Walking on egg shells

Although I'm not a particularly devout follower of Easter traditions (by which I mean I don't celebrate Zombie Jesus Day with either prayer or confectionery) I am however loathe to let the opportunity for a good pun go begging. It therefore seems entirely appropriate that as I have a customary, mandatory day off work for ostensibly religious purposes that I don't buy into, I'm going to lay (ha!) into a movie with a tenuous link to the season in its title.

Way back in the mists of time, I posted about a few of the bigger profile trailers I'd subjected myself to. I'm not going to say I was struggling for content, but it was early days and I hadn't really got into the swing of things. One of those trailers got my back up based almost entirely on how utterly pointless an exercise it seemed to be. Ghost in the Shell. I warned you it was tenuous.

It's a dangerous business remaking classic movies as it stands; fan boys and girls have developed from mildly disgruntled fanzine producers working out of their basements into keyboard warriors extraordinaire with much more of a reach. Some of them even count as minor celebrities apparently. Unfathomable. Regardless of whether they should, they hold a lot more sway than they used to and a poor reaction to a YouTube trailer can bury your movie. Anime fans are among the more rabid and unforgiving on t'interwebs, so remaking a bona fide anime classic is going to be risky business at best. And that brings us to Ghost in the Shell.

There's a lot of anime to draw from here; at least 3 movies and a couple of episodic series all based on the same characters. I'll freely admit that I haven't watched all of those, but the original film is a firm favourite of mine so applying logic and reason I made the assumption that they would probably start there and incorporate parts of the canon as they went. We all know where assumptions leave us; paddle-less up a certain creek is where.
If I'm going to be complimentary at all, I will concede that this version is very pretty. The city, the character design, the overall graphical content is all handled really well. Some of the scenes are shot-for-shot (which I'll get to later) and as impressive a feat as that seems initially, when you think about is it really? Is recreating effects in a computer really an accomplishment when the original hand-animations are genuinely incredible? You can try and convince me that programming a series of algorithms is as artful as hand drawing all those flakes of plastic skin floating away from her body, but frankly, like recalcitrant teenagers and drunken tramps, it just doesn't wash.

I have a long-standing theory about scripts in the Hollywood system. I keep watching movies and get a strange feeling in the back of my mind that something is amiss. Not the heroic levels of intuition displayed by the denizens of Lassie's home town (how many times do kids need to fall down wells before they cover them over anyway? It's just irresponsible) but nevertheless I often find myself wondering if the film I'm watching wasn't destined to be something else. Ghost in the Shell gave me exactly that feeling; the plot is far enough from the original (except for one or two set pieces that they've crowbarred in at various random spots) it makes me wonder if someone picked up a fairly bog-standard Sci-fi script somewhere and decided it had enough potential similarities that they could slap some logos on the poster, attach the right character names to the dialogue and boom! There’s your remake.

So we get Major's origin/creation scene, we sort of get the hotel shoot out, an abridged garbage truck chase, a variation on the interrogation that follows, a much less philosophical diving scene and the Spider Tank makes an appearance, some of which is shot for shot as I mentioned earlier. It's all very well and good, pat on the back for the FX department, crack out the party hats, here's a slice of cake. Problem is that because they don't follow the same plot there's this weird juxtaposition going on; if you know the original, it's just really jarring. The way this updated version plays out is more like a weird mix of Robocop and I-Robot, with the pseudo-philosophical bullshit from Batman Returns (lest we forget, it's not who we are that defines us, it's what we do apparently. I'm not convinced you can separate those actually but I really don't have time for that discussion) and a nice generic line in government paranoia/cybernetic amnesia and double dealings all round. In fact almost everywhere the original felt fresh and exciting, the remake feels laboured and tired. There's nothing here that expands or improves on anything we've seen in modern Sci-Fi; it's just old ground being trodden by sore feet. Assuming cyborg feet get sore. You know what I mean.

The easiest way to sum this up is that Ghost in the Shell doesn't give any credit to its audience. The whole thing seems like an exercise in dumbing things down. We're not five minutes in before we get a clumsy explanation of what a ghost is, just in case you couldn't work it out yourself and you were expecting there to be poltergeists or Casper running around in the background hacking into people's cybernetically enhanced brains to make friends with them or something. We can't just accept that Batou has enhanced eyes; we have to see them being put in because I assume there was a general fear that test audiences everywhere wouldn't be able to work out where he got his cool sunglasses from. We have to be told that the team has switched to "mind comms" presumably because I wouldn't be able to use my initiative when they're talking without moving their lips and instantly try and add it to IMDB as a goof. Of course the bad guy isn’t all he seems; that whole “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” debate gets wheeled out again, which could have been quite provocative in today’s highly charged political climate, but ultimately just falls flat on its arse. That might be because it's glaringly obvious who the real shit bag is here; so either they thought they were being clever and suck or they don't care about being clever and still suck. Beat Takeshi is the coolest person in it and sadly for far too little time; he does however inadvertently summarise the sorry state of affairs on show here quite nicely with easily the best line in the movie: 

“Never send rabbits to kill a fox”. Problem is we’re getting far too many rabbits nowadays.