The Live-Action Ghost in the Shell Now Has a Trailer

[Darth_Payn]

It looks about as good as you'd expect. Meaning is looks absolutely dreadful and will more than likely bomb. Also we as a country need to come together and just admit Scarlet really shouldn't talk anymore. Its just not something she's good at, and its dragging the entire country down.

When people kept complaining about there not being a Black Widow movie, I just point to literally all of her performances. You want a whole movie of that? I think she has been the only major miscast in the MCU.

That's been on my mind since Iron Man 2. Like, Eastern Europe basically exports supermodels, so why not give the Black Widow role to one of them?

Is it using the Puppeteer ark? If so can't wait to see the Major vs the tank battle that pops up at the end... also wasn't the original movie like 50 or something minutes long.

83, but I guess with this being a big budget Hollywood affair anything less than 120 is entirely unacceptable.

I can't help but think that this is going to be a related to GITS in it's aesthetics and stealing some of the action sequences, but very little else. The implied plot in the trailer doesn't seem to relate to the movies, Stand Alone Complex or the comics.

I also doubt the Spider Tank and it's limb popping turn against the major will survive unless this thing's a 15, which makes me sad.

Although I loved the Depeche Mode remix, to Youtube!

It looks to me like the this movie uses some scenes from the original movie and manga (the Puppetteer story) and some
of it's from the Kuze side of SAC's 2nd GIG, particularly the stuff about the Major's past.
It's a bit like what I thought Stand Alone Complex did, using bits and pieces of the movies and mangas to tell a new story. I'm not judging this one too harshly until I see another trailer.

And remixed Depeche Mode is fine, but I prefer these two from our old friend, Gavin Dunne, of Miracle of Sound:
and Enjoy.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Also i'm not into the whole 'whitewashing' conspiracy going on but I will admit, there's little to no Asian people in a very hefty Asian themed environment and it doesn't help how Major looks like she's trying to cosplay as Major instead of being the Major.

Perhaps you should ask the Japanese film industry why, in the intervening 21 years, they have never bothered to do a live action version of the movie. Before, you know, go blaming Hollywood whitewashing.

Sooooo looks like I"m going to be one of those minority GitS fans that is excited by this...

Ah well. Not the first time

Now there are two of us. If we can find 3 more, I know a place where we can get a discount on t-shirts.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

Also i'm not into the whole 'whitewashing' conspiracy going on but I will admit, there's little to no Asian people in a very hefty Asian themed environment and it doesn't help how Major looks like she's trying to cosplay as Major instead of being the Major.

Perhaps you should ask the Japanese film industry why, in the intervening 21 years, they have never bothered to do a live action version of the movie. Before, you know, go blaming Hollywood whitewashing.

My guess is they lack a pathological need to retread ground that they felt was adequately covered the first time. Or conversely there's not enough public interest in the property that warrants spending the money required to faithfully recreate the whole thing. Which begs the question why Hollywood is bothering at all.

 

[Jandau]

That looks... bad.

On one hand, there are sections of the trailer that indicate that the film will mirror the early sections of the anime. However, then it goes off on a tangent about Kusanagi's past, which was never a factor in the original work. Also, that line "You were the first of your kind" kinda ticks me off. Kusanagi wasn't the first. She just happened to take to a robotic body better than most people. She's not "The Chosen One". And yet, it would seem that we're getting a fairly generic Hollywood storyline.

Also, while I generally like ScarJo (hell, I'm one of the 6 people who enjoyed Lucy, despite the flaws), something about her appearance in this film just doesn't sit well with me.

I'd say the best we can hope for is a bearable popcorn flick. At worst, we might get another Dragonball: Evolution...

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

My guess is they lack a pathological need to retread ground that they felt was adequately covered the first time. Or conversely there's not enough public interest in the property that warrants spending the money required to faithfully recreate the whole thing. Which begs the question why Hollywood is bothering at all.

Perhaps there wasn't sufficient interest, in Japan. And as for retreading, if that were the case, they wouldn't have turned it in to a series.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

My guess is they lack a pathological need to retread ground that they felt was adequately covered the first time. Or conversely there's not enough public interest in the property that warrants spending the money required to faithfully recreate the whole thing. Which begs the question why Hollywood is bothering at all.

Perhaps there wasn't sufficient interest, in Japan. And as for retreading, if that were the case, they wouldn't have turned it in to a series.

The movie and the show covered very different themes. The movie is more an introspective piece about humanity and whether it is our body or our mind that makes us human and in a world of people who's only natural organ is the brain where the line is.

The show was more espionage/crime thriller in a cyberpunk setting and the parts about humanity were (hilariously) discussed using the Tachikoma tanks. Sure the crew occasionally had some existential wonderings but they weren't the core of the story. In fact a shit load of season 2 from memory had a lot to do with things like immigrant populations, war and sovereignty.

Plus I can never imagine Movie!Motoko or ScarJo!Motoko (based on what I've seen) doing some of the shit SAC!Motoko did because they're very different.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Plus I can never imagine Movie!Motoko or ScarJo!Motoko (based on what I've seen) doing some of the shit SAC!Motoko did because they're very different.

This movie appears to be doing it's own thing with the brand too. It'll have to stand on it's own two feet.

 

[The Real Sandman]

I cannot remember the last time I was genuinely excited to see an upcoming block buster film, and this doesn't change that.

Yes, the film industry at large (especially Hollywood) has always been more focused on making money than making creative and engaging works of art made by passionate filmmakers, but now a days big movies feel so much more transparent than usual, that they're committee designed to such a degree that they hit all the right profit margins.

How is it that a film like this and others like it with great visuals and action scenes that hundreds of talented artists, animators, compositors, stuntmen, camera operators, et al worked countless hours on somehow feel so boring and lifeless?

Am just a cynical asshole, or has the landscape of block buster movies really changed for the worse?
I don't know...

But if I want to watch Ghost in the Shell I'll just watch Ghost in the Shell [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2MEaROKjaE], its sitting right there on my shelf.

Also, Scarlett Johansson as a lifeless robot? Now that's just too close to home.

 

[step1999]

That said, whilst Gibson's cyberpunk was well ahead of its time, it seems the themes and worlds he dealt with have never been more relevant. So I suppose a live-action Ghost In The Shell is really just part of that cultural resurgence (or recontextualisation), for want of a better term. Blade Runner 2 (ugh... ) is around the corner, Spielberg's got Ready Player One, and then I suppose there's the unimaginatively titled Cyberpunk 2077, which may actually come out in 2077 and miss several new waves of cyberpunk.

Minor correction: Ready Player One isn't really cyberpunk from what I remember of the book. (And if the movie feels cyberpunk then that's an adaptation thing.) I'm not sure what subgenre I'd say it is.

 

[Dalisclock]

I'm so use to Stand Alone Complex & I don't really remember the plot of the original movie despite seeing it a couple of times.

I kinda have the same problem. Part of the problem is that the pacing from the film is fricken awful, going back and forth between "Frantic Action", "Huge Plot Dumps" and "Nothing happening, looking at the pretty". It also feels like the plot has a lot left out.

Frankly, GitS usually only works when it has time to develop it's plot, characters and ideas(the series) and a lot less so when it has to cram everything into a movie (Solid State Society, the films). Still not sure how I feel about the reboot series.

 

[Darth Rosenberg]

Minor correction: Ready Player One isn't really cyberpunk from what I remember of the book. (And if the movie feels cyberpunk then that's an adaptation thing.) I'm not sure what subgenre I'd say it is.

Genres blur - this is most of the first two paragraphs from Wiki's entry on cyberpunk: "...tends to focus on society as "high tech low life" featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as information technology and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.

Cyberpunk plots often center on conflict among artificial intelligences, hackers, and among megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than in the far-future settings or galactic vistas found in novels such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to feature extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its original inventors..."

I'd say RPO ticks off almost all of those boxes, so it's reasonable to say it lies on the spectrum of cyberpunk. Though on the page it was mostly equal parts Wade's arc and ramming as many references into one page as possible. Whether Spielberg's ambitious enough to do more with the dystopic themes or delve into questions of identities morphing across created worlds remains to be seen.

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

I'm not saying the movie doesn't look cool, and there's nothing I can add to the white-washing argument that hasn't already been said, but what the fuck is up with the amnesia plot? It's not like there aren't story lines in the GiTS universe at large where governments/corporations are covering up huge scandals that could easily lead to the Major going rogue, if that's what they really want.

And why no cyber eyes for Batou? It's sort of his defining feature. What, do they think we can't get an emotional read on someone who's eyes we aren't able to see the expression of?

 

[maninahat]

............... I ... do hope she isn't naked for the majority of the movie. She probably won't be, but it's just awkward because Scarlett Johansson to me is Black Widow in The Avengers so I get this mixed feeling about seeing the Black Widow actress going 'rogue' on us in a cybernetic themed movie lmao.

You should probably steer clear of Under the Skin. Though don't, because it is a really good movie and one that demonstrates why, white washing issues aside, Scarlet is a really natural casting choice.

Also, she won't be nude often; she only does it in GITs to be invisible in combat.

My own thoughts, I think this looks surprisingly good, and it does have a lot of scenes straight out of the 1995 anime. I'm happy to give it a shot.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I kinda have the same problem. Part of the problem is that the pacing from the film is fricken awful, going back and forth between "Frantic Action", "Huge Plot Dumps" and "Nothing happening, looking at the pretty". It also feels like the plot has a lot left out.

I think that because it was one of the first anime movies to use cgi, that they decided to put as much of it as possible in the movie. Excitement of it, turned the movie in to a tech demo.

 

[Poetic Nova]

I'll wait for reviews. But I'm slightly more positive about it than I used to be.
They picked the wrong guy to depict Batou though, and it annoys me greatly.