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| Tuesday, December 11, 2007 12:18 AM |
| On the Viewer: Ghost in the Shell 2 |
 by Fëanor |
Can't say I was all that impressed with this one. It's the follow-up to the rather dazzling original anime about a machine woman who essentially evolves into something more, after fighting her way through a labyrinthine plot and killing a bunch of guys. This film picks up some time after the end of that one, and follows her former partner, a cold, hard cyborg cop, as he and a slightly less cold, slightly less hard, slightly more human partner investigate a series of incidents in which a new model of life-like robot has malfunctioned, killed people, and then self-destructed. The film then proceeds to intersperse scenes of rather half-assed philosophy, wherein the characters quote weird old sayings to each other, with scenes of extreme violence, all visualized via extremely impressive, fluid, realistic animation. There's also a surreal sequence where they keep reliving the same sequence of events over and over, but each time slightly different, as if they're trapped in a living nightmare. The plot itself doesn't go much of anywhere and isn't all that interesting, and the theme - which essentially questions whether things like machines and animals can be said to be alive and aware in the same way people are - is pretty old hat. Still, the film is visually amazing, the action scenes are pretty exciting, it reminds me a bit of Blade Runner, and the scenes where the cyborg cop interacts with his pet dog are seriously cute. It's an uneven flick, but I'm not sad I saw it. |
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