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Ghost in the Shell Review
-July 9, 2001-
I honestly planned on watching this twice. Honestly. When I'm writing a review for something like an OAV, I tend to prefer watching it multiple times so I can get the full experience, and notice things I didn't notice before. But not with Ghost in the Shell.
GITS is quite possibly the most hard-to-follow, unbelievably boring anime I've seen in my natural born life. If it were possible for me to give a greatly-detailed description of the plot, I would. Unfortunately, I have to say that it's impossible for any LIVING BEING to do so. But I digress... here's a very basic lowdown(or atleast, from what I could understand) of the movie's plot.
It's the future. We can tell because everybody has cybernetic implants, there's naked androids being created in labs, and illegal unknown deals are being handled by powerful companies. Our story revolves around one such naked android(although most of the time she's clothed), who's name is impossible to pick up. She's teamed up with some guy who uses an old Mosshammer for a gun because he likes classics(every science fiction story has a guy like him, of course), and another guy who's made up of almost complete cybernetics and probably beat up small children when he was in grade school. These three police officers(or that's at least what I assume they are) team up to track down a hacker by the name of "The Puppet Master", who apparently likes to hack into Android souls(or something else, I guess) called "ghosts". The guy tries to hack into some major powerful companies, they get ticked, and send the police in to track them down. And... I'm guessing that's what GITS is all about.
 The Good
The only seriously-interesting things about GITS are 1. The few brief minutes of action we get to see, and 2. the complexity of this whole "mind hacking" stuff that's brought up. The few(and I do mean few) fighting scenes that we get to see are done pretty well; it's nice to see some intense anime fighting done in a real-life setting for once. Bullets flying everywhere, guys' heads being blown off leaving a nice spinal cord hanging in mid-air for a brief second, a guy firing an SMG that's using rounds that it shouldn't be... quite nice.
The concept of hacking into a person's own memories really is pretty interesting, too. The thought that in the future a person's mind could be hacked, replaced with artificial memories, and the old, real ones are lost forever is really compelling. Unfortunately, they hardly touch on the subject much, which is a definete downer.
The Bad
Can anyone say "boresville"? Halfway through I was beginning to think the movie had a Jackie Chan-style, where action scenes are seperated by boring crap where little kids say stuff like "I got a new pillow!", and afterwords another, even better battle begins. Not in GITS. The movie had TWO(yes, 2) actual fighting scenes, one near the beginning and one at the end. Terrible. And to make things worse, during the times when the fighting is not happening(i.e. pretty much the whole darn film) lots of talking goes on. Boring talk. Extremely boring, impossible-to-understand speach. If you're planning on fully understanding the plot, grab a notepad, a pen, and your VCR remote. Lots of rewinding will need to be done...
 The Ugly
That darn talking. All of it. Heck, they could at LEAST make the characters talk about something semi-interesting and more relevant to what an actual human being(excluding the androids) would talk about occasionally, like... oh, I dunno, their lives. I think the false-Puppet Master had more to say about himself than any other character in the whole movie, and his lines consisted of "My wife broke up with me, and I have a kid. I really love my little angel.". Sure, it's supposed to be all Millitary-serious-like and all, but heck-- even Metal Gear Solid did it. More emphasis on the character's lives and personalities really would have been wonderful.
Final Thought
Could have been done much better, essentially. I don't consider myself a genius, but I think of myself to be at least semi-smart. And as a semi-smart person... this movie lost me. Kinda like "X-Files", in a way. But sheesh... even X-Files has Gillian Anderson to brighten things up. GITS just has an android woman with no crotch and a blond half-human who looks like Duke Nukem. With that said, GITS would have to be, on a scale from Good to Bad, teetering near the Bad. It ain't average, it ain't wonderful, it ain't bad... but close to it.
I think I'll stick to hardcore ultra violence and nudity, mixed with a bit of the good ol' anime humping. Yeah.
-Grand Master Dragon
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