Ghost in the Shell (2017)
I just wanted to read the review. This is the sum total of my opinion on this film. I just wanted to read the review of the film by a competent reviewer so that I could judge whether the film was worth my expenditure of a few dollars or whether I should pass on it. That was all I was interested in. I didn’t need the angsty bullshit from people who want Japanese art to look like Japanese people and reject that a Hollywood star could ever be representative of those people and that art.
I say that as someone who has given up Trek fandom because of rabid Trek fans who think Sylar is a better Spock than Spock and various other iterations of inanity that occurred immediately following the release of the 2009 Star Trek. I took my own advice then and just quit watching or talking about the thing that was bothering me. While Classic Trek had been very important to me once, bordering on a religion, I could no longer call myself a fan of it because I wouldn’t drink the kool aid offered by the current rights holders at Paramount.
Ghost in the Shell (1996)
I saw the first Ghost in the Shell anime well over 20 years ago now. I thought it was an intriguing study of what makes consciousness possible from the perspective of humans who had become increasingly less human and more and more machine. Like most anime you have to watch the film several times to even begin to understand what the Japanese speaking audiences understand on first viewing. It was one of the first instances where I noticed that the characters were markedly not Japanese in appearance, but definitely not the last.
My children who have been infected with the anime virus far worse than I am have already prepared me for the hatred being spewed at this new film. I am resolved to see it at some point anyway, but I have little doubt that it will be found wanting on several levels. I’ve seen most of the follow-on work that uses the same title as the original, and it similarly does not do the original manga or its anime film justice. I don’t care for the opinions of people who just want to hate on something that they could just not watch in the first place and be done with it. I hate to break it to them, you cannot force a rights-holder to unpublish something. Right now they are just genning up interest in the film, increasing the chance that more media like this film will be created in the future.
The hatred for this new movie is just another self-fulfilling prophecy in a near-infinite line of self-fulfilling prophecies that I’ve noted. I hope against hope that the haters will figure out how to boycott something properly so that the next time something truly sucks it fails to achieve its market goals, and so consequently is never followed up with something even worse.
