journal features

movie review - Ghost in the Shell

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 1997.01.12

A manga brought to film, this one is amazingly well animated, though the story is strange. It's brooding. It's very Japanese, and it's perched with a just-so tone like most of it's genre. But it's different in that it's about an reanimated cop who is put in a new synthetic body and there is a fair bit of reorientation and reintegration involved. This involves the female cyborg lead finding an identity in a government bureau with, for a manga, suitably shadowy agenda and scope.

I really liked the central character, or rather how that character is realized (there's little actual characterization). I liked the supporting characters. And I liked how the setting shows a certain trajectory - the world is a bit of a mess but it isn't a broken dystopia, and it's not purely an exploitative nightmare. They walk a fine line here where technology plays a central role and our view of the culture is shaped by the telling of the story (as it should be). And that technology it is very imaginative - as far from where we are today as we are from the 19th Century, with concomitant changes in culture.

Strongly recommended.

rand()m quote

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov