It is no secret that the new version of "Ghost in the Shell" (2017), released this week, is a remake of the film, which is simply a hoax adaptation.
Even if the director of the old version of the 1995 version, Oshii Mori, personally guaranteed that Scarlett Johansson was the perfect candidate to play the heroine Suiko Kusanagi, it was still difficult to explain the chaos of the story of the American version of "Ghost in the Shell" - the film takes place in the near future, any organ of the human body can be replaced by artificial organs, the current situation of the large number of wholesales of the flesh (Shell) makes the unique consciousness of the human soul (Ghost) questioned, and how the chain between the spirit and flesh (in the) has become a problem for every mechanical transformation person, this is the old version of the "Shell" Ghost in the Shell story core.
However, in the new version of "Ghost in the Shell", the heroine not only does not care about this matter, but instead regresses to pursue an outdated self-positioning in the posture of the most sophisticated robot in history: memory, spending the entire film trying to retrieve the childhood years that were brainwashed (sealed) by bad people, as if she could be satisfied after recapturing, and the self-question of "who should I be" will automatically be solved.
A police officer who has been washed by others and then made a career by sneaking into other people's memories will believe that the brain memory of a person who is not as safe as a USB hard disk can solve the problem of the real memory (Die Existenz) brought by the spiritual meat chain! The contradiction between worldview and role is evident at the first sight.
However, the discrepancy of the story is not the biggest difference between the old version of "Ghost in the Shell" and the American version.
If you want to understand Oshii's movie, the first thing you really have to see is how he arranges the scenes in the video; the real essence that the new version of Ghost in the Shell does not learn from the old version is the scene, especially the part about the city.
The establishment of "Peace Defense War": telling stories with a long perspective
How to strengthen or alienate the organic living space of "the city" into an inorganic and peculiar field is the consistent theme of Oshii Mori; unlike the director who is supreme in the original painting (action of the line), Oshii Mori has always been known for his performance technique. When the two collide, how to frame the compositional technique of urban space has become a self-exercise that Oshii has been groping for many years.
In the 1980s, Oshii was still groping in other people's works, and also made a fuss about the famous previous history of the original manga and the famous history of the gold lord in "Fukusei Kid 2: Kiri Dream man", which moved the original Japanese town of Yuincho to the back of the flying stone turtle.
Until 1993, Oshii Mori, in his epoch-making masterpiece "Mobile Police Movie Edition 2: Peace Defense War", formally established his own set of spatial (symbolic) methodology - close-up depiction of characters, mid-scene depiction of world view, long-range depiction of stories.
In tokyo in the film "Peace Defense War", whether it is in the high-rise buildings, the reclamation of new lands and the indirect exchange of houses in the dark alleys, the rampage of tanks driving on the streets to surround indifferent people, or the still paintings of birds and birds that only exist in posters and TV screens... Everything that originates from the pictures between the cities is like a projection of glass, which is the most fictional reality and the most realistic fiction, far more powerful than the protagonist and any character's actions, which point out the theme of the movie "False Peace under stable conditions" and shock everyone.
Aaron Gerow, a former director of the Japan Mapping Society, selected it as one of the best Japanese films of the 1990s, alongside many live-action films, on the grounds that "Japan's live-action films to date have been unmatched by sharp criticism." [1]
"It's an imagery that only movies can do." Oshii Shoudo. So, three years later, Oshii Mori led the same group of team members to challenge another genre: the sci-fi manga "Ghost in the Shell", which is set in time and space.
Ghost in the Shell's old mystery: urban evolution
Ghost in the Shell is the story of the protagonist Suiko Kusanagi tracking down the hacker Master. In this tracking trip, they broke into several areas from the outside in the futuristic city: the heart of the city, the suburban slums, the uninhabited museum, and the home of barthes with colleague Bart.
The further back they get, the more backward, chaotic, and narrower the space in which Suzi and The Master are located; and when the story comes to an end, they lose even the space where their souls are stationed, the physical body.
The urban prototype of Ghost in the Shell is taken from British Hong Kong. Oshii Mori described Hong Kong this way:
"The city gives me the feeling that there is only the 'now' here, a non-stop place. People have not had a little idleness and playfulness in the past, and they will not get these things in the future. This fast-paced city emphasizes the "now". In fact, this feeling brought to me by Hong Kong has become the key to guiding the style of the whole film." [2]
This idea is embodied in the film. The city's "space" of the city's capital (Hong Kong urban area), suburbs (Hong Kong walled city) and the museum hosts the imagination of the past (Homo sapiens), the present (mechanical transformation of man) and the future (network consciousness) of life.
The progress of space and time presents a kind of stillness and a metaphor for "evolution".
For the Quashian, the way the city was constructed—a few magnates concentrating the physical private space (dwelling and dwelling rights) in the capital center, and the rest being squeezed into slums outside the concrete jungle, coincided with his birth; it was precisely because he was a procedural life that gradually developed and eventually entered the center of human collective consciousness by swallowing up the spiritual privacy space (mind and memory) of mankind.
If human progress is based on the absolute affirmation of the extreme self, and does not hesitate to exclude any non-self (just as the police want to destroy it), then the development of the city undoubtedly affirms the statement that the Kui master is convinced that he is a new species of natural evolution, and is a process of progress.
For Suzi, the city is confusing.
One of the symbols of human progress is technology, but when the towering towers, mechanical bodies, and cloud brains of cutting-edge technology are densely packed in the heart of du, it makes her feel the reality of being alive.
The appearance of the urban body like a building, sophisticated but uniform in specification, loses its uniqueness, and gradually blurs the definition of why the individual is an individual. On the contrary, the slums still retain the diversity of architecture, and no one store's billboard is repeated with others, and the billboard is a unique visual manifestation.
However, slums are precisely the areas where people's human rights are suppressed under the social system, and there is only a line between the museums where human beings are separated from the time stalemate, and the real sense of life runs counter to the definition of life, which is a retrogressive process.
Artificial intelligence that has no doubt about the self, and human beings who are full of self-doubt, the two have very different interpretations of time in the same space field, and they are different about the future of evolution.
Finally, the Master piloted the spider chariot and fired at the evolutionary tree on the museum's wall, the bullet shattering the word Hominis (human) at the top of the tree, as if he could forcibly push the next stage of the creature's progression with violence.
However, its unification with Suzi into the most open new life in history was done in the most private place for mankind: Bart's home.
If the city-dweller relationship is also a borrowing of the shell-ghost under the body, the home is the embodiment of the most intimate and intimate part of the soul.
Barthes's desire to hide Suzi in his home, even at the risk of committing a crime, is both his emotional entanglement with Suzi and proof that Suko can confirm that she is indeed a unique individual in the eyes of others, both of which are things that cannot be achieved without risking to become a master who can enter and exit the human brain.
If so, whether it is an evolved new life, or just a copy of mental thoughts, another kind of "human" old version of "Ghost in the Shell" that lacks uniqueness, leaves the audience with an unsolvable mystery.
The loss of the new version of Ghost in the Shell: the wrong stage
This is the real essence that the new version of Ghost in the Shell has not inherited.
Yes, the new version of the scene art has intentions, CG special effects are exquisite, and on the basis of the 1995 version, the figures of various "Shell" and even other unpopular works such as the suit of "Ghost in the Shell: Rise", the geisha of "Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C", the apartment of "Avalon" and the flying carp of "Labyrinth Object" enrich the scene.
However, these scenes from different worldviews do not have a real connection between the stories. Suzi's suit appears abrupt in the new version of the story without formal military settings, and geisha shouting "save me" in the new version of the world without AI is just unknown, so such fallacies are numerous.
The most important thing is that these seemingly reproduced urban spaces of the old film have long since been completely peeled off.
Under the superfluous three-dimensional projection decoration, the billboards in Water Hong Kong have lost their eye-catching and symbolized the watershed of life's evolution to a mediocre ruined clearing, with nothing to play except to make the fighting space larger.
Suzi once again returns to the top of the building in the finale to go out on a mission, witnesses the fictional apparition of the city, and jumps down the building indifferently, although it is in line with the choice of the new version of "I am me", but it is unchanged, it is inevitable that people have a cheap sense of picture recycling, as if the actors ran on the wrong stage, or if the repertoire built the wrong stage.
The name "Ghost in the Shell" obviously should not be such a film that lacks the deep chain of the old version in terms of space and story meaning, but instead reduces it to a fake Easter egg that pays tribute to it, and it is a film that loses the other.
Of course, Paramount Pictures has been picking this "old animation" on the screen for twenty years, and the request is never word of mouth, but to save their precarious box office figures, otherwise it would not have changed "Ghost in the Shell" into an old action movie like "Kamen Rider". But can it be done?
The box office benefit of this film so far is 100 million US dollars, which can be returned, but it is bound to be a big gap with the expected big sale; the Chinese mainland box office that was originally expected is not optimistic at present. It seems that those who are disappointed in this film are probably not only fans of the original work.
exegesis:
[1] "Lily squid", October 1997, ample 译, Ruins: https://www.douban.com/note/567302555/
[2] The November 1995 November issue of the monthly "Online" Japanese edition, translated by Captain Van Cliff, source: WeChat public number Five Boiler Room "Ghost in the Shell" article
More featured content in the shadows
Welcome to pay attention to the Fan Shadow Network Cinephilia WeChat public account
Taiwanese contributor. I know more about movies than I like, and I like animation more than I know about them.