Ghost in the Shell

I know fuck-all about comic books, DC or Marvel or anything else, and fuck-even-less about manga, which I find totally incomprehensible. This was based on a manga that apparently was very popular. I’ve tried, and I can’t find much good to say about it. The design of the thing got some good reviews, and there’s no denying it’s extremely complex, but I think they went overboard. If you think about it for just a moment, what is the sense of having 100-story tall hologram billboards? Very little chance you could make any sense of them from the ground. Also, in the future, will our brains have changed enough that we could possibly deal with the sensory overload that we see here? I won’t say no, and I know that virtual reality is widely thought to be the Next Big Thing. Coupled with the mobile smart phones that are now put into the hands of infants as they emerge from the womb, it could be that the world of the future will look something like this. In which case I’m genuinely sorry for future generations.

As for the film itself … we saw it a few weeks ago, and damn me if I can remember fuck-all about it. Something about a woman whose body is destroyed, re-built, who then becomes a killing machine. Scarlett Johannson, who can be a good actress when she wants to be, lately has been making paycheck movies. I won’t condemn her for it; if someone offered me $5,000,000 or so to act out a piece of dreck, I’d probably take it, too. And I can’t deny that she’s good at it and always looks terrific. I just wish the films left a wee bit more room to create a character. But characters don’t seem to put butts in seats anymore, do they?