ghost in the shell 2

[mikkeneko]

Bateau: DOLLS!
Audience: Yeah, I'm getting that.
Mamoru: If I'm going to have CGI in this movie at all, then by GOD I am going to get my money's worth out of it.
Togusa: And then things stopped making any sense whatsoever.

Comments

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

I KNOW!

I think Togusa is there for two reasons: 1) So everybody else in the movie can talk down to him. 2) So the audience can sympathize with his utter confusion.

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Although Bateau wasn't quite as bad as I thought he would be. At times I actually suspected him of having a deadpan sense of humor under there... somewhere.

Overall, it was actually a better movie than I'd expected... right up until the last oh, say, seven minutes. It was fantastic until Bateau peeled the chick out of the ghost dubbing machine, and she bounced back from 'trauma nigh on death' to 'morally contemptible' within twenty seconds, after which it became merely okay. And the final image of the movie was weak. I found myself going "Togusaaaa! Why couldn't you have brought the girl some damn chocolates or something?"

Cute dog, tho.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's from the manga, even. Section 9 investigates all these bizarre crazy android murders and finds out it was these teenage girls who were slated for ghost dubbing--which, for no reason I've ever been able to ascertain, is supposed to kill the original--who exchanged sexual favors with one of the techs in return for his sabotaging the dolls and writing "help me" in blood inside the dolls' skulls. When they find out the truth, Bateau rips into them for causing all those innocent deaths. It's pretty ugly. Then again, no one ever accused Ghost in the Shell of being nice.

GITS SAC is probably the nicest incarnation of it, actually. Not nearly as edgy. More fun to watch, though.

What was the final image of the movie? I've forgotten.

I really wanted to like this movie, and for a while, I was able to go with it, even through the coroner's dumbass speech about how biological reproduction is an attempt to create artificial life. (Um. No.) I think I gave up during the weird sequence with the house on the hill, and the mind-tripping, and the seventeenth rambling speech about dolls.

If movie Bateau has deadpan humor, it's lost on me. I'm just too used to his wackier, nastier sense of humor from the manga and the series.

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

Well, the last image of the movie is the one where Togusa goes home to his little girl, and (presumably because he's been away for a few days) brings her a present. Now, Bateau has just spent the entire movie soliliquizing on how crummy it is for human beings to make dolls in their own image and then treat them like playthings (I'm paraphrasing here,) and, of course, what does Togusa get for his daughter? A pretty little doll. Thus indicating that he's completely missed the point of the movie and is not fit to be Bateau's partner, or at least that's how I read it. The final shot is of Togusa's daughter holding the doll, and Bateau looking at it and looking grim.

I had to remind myself that this was a seqel to the first movie, not to the series, and that Bateau and Togusa did not in fact end up partnered all the time. But still, that bit after the house sequence where Togusa says "that'it, I can't make it as your parter," and Bateau basically goes "Yeah, you suck," kinda ticked me off. If nobody can keep up with now that Motoko's gone, then maybe you need to tone it DOWNa notch.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, that. Of course, in my reading of the movie, that's Togusa, symbolizing the audience saying, "You're so full of shit."



I think the series does a much better job than the movies of illustrating the stated reason Togusa's with Section 9 to begin with, despite being less experienced and physically less capable than its other members: they require diversity to survive. Series Togusa hasn't lived and doesn't think like Motoko or Bateau, and that frequently pays off in investigations. In the movie timeline, Togusa's a Section 9 rookie (this gets confusing, if the movie canon is supposed to co-exist with the series canon--and I don't think it really can, at this point--because in the series, he's not a rookie, and the series would have to come first), but he's still an intelligent and capable man, and it bugs me when he gets stuck in Companion Mode.

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

Of course, in my reading of the movie, that's Togusa, symbolizing the audience saying, "You're so full of shit."

*snarf*