released 21 jan 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* Fans of Japanese manga (comic) writer Masamune Shirow are familiar with his elaborate, meticulously produced, imaginative, and sometimes maddeningly obscure works, and any new video based on his works is eagerly awaited. His GHOST IN THE SHELL (GITS) manga series is a set of cyberpunk adventures of Major Motoko Kusanagi of the Japanese Ministry of Internal Security Section 9, an elite clandestine organization that is formally chartered to keep an eye on other government ministries -- but also does some counterterrorism and "dirty tricks" when required. Major Kusanagi is a high-powered cyborg, and she is aided by her lieutenants Batou, another cyborg who is something of a rambunctious thug, and Togusa, a clean-cut ex-cop who is mostly a "meat" human.
Director Mamoru Oshii's first take on GITS was a cleanly produced, dark effort in which Major Kusanagi merged with an artificial intelligence and became something of demigoddess on the Internet. The first GITS movie was commercially successful, and so he has now followed it up with a sequel, GITS 2: INNOCENCE. GITS 2 focuses on Batou, who has moved into the top field slot at Section 9 since Major Kusanagi's disappearance. He is drawn into a series of killings committed by sexually-capable female androids or "gynoids" and discovers a dangerous conspiracy.
Although Masamune Shirow has written a GITS 2 sequel of its own, the wildly imaginative and totally incomprehensible MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, the GITS 2 movie has no direct relationship to it, instead being a scaled-up version of one of the original GITS 1 manga stories with some elements of other GITS 1 stories thrown in. The result is a visually stunning movie, with very impressive production values, coupled to a weak script that swings between overly violent and annoyingly pretentious, with aimless musings about dolls. The story line is also so convoluted that only those familiar with the GITS scenario will be able to follow it comfortably. Most other watchers will be lost, and will also wonder why it's worth the bother to figure things out.
On reading the completely baffling MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE manga, whose writing didn't strike so much as incompetent as mentally disjointed, I came to the conclusion that Masamune Shirow needs to acquire a partner whose only job is to hit him over the head with a mallet when he starts to drift into some parallel reality: "You're not making sense! BOP!" It appears that Mamoru Oshii probably needs to hire the same guy.