Original/2.0 Story (Spoilers!)
The films all open with Major perched on a ledge preparing to conduct a raid. She drops off the ledge and proceeds to assassinate a foreign dignitary to prevent a programmer from defecting. Chasing a hacker called Puppet Master, Major and her team follow a garbage man who has been using one of his programs to spy on his presumably cheating wife. Major’s team also catches the man providing this program, finding that both he and the garbage man are shells that have been “ghost-hacked” by the Puppet Master. The major manufacturer of shells, or replicated bodies, is hacked and assembles a ghost for the Puppet Master to inhabit but is hit by a truck during its escape, landing it in the hands of Security Section 9, Major’s unit. The Puppet Master talks to the group through this body about his status as a sentient being and the body is stolen by a camouflaged agent. Investigating this, the group finds that the programmer that was trying to defect is tied to a project that the Puppet Master mentioned, concluding that Section 6 created the Puppet Master for its own reasons. Major follows the car carrying the stolen body and finds it guarded by a tank, which almost kills her. She merges with the Puppet Master due to a mutual dysphoria, gaining all of his abilities in the process. To cover up the project that Puppet Master was established as a part of, Section 6 snipers destroy the Puppet Master’s brain and attempt to destroy Major’s, but her partner Batou protects her and gives her a new body. She informs him that she is now a combination of Major and the Puppet Master and leaves.
2017 Remake Story (Also Spoilers!)
As noted, this film begins with Major perched on a rooftop. She dives off and stops a terrorist attack on a business conference, killing a robotic geisha. She finds out that this geisha was hacked by an entity named Kuze, this version’s Puppet Master. she dives into its AI and is nearly hacked in the process, but is able to trace the hacker to a yakuza nightclub. Major and her partner Batou walk into the trap, which claims Batou’s eyes and most of Major’s body. Kuze kills one of Section 9’s consultants, and has done so several times before, and conclude that the doctor who designs the new bodies, Dr. Ouelet, is the next target. An attempt is made on her life, but is thwarted by Batou and the Major. Kuze leads them to his location, where they find a large group of humans whose brains are connected to form a network. Kuze captures the Major and reveals that he was the result of the previous attempt to create what essentially became her, freeing her and telling her to question her memories afterward. Ouelet is ordered to kill Major after it is revealed that she knows about the previous test subjects, but frees her instead and is killed because of it. She follows an address that Ouelet gave her and finds her mother, then follows her memories to the place where she was last seen before Section 9 made her a cyborg, meeting Kuze and bonding over having grown up as anti-cyborg radicals. Cutter, the CEO of the company that makes shells, deploys a tank to kill the two of them, nearly succeeding. On his deathbed, Kuze offers to merge their spirits but Major declines. Kuze is killed by a sniper, Major is rescued, Cutter is executed, and Major reconnects with her mother.
My Review (Minor Spoilers)
First and foremost, the themes of the original version are taken directly from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This isn’t speculation; its conclusion is directly referenced in the final scene of the original version. Additionally, this film’s influence on the larger scope of film as a medium is clear, especially evident in the case of The Matrix, which takes most of its aesthetic choices from it, as well as the idea of plugging into one’s consciousness through a port in the back of the neck. These films serve to question human identity, and what it means to even be human. Especially in the remake, debating whether Major is human is a primary plot point. She has a human brain, but the rest of her body is cyborg. She retains false memories, but can still connect to her real memories later in the film when her false memories are questioned. So, are our identities formed through memory? And are these identities tangible souls? In the remake, the Major’s name is originally Mira Killian but changes it back to Motoko Kusanagi when she realizes who she is; whereas in the original version, she is always Kusanagi. This is a common theme in science fiction, however, and these themes are more well-developed in the remake than they are in the original.
On the other hand, the original version has more obvious influence from 2001, taking its themes primarily from HAL 9000’s quest to attain higher consciousness and Bowman’s eventual attainment of it. There is a shot toward the end where gunfire rips through a wall with Latin inscriptions on it, stopping just before it reaches “hominis,” asserting that the eventual transcendence is not a destruction of what it means to be human, nor are the robotic aspects of their daily lives because humanity is more than a physical form. The ending of the original highly suggests that Kusanagi has attained a higher level of oneness with the universe and her place within it. She concludes the film by walking out of Batou’s house and stating “where does the newborn go from here?” The conclusion of 2001 is a shot of Bowman, who has evolved beyond manhood and become a giant space fetus floating above the earth, representing a new beginning and a fledgling stage of humanity. Kusanagi’s new body, that of a child, has the same symbol attached to it. She has attained, through spoiler means, enlightenment and becoming more than human.
Despite these themes, however, all versions of this film struggle. The original version is dragged down by a relentless info-dump through stilted voice acting and pretentious, pseudo-intellectual rambling. The dialogue is godawful throughout, except for a handful of cases where it is quite poetic and hearkens back to a fundamental distrust of the self. This version, however, hardly touches on any real philosophical material, and when it does it’s fairly weak. It’s enjoyable enough and expresses sound philosophical thought, though the execution of it is shaky at best. There are quite a few instances where symbolism is made prevalent, and this symbolism is often genius. Version 2.0, however, is unwatchable. It’s a version of the film with “updated graphics,” which are random lighting changes and horrid 3-D renderings of anything that looked better flat. There is one single sequence in 2.0 that is an actual improvement, and it is the angel sequence toward the end. The graphics are actually updated and they’re far more beautiful than the original. It is the only thing that I wish was just in the original rather than the waste-of-time update.
The remake is a tasteless hack job of the original and it makes me sick to think about what it did to the theories behind the original. As I’ve mentioned in my Princess Mononoke review, guns or explosions in Japanese film tend to represent the atomic bomb, especially when they cause a change in generations, people, warfare, etc. In the case of the remake, it is insinuated that Major’s identity crisis is the same crisis felt by Japan after the bomb dropped, forcing it into Westernization, industrialization, and a departure from traditional Japanese values. In this version, a clearly Japanese child actor playing young Motoko (not really a spoiler) was destroyed in a “tragic accident” and reformed by the French Doctor Ouelet (played by Juliette Binoche, one of my favorite actors) into the controversially non-Japanese Scarlett Johansson. This reflects the Westernizing of Japan after the bomb destroyed the essence of Japan, and explains her mother’s inability to recognize her. This was a rightfully controversial decision, though, because the way in which director Rupert Sanders demolished everything thoughtful about the original convinced me that no thought for themes crossed his mind. There is next to no time with young Motoko, especially not enough to justify the decision to make her adult form white. If there was a thematic reason, it should’ve been made clear. In addition, he turned an anime with philosophical material into a high budget, run-of-the-mill shooter with only whispers of anything deeper than a kiddie pool. I have to think that the casting of a white actress to portray a Westernized Japan has to be intentional, but considering how barbaric this version is, it’s not terribly likely.
Original/2.0: 4/10
Remake: 3/10
Recommendation!
It’s my first recommendation. Since these movies are less than 5/10 in my opinion, I’m going to recommend one to watch in their place. Just watch Dark City instead. It’s a criminally underrated sci-fi noir about memory and its relation to identity. Unlike Ghost in the Shell, it actually expands on the themes of identity hinging upon memory by making it a crime thriller in which a character committed murder. The catch is, memories in Dark City are entirely artificial and are changed every night at midnight. So his guilt is contingent upon whether he always maintains the same identity regardless of the memories implanted within it, or whether his memories change who he fundamentally is on a day-to-day basis. It’s great. Check it out instead.
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