![]() ![]() ![]() It features main characters who are troubled by the status of their consciousness-their present-day selves are defined by the memories of experiences that determine their personalities, and those memories are always at some risk of being lost forever. Ghost in the Shell is remarkable in the same ways Blade Runner is remarkable. The Puppet Master proves hard to track down like the serial killer in Se7en, released the same year, this slippery mastermind finally arrives on the scene unexpectedly, essentially surrendering to the police. The two are tracking the Puppet Master (Iemasa Kayumi/Tom Wyner), an anonymous adversary who "ghost-hacks" victims, implanting them with false memories in order to manipulate them from afar. Ghost in the Shell is dense with intrigue, and while I've always found the specifics elusive (it's one of those movies that dumps truckloads of exposition on you in conversations between otherwise nondescript characters), the main throughline follows mostly cybernetic Major Motoku Kusanagi (voiced by Atsuko Tanaka in the Japanese-language version and Mimi Woods in English) and her only partially enhanced partner, Batou (Akio Ōtsuka/Richard Epcar). It's all of those things, and it's a disquisition on human consciousness, a meditation on urban loneliness, and also, maybe, a poem about unrequited love. And it's a fantasy about a sexy cyborg who knows how to use a gun. It's science-fiction about the human rights of artificial intelligence. Ghost in the Shell is a cop movie about robots with human souls. The writer and illustrator Masamune Shirow borrowed and altered the phrase for his serialized 1989 manga "Mobile Armored Riot Police", which bore the subtitle "The Ghost in the Shell." I haven't read the manga, but the animated feature it inspired is positively heady with ideas. The title is a reference to Arthur Koestler's book The Ghost in the Machine, which itself refers to a term coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe the duality of mind and body. Screenplay by Kazunori Itô, based on the manga by Masamune Shirowīy Bryant Frazer I'll get this out of the way first: the soul is the ghost and the body is the shell. Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |