Scanlyze

The Online Journal of Insight, Satire, Desire, Wit and Observation

Reflections on the first Ghost in the Shell Trailer

Here are some actual issues to be concerned with in the new trailer of Ghost in the Shell:

* The Major doesn’t need a traditional origin story along the line of “the government stole my identity and made me a super soldier cyborg.” This is a way overdone trope and it misses the essential nature of the Major’s identity issues in the manga, movies and the series. What holds the Major back in her evolution is is not, not knowing who she was, it is clinging to material items like her watch which serve as tangible confirmation of our identity and that our memories are real, not a dream or illusion or a memory edit or hostile program.

* Bateau seems miscast. He is supposed to be a laid back, beer drinking, basset hound loving, weight lifting ex-US special forces operator. Seems like here the character has been “Danewashed.”

* An important point in the representation of the world of Ghost in the Shell is that cyberization is becoming common and the Net is becoming universal and starting to evolve in it new forms of consciousness and life. Having Motoko as “the first of your kind” is again, recycling a tired old trope which isn’t needed here.

* “Major” is an orphan appellation in this movie. It is used as though it is a first name, which in the manga, movies and TV series is not the case. There, she is called “Major” because she was a special forces operative, a Major in the JSDF and UN forces in Central America before she was recruited for Section 9. But because they have latched on to the “they stole your life” formula, they have lost the more interesting origin story of Motoko losing her parents, her body, her memories, everything in a plane crash when she was six. And they have lost the very touching backstory of her relationship with Kuze and the one hand folding paper cranes by which they recognize each other again.

Part of the confusion in the “whitewashing” issue is that Little Englanders and USians who are not familiar with the franchise assuming “Motoko Kusanagi” is her given name, whereas in English it would be like naming a character something like “Jane Doe Excalibur” and should be seen as an obvious code name, callsign, handle or pseudonym and not as a given name. So they shouldn’t shy away from using it.

Simply “looking awesome” and “looking like the source material” does not necessarily a good movie make. Witness “Warcraft.”

So count me encouraged but dubious about this trailer and film. On the plus side it looks gorgeous and we can at least enjoy the world building and watching a smirky naked badass Scarlett Johannson kicking ass. Which can’t be all bad.

Copyright © 2016 Henry Edward Hardy

16 November, 2016 Posted by | Ghost in the Shell, movie, review, scanlyze | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Peculiar Movies I Like

Peculiar strange movies which I like.

Dusk til Dawn.
A family road film turns into Pulp Fiction which then becomes a vampire/zombie bloodbath. And there’s Salma Hayak.

The American Astronaut.
One part Luis Bruñel’s Un Chien Andalou, one part David Lynch’s Eraserhead, one part John Carpenter’s Dark Star, three parts punk-shockabilly music video, one part Devo show, one part Busby Berkeley extravaganza, one part John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath plus liberal doses of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

Dark Star.
Space garbagemen lose an epistemological argument with one of their nuclear bombs. This does not end well for them.

Queen of Outer Space.
Zsa-Zsa Gabor is that.

The Thing from Outer Space.
James Arness is the homicidal shape-shifting super-carrot. Rawr!

Moral is: if discovering alien spaceship buried in ice, do not drop thermite bombs on it to see what will happen. They will be pissed, and hungry.

Robot Monster
There’s this robot monster, only it looks like a man in a gorilla suit, except its head is an old fashioned diving bell… and well it goes downhill from there. There is a girl, and screaming of sorts. Aaah!

They Live
Roddy Piper is in it. You know the wrestler. And he discovers some glasses that shows him the whole world is an illusion being projected by aliens. And he and his friend fight about whether the friend should look through the glasses. And they fight. And fight. And fight some more. And there is stuff about a girl and she throws him out the window, and more droll set pieces… sort of falls apart at the end but who cares at that point.

Schlock
There’s this Bigfoot, and he plays boogie-woogie piano with the blind man when nobody is around to see. That’s about all I remember. Something about 2001 is in there also.

Alien v Predator
So there’s the most estrogen-powered series ever, Alien/s etc. with Ripley tearing up the penis-headed monster thing which likes to burst through your chest, and then there is Predator, the most testosterone-powered movie evah, with Arnie, Carl Weathers, Jessie Ventura etc fighting the vagina-headed monster Predator.

So at the nadir of the cycle of cheaper and cheaper remakes, somehow a sticky peak nadir as it were was reached with Alien v Predator combining the two franchises. It’s game over, man!

Ghost in the Shell Innocence
This isn’t good badness, it is good goodness but very high on the scale of weirdness. The only odd thing is it falls into the uncanny valley at times by combining cel animation, digital rotoscoping and cgi. But the Locus Solis scene is one of the trippiest ever.

Copyright © 2016 Henry Edward Hardy

1 November, 2016 Posted by | movies, scanlyze, science fiction | , , , , , | Leave a comment