Ghost In The Shell (1996) A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp (C) 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Crack the shell and discover a real gem. Navigates its wilderness of high-tech philosophy without dropping the ball.
When we first see Agent Kusanagi, she's squatting naked on the ledge of the topmost floor of a gigantic building, waiting for the right moment to strike. In the room below her, illegal deals are being transacted. Just as someone smells a rat, she dives like a suicidal bungee-jumper, takes out her target with a burst of hollow-point submachine-gun fire, and then vanishes in a haze of personal body-cloaking technology. Not exactly the opening for a very thought-provoking movie, we might think. We are wrong.
GHOST IN THE SHELL -- a great title, by the way -- contains a barrage of ideas that are both engaging, AND played out on-screen in fascinating ways. It takes place in a heavily technologized future, where the human body itself can be turned into one gigantic cybernetic host for a mind -- the "ghost in the shell" of the title. The heroine of the film is the aforementioned Kusanagi, a cool and calculating policeman with a totally synthetic body, but with a very human mind. She knows from whence she came, sort of, but where is she going?
Kusanagi and her cohorts run afoul of a clever and malicious hacker who calls himself the Puppet Master. His specialty is hacking human bodies and memories to perform crimes, and then leaving the hacked humans behind as saps for the police. Fortunately, Kusanagi catches on fast, and when she moves to trap the Puppet Master, she finds something even more startling -- not a hacker, but a new kind of life form, one that has been germinated in the web of information and technology encircling the planet. GITS gives this idea the workout it deserves, even though it's not a long movie -- less than 100 minutes -- but it's packed with movement and color, and never pauses for breath. It also has the right ending for its difficult material; a lesser movie would have a shootout and that would be the end of it, but GITS has a knowing coda that puts everything into perspective.
GITS' biggest flaw, which is becoming an increasingly irritating caveat in many imported movies, is the shockingly bad dubbing job. This is a movie to watch subtitled if at all possible, since the dubbing is done with voices that often don't match the characters at all. Kusanagi's dub voice is the worst of the bunch -- static and uninvolving, despite the fact that she has one of the best speeches in the movie.
The movie's greatest glory, however, is in its sleek and overpowering images. There is a moment where Kusanagi goes scuba-diving, and touches the reflection of her own face on the underside of the water. There is the final brutal showdown in a "museum of evolution" between Kusanagi and a death-dealing robot tank. There is the opening sequence, in which a human shell is assembled and deployed. And there is a moment in the middle of the movie where the camera stares and stares at rain-slickened streets with crowds peppering them in slow-motion, for no other reason than to revel in the glory of it all.
Four out of four shells.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://www.io.com/~syegul another worldly device... you can crush me as I speak/write on rocks what you feel/now feel this truth UNMUTUAL: A Digital Art Collective - E-mail syegul@ix.netcom.com for details =smilin' in your face, all the time wanna take your place, the BACKSTABBERS=
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews