MDK'S VERDICT: NOT BAD
New GiTS is decidedly NOT a terrible movie. It's also a let-down, but not for the obvious reasons..... yes, it readily departs from all the established universe, yes it changes like a BUNCH of characters.... all that basically makes sense in the movie, even (especially) the whitewashing aspect. I
really wanted to hate Batou, but couldn't. Anyway, it's none of the expected stuff that makes the movie suck, I guess, is the point of this intro -- suck is a strong word. It's got weaknesses. Let's dive in.
THE GOOD:
First, the movie
sounded fucking brilliant. They're getting a lot of props for the visuals -- those were great, sure, most of the time, but the sound was
outstanding. Major props to Clint Mansel, the soundtrack guru you should all know better than you think you do. He nailed this shit.
Second, the visuals. They were cool. The coolness was suitably pervasive too -- background floating fish, holobilboards, etc. It looked slick. They even handled most of the legacy shots well -- the spherical hacking, the robogeisha, all that shit. Visuals were nicely done.
Third (and arbitrarily last), they cast this shit
right. Based on the script I just watched, Japanese is the only think Kusanagi
couldn't be -- her cover was a refugee killed in a terrorist attack on a boat into the country, so that wouldn't, you know. How would a Japanese refugee be sailing to.... w/e. Yeah they could've written it differently and preserved stuff, but Scarlet nailed it, and so did (almost) everybody else. Had my doubts with Aramaki off the bat, but he turned out to be perfect too. Really, the only people who didn't seem like a perfect cast were evil-white-corporate-villain and the random-third-world-rep (who performed just fine, really, but just could not capture the gravity of his role or dialogue and it's purely an aesthetic thing -- his acting was fine, he just wasn't cast in the right part).
POINT OF THIS SECTION BEING, there's plenty to like. It was paced well (enough), the action was good, various other elements were good.
THE NOT-SO-GOOD:
First and foremost, this was a really simple film -- nothing wrong with that, I guess, if we don't hold it to source-material standards -- but it managed to still do a
really terrible job introducing its elements. We never saw (cringe) Major Major's shell as anything particularly special -- the old shit always has a shot of her crashing into some concrete or talks about how she'd sink in water or whatever. This one she just broke on literally every single mission until
magically she's ripping apart a tank with her bare hands? It was rough. This was surprising because they started out, like, super good at this -- that African negotiation, where he plays the french lullaby and says "in the time it took her to sing that song, she learned French." PERFECT! They coulda done that level of exposition the whole way through and it woulda been great. But sadly no -- ten minutes later we reverted to sixty fucking lines of trialogue to explain what 'diving' means, and that still didn't turn out to mean anything because at the end of it Major Major just magically knows where the signal was coming from and
handwave it just you know hacking or something fuckit let's go shoot Yakuzas. See they tricked me into thinking they were gonna write it well, and then they didn't write it well at all.
Second, the characters were generally awful
with some great exceptions. I mentioned Aramaki already -- thought he was gonna be in the awful camp, he wound up in the good camp. Also in that camp: Togusa, Oulet, British agent whose name I never fully registered. Awful camp: pretty much everyone else. Motivations (if they surfaced at all) never made much sense for anyone else, which you can forgive in the random drones I guess, but not in the main characters, so let's focus on them. Major Major swallowing magic plot-suppression juice until she
no longer swallows magic plot-suppression juice because random guy she's so bent on killing has a funky tattoo and then I mean shit man do I really have to go on, and all this supposedly after going from zero to ultraterminator in a year? Meh. It was a sad fucking excuse for an arc, summarized nicely by the clumsy Schwarenegger punchline they spent half her scenes building towards. How about White Corporate Villain though?
Honestly can't remember if he literally said it out loud, but that was the full depth of his character -- well, that, plus a tedious coward-reveal at the end just to help the audience feel better about Major Major's punchline (it didn't work). Batou, I'm struggling to put into either camp.... On the one hand I thought they generally handled him fine, but then on the other, I can't decide whether he makes
any sense at all as less than a full cyborg. I keep going back to the Yakuza Disco, and wondering how he can be both Cyber-Noob and also unit strongman who recklessly throws his measly organics into
actual human carjacks and come out on top. He made sense when he was full-cyborg. He didn't make sense here. They didn't have a choice, based on the way they took the script -- but maybe that's a reason they shouldn't have gone that way.
Third, the whole big thing was overly personalized at the expense of nuance. There was
one heroine and
one villain and everything else was a smokescreen. By doing that, the movie precluded the asking of any significant questions --
"Are cyborgs still human?" "Well you're the main character, so I guess yup, checkmark, done." "How does the team differentiate itself into their different roles -- and how can a guy like Togusa contribute? What even is diversity when every part of you is in a catalogue somewhere?" "You, uh.... I think you said something about a team? What's that?" "Are the structures that govern human society prepared to deal with changes to the way we perceive and experience the universe?" "RAAAAAAH I'M A RAGING CORRUPTED CUNTBAG, RAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGHHH!!!" "But...." "RAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGH!!!!" You get the idea. Dumb.
But still......I could go on for a while on either good/bad, but this is the fucking spam section, so naw. Look, I was entertained. It was not a waste of money. The theater where I watched was
empty -- that's a damn shame. More people are gonna see Baywatch. GiTS: the Whitening 3D doesn't deserve that bad a reaction.
It was fine. They choked the life out of it with Hollywood bullshit, but hey, that's every damn movie. Is it an affront to GiTS God? I mean..... yeah....... but who gives a shit what that guy thinks? This is America. Freedom of Religion bitch, that's the fourth amendment.
Little Bill