punch himself, New Movie hallway fight. Does the Robo Geisha count? I thought the film looked and sounded really great. The server room full of monks was a really neat image, in particular. Takeshi Kitano's two action scenes in this are easily the highlights of the movie, though. That dude just exudes charisma. Snak posted:I don't remember RoboCop hacking anything in the original... Yeah, the plot was way too close to RoboCop. Kind of makes Ghost in the Shell seems like a very expensive ripoff.
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Apr 4, 2017 15:51
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What is it called when German characters are replaced with Japanese characters? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azPVumixZuE
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Apr 4, 2017 16:03
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I don't have anything against the "origin story" aspect of it, but they didn't commit to it. Not counting the Geisha begging for her life, there are 3 main plot hooks going on in this movie, and it barely explores any of them because it's so busy shoving visual references to the original in... I just I'll just chuck a spoiler block here: The main bullet points of the "origin" plot, how (the?) Major became who she is, are really generic. This is the plot that is most explored in the film. They don't do a bad job, and it works out okay. But it's still pretty generic and not very interesting on its own. The not-puppeteer plot/highlights from 1995 story: Well, there it is. Except in the 1995 movie, the Puppeteer was a big focus in the movie. It worked really well having established badass Major Kusanagi facing off against something that literally transcended her human enemies and showed her the next step in finding meaning in her existence. This film replaces that with... finding the character that she is at the beginning of ever other version of GitS. Which I guess is technically a good way to tie these two plots together, but the lack of development of the Puppeteer character (Yes, I know he's 'Kuze' in this movie, more on that below) really robs the climax of any weight. Hideo Kuze. My favorite GitS antagonist and subject of an entire season of the series... Putting that aside to judge this film as its own merits... What is his motivation? And what are his methods? They don't make any sense. The characterization that relates to the plot is, again, the most generic "revenge on his creators" villain poo poo ever. He want's to kill everyone who worked on his project because ??? They were mean to him? Okay. Fine. They were. He's pretty much justified. That's fine. Generic and done a hundred times this decade, but fine. So what's the purpose of building "his own network"? Like, they say it's what's giving him super powers and some kind of immortality. But... like, wasn't "his network" all those guys plugged into those cables that they found? Probably they took that down. Like, the "liberated" that facility. At the very least they probably killed or unplugged all those dudes. It's one thing to establish "Kuze is the villain. He want's revenge. He built [a thing] that gives him super powers". But they find the [thing] almost immediately and it's never mentioned or relevant again. So... why is it in the movie? Well, back to the source material... that's what Hideo Kuze does... he's a pseudo-religious messiah that unites people in cyberspace. That only reason you would invoke his name is if you were gonna make a reference to that. So they do. And then because that's not really part of their plot, they drop it. It's completely baffling to me why they bothered to use Hideo Kuze as a character and then just have him be the Puppeteer. If they weren't so fixated on including so many aspects of the 1995 plot, they could have made a perfectly decent movie with the pieces they had. Kuze and Motoko being friends before they were both abducted into the 25XX project is fine. I don't care that it's different from the source material. Right before he dies, Kuze says "I will always be with you. In your ghost". This is really similar to what happens in the series. Because of Kuze's network being this transhuman digital spiritually unifying deal. It's kind of a big thing. But is no scene in the movie where the Major joins his network and experiences this communion. They aren't even linked at the end! There's almost a really good movie here, but it's lacking a lot that actually makes the Kuze storyline work. Mom Kusanagi is much more emotionally climactic than anything that happens with Kuze. I feel like they took two major GitS stories and burned both of them at once without doing either justice. Also the garbage truck guy makes no sense in this. In the original, he is ghost hacked (a phrase they never use in the movie because they don't know how to use the term ghost and it just comes out super awkward), to have this false identity. The reason that The Puppeteer does this is because it's using him to hack poo poo as a proxy. The garbage man believes that he is using payphones to hack his unfaithful wife, but actually his wife does not exist and he's hacking the government. In this movie, he gets hacked to just become an assassin (which also happens in the original) but... why was he given fake memories before that? The payphone hacking plot point doesn't exist in this movie. So... what? Why does he have false memories? It's because they wanted to do that iconic scene from the original, even though they didn't bother to make it fit in this story. tl;dr: I don't really have any problem with differences from the source material, but I feel like they didn't commit to any aspect of the story and the movie suffered for it. also while I may have reacted with loud glee when Saito was revealed out of nowhere as a deus ex machina, I can only imagine how dumb that seemed to someone not familiar with GitS. A character that has literally not been in the movie or mentioned at all shows up for literally 8 seconds and saves the day and is never seen or mentioned again. Like, if you aren't a fan of GitS and don't know that that character exists and expect them to show up in the movie, I don't see how that scene plays as anything but lovely. Also, Kuze is Henry from Dawson's Creek. Snak fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Apr 4, 2017 |
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Apr 4, 2017 16:25
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Vintersorg posted:What is it called when German characters are replaced with Japanese characters? Aren't they Amestrians
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Apr 4, 2017 16:35
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Vintersorg posted:What is it called when German characters are replaced with Japanese characters? I think that's just called industry standard. Who actually uses German actors to play Germans? edit: Looking at the wikipedia entry, it seems pretty likely that they're fantasy Dutch. (Van Hohenheim. Also, that shouldn't be a first name.) That's the thing. The only plot line they develop properly is taken from RoboCop. The film basically comments on RoboCop by switching the details around, but it has gently caress all to do with Ghost in the Shell. Those elements are just window dressing. And More fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Apr 4, 2017 |
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Apr 4, 2017 16:37
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Also, yeah, the usage of the term "ghost" was totally botched in this movie. Like, they tried to use it just as a standin for "soul" in the eay that the average viewer might understand it, which just made it seem awkward as gently caress. Like every time the used it, they were just trying to justify the title of the movie somehow. In the GitS universe, a "ghost" is your essence, but also in codified digital way. They don't just use it in weird like "ur still ur ghost, major!" They constantly reference ghosts in technical conversation. "This guy has been ghost hacked" "There is a ghost still present in this cyberbrain" "Project 2501 seems to have a ghost even though it's an AI" And this script seemed tk be afraid of using it that way, but the alternative was much hokier. They shouldn't have used the term at all. What a bunch of weirdos. In a universe where ghost doesn't mean what it normally does in GitS, who talks like that? If they had never said poo poo like "It's still ur ghost inside this... shell", people still would have got what the title meant. Especially considering that in this version she's practically the actual ghost of a dead girl.
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Apr 4, 2017 16:46
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Snak posted:Also, yeah, the usage of the term "ghost" was totally botched in this movie. The fact is that she's, as you say, a shell being haunted by a dead girl is what makes the term "ghost" correct. The doctor stumbles over the word "soul" because it's hard to see how the soul of an anti-technology anarchist has been preserved in this government kill-bot. She says mind, but that's wrong, because they rewrote her mind. She says soul, but that's wrong, because they changed even her most basic values. She ends on "ghost" because it acknowledges that Motoko is dead. This may be different than how it is in the cartoons, but it's a reasonable use of the English word "ghost".
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Apr 4, 2017 16:55
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The doctor using it kind if makes sense, sure, but Aramaki? Kuze? Their usages seem awkward because they are more in line with what "ghost" usually refers to in GitS.
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Apr 4, 2017 16:58
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Yeah, I don't remember the specific examples, but I think they were a bit clunkier about it. I was just talking about the doctor.
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Apr 4, 2017 17:01
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I just feel like it felt out of place and awkward, trying to put myself in the shoes of someone not familiar with GitS. I really liked this movie, despite all of its issues. But a big part of that is because I'm a die hard GitS fan and I'm used to seeing different versions of GitS and the visual references. When I try to out myself in the shoes of someone who doesn't see the movie as a "greatest hits" of material I'm already familiar with, it falls apart even worse.
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Apr 4, 2017 17:04
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