Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Tedium ex Machina
B-Fest has come and gone, and I’m working on a full recap. In the meantime, let me whet the palate for movie reviews with my thoughts on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, or as I like to call it, Ghost in the Shell 2: Still in That Damn Shell. The original Ghost in the Shell is widely considered an anime classic, and I won’t disagree. I dig it because it’s the ultimate ichthyologists’ anime, from the prominent featuring of osteoglossomorphs in the opening scene to the tank battle in a museum at the end (with perfect reproductions of the Holzmaden Stenopterygius specimens and a giant Victorian-style tree of piscean relationships on the wall.) The original film managed to balance awesome cyborg action with lengthy stretches of philosophizing, mostly on the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human. This talkiness earned the film the love of some critics and the ire of those who’d prefer robotic explosions to robotic soliloquizing. As I just said, I think it managed to balance things well enough. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the sequel, Innocence. Immediately prior to seeing this movie I joked that, taking the first movie to the next level, this one would be 95 minutes of quoting philosophy, and then when they get to Wittgenstein, stuff blows up for four minutes. Then it ends. Imagine my distaste at having this jocular aside essentially confirmed. Seriously, all this movie does is talk talk talk. Every other line is a quote of some kind, running the gamut from the Bible to Confucius to Descarte. For every scene of sweet robot action there’s ten interminable stretches where characters sit around, listlessly reciting passages from their undergraduate soc class. This is the kind of robot battle anime that’s not afraid to just hang out for ten, maybe fifteen minutes and show you what it’s like for a cyborg to feed his dog, kick back on the Lay-Z-Boy, and drink a couple beers. (It’s pretty much what you’d expect: boring.) Then there’s this stretch at the end where the scenes start to repeat. Here I joked, “They just repeat this one scene for the rest of the movie.” Again my jest became reality. Okay, so it didn’t repeat until the very end of the movie, but it sure took its sweet time in breaking out of the loop. Now, the “repeated scene with slight variations” bit can be good in a movie, but here it’s just tedious. That’s the problem with everything here: not only is it boring, it’s boring because it’s all been done before. Don’t get me wrong, I love protracted philosophizing, and I’m more than enough of a film snob to eat up the talkiest of features. But that’s only when something new is being brought to the table. Let’s see, a Japanese animated program featuring robots and humans where the lines between the two are blurred, and in the end we must ask ourselves whether it is not we who are the robots? That’s not exactly blazing any new trails here. Indeed, anime in general has beaten that horse to death, then resurrected it as a cyborg, then beaten it to death, then blown it up. And don’t even get me started on hearing creepy little girl voices saying, “taskete” (“help me”) over and over again. SO played. Furthermore, the entire plot of the film (I’m going to spoil the big twist at the end of this parenthesis, so if you are dead-set on catching Innocence I would abort reading now), concerning the mass copying of captive girl’s souls onto “sexaroids” (mechanical companions for the wealthy, as it were), is a total rip-off of the Futurama episode with Lucy Liu. (For the real nitpickers out there, yes, I’m aware that this plot point was present in the original manga, which predates Futurama, but to that I say, “Come on…come on!”) By now I’ve heard pretty much all the possible angles of the robot-human debate, and when I go to an anime of that bent, all I ask is wicked robot fight scenes and lots of them. A little bit of pseudo-deep philosophy in the mix is pretty much a given, but I’ll tolerate it in minimal doses. But when you base an entire movie around it, that’s when I have to draw the line. If I had wanted to hear Descartes quoted at me, I’d have gone and had a round with me mates. Finally, there weren’t even any fish in here! There’s a hologram of one of the arowanas from the original, but the animal action is concentrated around a beagle and sea gulls. Billions and billions of sea gulls. Really, there’s a whole mess of them. So, if you specialize in the study of or are merely extremely fond of gulls, and additionally enjoy hearing lines like, “Birds do not peck at the green persimmon, they wait until it is ripe” every couple of seconds, I would recommend Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Otherwise, stay the heck away.
B-Fest has come and gone, and I’m working on a full recap. In the meantime, let me whet the palate for movie reviews with my thoughts on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, or as I like to call it, Ghost in the Shell 2: Still in That Damn Shell. The original Ghost in the Shell is widely considered an anime classic, and I won’t disagree. I dig it because it’s the ultimate ichthyologists’ anime, from the prominent featuring of osteoglossomorphs in the opening scene to the tank battle in a museum at the end (with perfect reproductions of the Holzmaden Stenopterygius specimens and a giant Victorian-style tree of piscean relationships on the wall.) The original film managed to balance awesome cyborg action with lengthy stretches of philosophizing, mostly on the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human. This talkiness earned the film the love of some critics and the ire of those who’d prefer robotic explosions to robotic soliloquizing. As I just said, I think it managed to balance things well enough. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the sequel, Innocence. Immediately prior to seeing this movie I joked that, taking the first movie to the next level, this one would be 95 minutes of quoting philosophy, and then when they get to Wittgenstein, stuff blows up for four minutes. Then it ends. Imagine my distaste at having this jocular aside essentially confirmed. Seriously, all this movie does is talk talk talk. Every other line is a quote of some kind, running the gamut from the Bible to Confucius to Descarte. For every scene of sweet robot action there’s ten interminable stretches where characters sit around, listlessly reciting passages from their undergraduate soc class. This is the kind of robot battle anime that’s not afraid to just hang out for ten, maybe fifteen minutes and show you what it’s like for a cyborg to feed his dog, kick back on the Lay-Z-Boy, and drink a couple beers. (It’s pretty much what you’d expect: boring.) Then there’s this stretch at the end where the scenes start to repeat. Here I joked, “They just repeat this one scene for the rest of the movie.” Again my jest became reality. Okay, so it didn’t repeat until the very end of the movie, but it sure took its sweet time in breaking out of the loop. Now, the “repeated scene with slight variations” bit can be good in a movie, but here it’s just tedious. That’s the problem with everything here: not only is it boring, it’s boring because it’s all been done before. Don’t get me wrong, I love protracted philosophizing, and I’m more than enough of a film snob to eat up the talkiest of features. But that’s only when something new is being brought to the table. Let’s see, a Japanese animated program featuring robots and humans where the lines between the two are blurred, and in the end we must ask ourselves whether it is not we who are the robots? That’s not exactly blazing any new trails here. Indeed, anime in general has beaten that horse to death, then resurrected it as a cyborg, then beaten it to death, then blown it up. And don’t even get me started on hearing creepy little girl voices saying, “taskete” (“help me”) over and over again. SO played. Furthermore, the entire plot of the film (I’m going to spoil the big twist at the end of this parenthesis, so if you are dead-set on catching Innocence I would abort reading now), concerning the mass copying of captive girl’s souls onto “sexaroids” (mechanical companions for the wealthy, as it were), is a total rip-off of the Futurama episode with Lucy Liu. (For the real nitpickers out there, yes, I’m aware that this plot point was present in the original manga, which predates Futurama, but to that I say, “Come on…come on!”) By now I’ve heard pretty much all the possible angles of the robot-human debate, and when I go to an anime of that bent, all I ask is wicked robot fight scenes and lots of them. A little bit of pseudo-deep philosophy in the mix is pretty much a given, but I’ll tolerate it in minimal doses. But when you base an entire movie around it, that’s when I have to draw the line. If I had wanted to hear Descartes quoted at me, I’d have gone and had a round with me mates. Finally, there weren’t even any fish in here! There’s a hologram of one of the arowanas from the original, but the animal action is concentrated around a beagle and sea gulls. Billions and billions of sea gulls. Really, there’s a whole mess of them. So, if you specialize in the study of or are merely extremely fond of gulls, and additionally enjoy hearing lines like, “Birds do not peck at the green persimmon, they wait until it is ripe” every couple of seconds, I would recommend Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Otherwise, stay the heck away.
Comments:
That's rather unfortunate. I wanted to see it, perhaps now I won't, and I won't feel like I'm missing anything, either.
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