MovieChat Forums > Kôkaku kidôtai: Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society (2012) Discussion > Afraid of change?

Afraid of change?

posted 17 years ago by Jimmeylegs
5 replies | jump to latest

Let me first say that I love GITS, manga, movies, tv, novels, etc... When I heard that they were making a movie from the universe of the tv series I was elated. The series was so well done and really captured the essence of the manga where as Oshi's movies were more concentrated on the ideas of humanity and cyber reality but both were extremely well done. But after watching SSS I had the same feeling after watching Superman Returns which was it was a good movie, good action and some pretty cool set pieces but I had already seen them done before. It almost seemed that SSS was trying to remake the first movie with scenes of a mech attack involving Batou and the Major, a character called the puppeteer and its explanation of its actions, the dive sequence at the end where the pupeteer takes over the vocal functions of the major, and at the end with major looking out on the city and saying something to the extent of the net is infinte and vast. Now of course there was still new and interesting scenes like the suicide at the begining, the sniper duel with Saito, The "suicide" of Togusa, and the adaption of the first volume of the manga at the end with the tachikoma's taking on those megatech guards and trying to save the children being held at a government facility. I am not slamming the movie in any way but it seemed to me that the crew of the movie(director, writers, animators, etc..) were almost scared to try something different with the series in the form of a movie which seems weird to me since they had already done so with the tv series. I actually would have liked them to have done an addaption of Man Machine Interface because it still has Motoko away from section 9 and they did have some of that in SSS with her controlling multiple bodies and talking to her net cohorts konan, buzz, leo, etc. In the end it is fine addition to the universe but it just didn't add much new stuff for me

I would love to hear some feedback

CLOSE THE WORLD NEPO EHT TXEN

[–] 17 years ago

[deleted]

[–] tsplinter2000 17 years ago

I personally really enjoyed the film. I was a little worried when I heard that SSS had a mysterious super hacker character called the Puppeteer, but if you look at the SSS version and the Puppet Master from the original movie, you will see --without giving too much away here-- two different characters with different origins and different motivations. To say that SSS is a kind of remake of the first movie does not work for me (although I respect anyone's desire to disagree), because the foundations of the two stories are fundamentally different. I see the original film as a very personal story of self-discovery and transformation as experienced by the Major, disguised as a cyber-action thriller, whereas SSS (and SAC in general) is an ensemble piece, and very much a big-picture exploration of how this super evolved, technological world affects culture, society, the individual and politics.

Regarding your point about the Major and Batou fighting the mecha, again we have a different scenario with a different outcome. I do agree that the scene with the Major interfacing with Puppeteer, and the denouement in Batou's hideaway were a little too familiar, but again, in both those scenes, we have different specific things happening and conclusions being made.

In a way, I suspect this might be a case of inflated expectations going on. SAC is basically just an intelligent political cyber-thriller/mystery series, and for me, SSS lived up to that expectation. There is also the theme of aging in Japan that the film brings up. Again I don't want to spoil anything, but I found the interaction of old age and technology in SSS to be quite thought provoking.

And --oh my GOD!!-- that sniper duel was freaking awesome!

Another thing that do agree with is that it would be really cool to see a Man-Machine Interface type story with the Major out on her own engaging in corporate cyber-espionage and all that, but I do have to say that I find the manga to be disappointing in many respects. For one thing, it is a narrative mess. No offense intended to Masamune fans, but the guy could really learn a thing or two about sequential storytelling. I mean, just look at Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira or Domu mangas to see examples of comics storytelling at its finest. For me, those two stories are about as close to actual cinematic experiences as reading a comic can get.

However, for me, the most glaring annoyance is Masamune’s constant, nearly pathological obsession with perving over his female characters. I think you could probably count on one hand the number of pages that don’t feature some gratuitous T & A or crotch shot. I am no prude, but I just feel like his sexual overindulgences really work to bring the whole project down several levels. If I want soft-core porn, then I’ll buy a dirty magazine, or watch HBO after hours. What I find especially sad is that --scattered amongst all the smut-- are some really compelling sociopolitical, cyber-futurist notions that would really have made the book a classic, if the author weren’t so juvenile in so many other respects.

Thankfully we have the creators behind SAC (and the movies, of course). While they do obviously pay respects to some of Masamune’s … preoccupations, they fortunately do not go overboard, and instead tend to focus on the elements that make his worlds worth paying attention to in the first place. If they were to do an adaptation of MMI, I’m sure it would be a mindblower.

[–] cartman1_97 17 years ago

I thought that the sss was connected strongly to the original ghost in the shell movie, but more like a mirror image than a remake.
In the first movie, project 2501 emerges as a sentient being after moving though the net and gathering information on its own existence. But it started as a program, or a pool of data before becoming aware of its existence. In sss, however the situation is very different, the puppet is originally a person not a pool of data. and I saw the situation in sss as a person leaving behind traces of themselves that originally pooled into a data set that merged with others consciousness, a de-evolving and re-evolving state of existence. From what I understand of the show, whenever you merge with someone, or just hack into them you leave a trace of yourself behind. I saw the puppeteer as the collection of all the traces that Motoko had left behind in others as she hacked them. Although Im not exactly clear how these trace managed to reform into a being after being split apart, or how they managed to find the puppet that the original bureaucrat had been controlling from home. Perhaps Motoko accessed his mind one day before he died and part of herself was left imprinted in the dummy body. I kinda felt like this movie was paying homage to the original in sum, but not copying it down again. I liked the ending though, where he managed to gain access to her mind and download himself into one of the prosthetic bodies that she uses by remote. I suppose that was his final act because he was now free of the original designer's body, having taken on for his own, and wanted to be free of the original designers intentions as well. It wanted to be free to start the next society.
I thought this was the best gits ever, if not equal to some of the really other good episodes and moments just because of the complexity of the ending. But thats just my take on things. Im interested to see if anyone else agrees or disagrees with me.

[–] tsplinter2000 17 years ago

>>he managed to gain access to her mind and download himself into one of the prosthetic bodies that she uses by remote.

I thought the same thing at first, but then I watched that scene again and now I actually think something different happened here. When he walks out of the body storage device, he heads toward an open door with a glowing white light. I believe that is him finally dying, and that chamber was just in his mind. The same way he morphed his dying prosthetic body to show the Major different faces, I think that chamber was just a symbolic projection of his death, witnessed by the Major. The whole walking-into-a-white-light thing is a pretty common metaphor for dying in film and television. Of course, your interpretation is valid, and I think the filmmakers did intentionally leave it open to debate (although I still think I am right!).

>>Although Im not exactly clear how these traces managed to reform into a being after being split apart, or how they managed to find the puppet that the original bureaucrat had been controlling from home.

About this, my impression was that over time, parts of her unconscious were leaked out and imprinted into scattered areas of the net itself, and then the composite being that was the Puppeteer absorbed those bits. With the Major's iron sense of justice as a motivating force, the Puppeteer was then driven to take action in a way that the real Major could not. It's the same way the Major said she reconstructed the personalities of the Tachikoma's. She said she found them as bits of data "drifting on the net." As far as using the dead bureaucrat's body, I think that was probably a case of the Puppeteer looking for a way in to the company and getting lucky by discovering the dead body and then taking over from there. The Puppetteer could have found the body by back-hacking the guy's connection from the company to his apartment. Or something like that.

[–] haewatein 14 years ago

totally agree with you (being a big fan of both films, the 2 gigs and SSS), it seems the makers of GITS are simply too conservative and they are on the edge of turning everything that already appears in the first film and what they "reuse" as clichés... it's sad

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