Is her name really Major instead of Motoko?
It’s her rank. But in the movie, her name is different for a time.
If you’ve never seen (and enjoyed) some version of Ghost in the Shell, there’s not enough here to hold your attention.
If you’ve seen (and enjoyed) some version of Ghost in the Shell, what’s here will just make you sad. It’s not exactly that they got things wrong—although they certainly got some things wrong—moreso they just don’t do justice to anything at all.
The visuals of the city, from the buildings to those awesome retro-future boxy cars, are the only thing that felt like they made the transition from anime to this movie while retaining their appeal. Everything else you love about the anime is probably either different, or in most cases, missing.
I suspect a lot of that is because yeah, this was yet another origin story. I also want to blame the movie format itself, since I’ve just finished rewatching all 52 episodes of the television version (Stand Alone Complex). Coming off of that, my inclination is to say there’s too much here to do any of it justice in any movie, and then I remember that of course there was already an anime movie. It’s been over a decade since I’ve seen it, but I remember it working better than this.
It was decent enough. They clearly spent more time on the look than the story.
Ultimately I just didn’t buy that Department 9 was actually a team devoted to each other to the degree that I was meant to accept. Without that, the movie lacked an emotional center. Nor could I quite buy the interactions with the character’s mother. The acting was quite odd there.
This covers it pretty thoroughly in one line. I’d call this movie pretty much the definition of “okay”. There were probably half an hour of interesting scenes in here tied together by a bunch of unwieldy origin story. I’d be interested in watching a version of this movie that drops an hour of that and spends more time on either the team or on a more interesting internal conflict, because yeah, everything was pretty.
$19 million US/$40 million total global over the weekend. That’s not great for a movie that had a budget of $110 million. It’s too early to call it a flop, but it’s not looking good.
This movie obviously bombed because I didn’t go see it. I didn’t go see it because the ads and promo material said Motoko’s name was “Major”. That’s not her name, it’s a rank. It’s like someone watching Game of Thones and thinking Daenerys’s name is Khaleesi. They obviously don’t comprehend the source material. Other people call her Khaleesi, but she never says “This is Khaleesi. I’m going in.”
What the hell, honestly.
TIL. . .
(in fairness, I’ve never read more than 100 pages of the first book or seen more than a third of a trailer for the TV show)
That’s fine dude, you didn’t go and make a Game of Thrones movie after skimming the books.
As far as you know. . .
Ouch.
As with many adaptations, I feel like this one really struggles to justify its own existence, outside of ScarJo really wanting another action/sci-fi release on her resume. The anime is so…quintessentially anime, that if you aren’t going to add something to it significantly, why even bother making it at all? The trailer’s slavish devotion to remaking shots and scenes suggested they didn’t really know what, if anything, they were adding.
I find it hard to even argue “expanded audience” for this one, because while sci-fi is more accessible than ever, so too are anime and manga, so I don’t really know who is in this new audience you’re hitting.
It’s basically a bunch of scenes and ideas from all over the franchise, tossed into a blender and assembled into the most studio-noted version possible, without a fraction of the thought or style of the source material. It’s basically shot after shot lifted wholesale that only serve to remind you how much better executed those scenes were originally.
It’s kind of amazingly godawful.
The movie sucked, but her name, Motoko, is a major point of self discovery for the character in the third act.
…because, inexplicably, they chose to put a Ghost in the Shell skin on a remake of Robocop.
Despite the general bad feeling on the Interwebs, I went and saw the movie last night. Going in with low expectations helped, I think, since I thought it was merely bad instead of truly awful.
Leaving aside the Ghost in the Shell branding, it’s a fairly mediocre cyberpunk origin story with bad writing. From a Ghost in the Shell franchise fan perspective, all the references back to other versions are pretty jarring since they evoke characterization and world-building that this movie doesn’t share. Either way, they need to start over from scratch if there’s ever going to be a good live-action GitS film.
Let’s play the studio executive blame game!
[quote]
“We had hopes for better results domestically. I think the conversation regarding casting impacted the reviews,” said Kyle Davies, domestic distribution chief for Paramount.
“You’ve got a movie that is very important to the fanboys since it’s based on a Japanese anime movie. So you’re always trying to thread that needle between honouring the source material and make a movie for a mass audience. That’s challenging, but clearly the reviews didn’t help.”[/quote]
The remark about fanboys suggests to me they didn’t really get the problem. If you take the Japanese view out Ghost in the Shell you just get a rehash of every other American approach to a sci-fi cyborg movie.
My thought at the end was the eastern European hacker cyborg dude, should have said : “No, I am Motoko. You are Hideko” (or whatever the boyfriend name was). Would be a much more interesting twist.