Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
This is a totally captivating movie. (For peeps not into the genre, it's a Japanese anime film, the sequel to the very highly acclaimed original Ghost in the Shell made back in the '90s.) I watched it twice, once on Friday, when it opened, and once on Monday. It's so incredibly--wonderful--to watch a movie that quotes Descartes and the more obscure tales of Jakob Grimm and pays overt homage to Hans Bellmer. A local reviewer described this movie as "talky," and the Friday night patrons were rather quiet throughout, but the Monday crowd laughed perpetually and clearly dug the great wit and fab dialogue.
First off, the animation is staggeringly gorgeous, of a quality to bring tears to your eyes. In keeping with its predecessor, this movie is about cyborgs and humans and the nature of consciousness and life. It proposes to extend the concept of life to the apparently unconscious, a thought that will captivate anyone who has ever loved a doll, stuffed animal, or action figure. Sure, the theory of human projection can be easily subsumed within this idea, but the movie goes beyond that to suggest that the inanimate lead lives of their own, simply unperceived by humans, who lack the ability to communicate with the inanimate, just as we don't sing bird songs. The first time I saw this movie, I found myself agreeing with the local reviewer that the plot got lost a little bit in the middle--I remember thinking, "You know, at some point you've got to stop masturbating in front of the mirror and achieve a f*cking conclusion"--but the second time I truly felt that the movie's greatest strength is that it doesn't really achieve a conclusion-- It kind of reaches one, but essentially it leaves you with lots of ideas to think about regarding the essence of existence. Yeah, this could get rather funny, like, Does ink really enjoy being made into animated films? Does every pizza box I discard scream when I throw it in the trash? But it's such a trippy idea portrayed in such an engaging way that you'll continue to think about it and be amused by it for long afterward. This film grows on you with each repeated go-around, much like Some Girls by the Rolling Stones, as it is so rich and has so much to look at and listen to. It leaves you with an almost hallucenogenic feeling that everything around you is alive.
The one quibble I thought I had with the film is the statement that dolls and gods and animals are perfect in essence, while humans are not. Anyone who has grown up in a real forest or jungle knows that animals have considerable free will to exercise their judgment and make decisions, and thus, upon occasion, make mistakes. According to the Greek poets, the same is true of gods, and there is nothing in logic rendering dolls invulnerable to this argument. But the whole beauty of admiring dolls and gods and animals is that they are not human, and the message that it's good to get away occasionally from a species-specific narcissism is far more enriching than it is self-destructive.
First off, the animation is staggeringly gorgeous, of a quality to bring tears to your eyes. In keeping with its predecessor, this movie is about cyborgs and humans and the nature of consciousness and life. It proposes to extend the concept of life to the apparently unconscious, a thought that will captivate anyone who has ever loved a doll, stuffed animal, or action figure. Sure, the theory of human projection can be easily subsumed within this idea, but the movie goes beyond that to suggest that the inanimate lead lives of their own, simply unperceived by humans, who lack the ability to communicate with the inanimate, just as we don't sing bird songs. The first time I saw this movie, I found myself agreeing with the local reviewer that the plot got lost a little bit in the middle--I remember thinking, "You know, at some point you've got to stop masturbating in front of the mirror and achieve a f*cking conclusion"--but the second time I truly felt that the movie's greatest strength is that it doesn't really achieve a conclusion-- It kind of reaches one, but essentially it leaves you with lots of ideas to think about regarding the essence of existence. Yeah, this could get rather funny, like, Does ink really enjoy being made into animated films? Does every pizza box I discard scream when I throw it in the trash? But it's such a trippy idea portrayed in such an engaging way that you'll continue to think about it and be amused by it for long afterward. This film grows on you with each repeated go-around, much like Some Girls by the Rolling Stones, as it is so rich and has so much to look at and listen to. It leaves you with an almost hallucenogenic feeling that everything around you is alive.
The one quibble I thought I had with the film is the statement that dolls and gods and animals are perfect in essence, while humans are not. Anyone who has grown up in a real forest or jungle knows that animals have considerable free will to exercise their judgment and make decisions, and thus, upon occasion, make mistakes. According to the Greek poets, the same is true of gods, and there is nothing in logic rendering dolls invulnerable to this argument. But the whole beauty of admiring dolls and gods and animals is that they are not human, and the message that it's good to get away occasionally from a species-specific narcissism is far more enriching than it is self-destructive.
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