Review of Ghost in the Shell (2017) by Yanko_B — 31 Mar 2017

The biggest flaw of modern's adaptation films is the lack of respect towards the fundamental esence of the movies; Ghost in the shell is the quintessential example of how bad can you screw up franchises by selling us fake dreams.

The tolerability I had for this movie broke in the very first minutes of the film; The script is very weak in terms of carisma, the name "ghost in the shell" could be pretty much removed and I wouldn't notice the difference between a Michael Bay's, Jacob Gentry's or Wachowski's film.

In terms of direction we have this weird fusion of action driven play that don't don't developes the plot at all, but even worse, before and after that we have moments of very brief scenes of Mamoru Oshii's GITS (1993) contemplative shots that miss the point of reflection towards humanity and machines, existence and self.

The dialogues are probably the worst thing at all, filled with cliche phrases like "They created me. But they can not control me" and "They did not save your life. They stole it", didn't took the time to develop the meaning of "ghost", wich term is crucial to understand the film.

We get a glimpse of some of the members of sector 9 team, for like 30 to 60 seconds of screen time of Togusa, Saitou, Ishikawa and Borma (Hell, I recall seing Ishikawa for 5 seconds before the movie was over when I totally forgot about him).

The director just smashed whatever was in his mind when seeing the movie and removed the complexity of the play just to make it more accesible, but obviosly, was still flawed in its delivery.