Comment by firasd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by firasd | Hacker News Reader

We're in an interesting cultural moment for narratives like this, between Her, Ex Machina, GITS, Alien: Covenant, the upcoming Blade Runner 2049, and the great TV show Westworld.

This is my favorite essay on these themes, tying together threads spanning from ancient myths to contemporary movies: "The Robots Are Winning!" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/06/04/robots-are-winnin...

One interesting thing I've understood when discussing GITS the anime vs the new movie is that in the anime, Motoko embraces her cybernetic body, so the question is: What does it mean to be human? But in the new movie, Major is the first cybernetic body, so the question is more: Who am I? This an interesting essay by Hideo Kojima about the differences: http://www.glixel.com/news/hideo-kojima-on-the-philosophy-be...

By the way, people into GITS might like this post we made about shots in the movie recreated from the anime: https://medium.com/@gitsost/a-love-letter-to-ghost-in-the-sh...

> people into GITS might like this post we made about shots in the movie recreated from the anime: https://medium.com/@gitsost/a-love-letter-to-ghost-in-the-sh...

I find it quite superficial to call the new movie a love letter just because a number of stills have similar elements in them.

As an example: In the water fight scene the anime has a LOT of story-telling with her actions being clearly based on high level moral motivations, as well as observations of and adaption to the progression of the fight itself. Every action taken has a reason and nuance behind it, based on who and what her adversary is as well as the tactical situation. In the movie it's a straight-up beat-down of an almost entirely unresponsive puppet.

Indeed. Less a love letter than a cheap porn adaptation, IMHO.

As a long-time GITS fan, the new movie was a complete disappointment. It added nothing new or interesting, and dropped almost all of the philosophical content of the original.

If you haven't seen the original, start there. And then move on to the sequels, the TV show, etc. if you want. But avoid this new one. None of the individual elements (soundtrack, cinematography, etc) are the equal of the original and as whole it is utterly lacking in style and substance.

I don't think you can do GITS as a live action movie. The amount of special effects required to pull it off means the budget needs to be huge, but that also means you have to "dumb down" the plot for mainstream audiences to have a chance to recover your costs.

Well, you also can't have those lengthy expositions from the 95 anime. I think in a good film you would show the outlines to philosophical angles about consciousness without filling them in with so much prose. Of course GITS '17 went a bit too far in the other direction of keeping the dialog too simple, eg. the bad guy blurting out his clearly-bad motivations. I think Westworld achieved a good balance of throwing in monologues while keeping scenes lively...

Yeah; that's what I meant about "dumbing down" the movie. I agree that Ghost in the Shell in all of its iterations is heavy on exposition -- which makes it a difficult show for audiences to get into.

I also agree about your point about Westworld -- I think Ghost in the Shell could be pulled off as a live-action TV series because the exposition could be spread out across a whole season. Because it often doesn't have a guaranteed global market at the time of production, anime in general tends to be a balance between ambition and budget -- the compromise often being "recap" or "expositional" episodes focused on one or two characters (fewer voice actors to worry about) and using recycled animation. I get why they do it, but it's frustrating.

I know there is a lot of negativity about this movie from various quarters but I do think it's a love letter to the anime. I had the idea for the phrase when I saw that even the glitching motifs from the title credits were recreated in the movie (and expanded to the extent that glitching is part of the plot).

I mean, if we just step back, when I watched the anime I never expected that one day I'd be able to see a live-action version of the tank fight. It was very unlikely for this movie to have been made at all, in between Avengers 12 and Fast and the Furious 17. I'm glad it exists.

Pre-dating the manga GitS by a year, the Cyberpunk PPRPG from R Talsorian ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_2020 ) was a surprisingly well put-together and interesting world.

One of my favorite features was cyberpsychosis. As a gameplay element, it was an answer to "Why don't you just buy godlike cyber replacements for your body?"

But as a lore element, they bored down into the question. If you've got your neural processing running at multiples of human normal, or have a bulletproof body capable of lifting cars, then how do you relate to all the unmodified people around you? Musn't your relationship with them fundamentally change? And doesn't it seem logical that the amount of change would be related to the extremeness of your augmentation?

That's interesting. I recently learned about a philosophical thought experiment that may apply here, it's called "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

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