O.L. Design

I watched Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence the other day. While I’m not a die hard anime fan, I really like the original Ghost in the Shell, which has great visuals and an interesting philosophical story dealing with humanity from a cyborg’s point of view. So, I had pretty high expectations on the sequel.

The film starts out with our hero Batou discovering a robot, which is actually made as a kind of sex toy, but somehow has begun to develop human feelings and killed its owner and several other people. Batou and his partner Togusa, both working for the hi-tech police squad Section 9, gets assigned to find out how the robot suddenly could get human feelings. As they get deeper into the the mysteries of the case, they start to question humanity’s desire to mirror herself in dolls and robots, and where the border between man and machine is, and those philosophical issues ultimately get a central role in solving the case.

Innocence is really beatiful, a complete feast in amazing visuals. Several scenes gave me chills through their visual power. You get huge views over beautifully rendered urban landscapes (the movie is traditional cell animation over computer generated backgrounds and environments), and also some really disturbing and frightening visuals. All this together with great animation makes the world of Innocence very easy to believe in.

The problem with this film is its pretentiousness and its failure to reach the audience with all the messages it wants to deliver. This really made me sad, because I really liked the philosophical issues that the original film dealt with (although Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Blade Runner dealt with the same questions in a much nicer way more than ten years earlier). The main problem is that all the philosphical messages tends to be told through dialogue. Instead of, like in Blade Runner and in many ways the original Ghost in the Shell, let the main characters be the core of the philosophy, here everything happens around Batou and Togusa rather than within themselves. We never get to see what lies beneath the surface of our heroes, and in that way tell us what the problems are in a both personal and philosophical view at the same time. And this is what makes the characters talk about the philosophy all the time, quoting passages from the Bible and works of great philosophers, and in the mean time, forget to talk about where they are in their mission, and where they have to go next.

All this makes the film lack a sense of depth, as it is for me very hard to crack the shell of all those philosophical quotes and really take them in. If we would know the characters better, and could connect their feelings in a deeper sense to all the philosophy, we would feel what everything is about, and that would have gotten us into the philosophical train of thought necessary to be in to really take in the messages being told. And so, when the film’s climax arrives, I barely know why the characters are there, and everything just feels like a beautiful surface with no real depth.

Innocence has really nice visuals, some entertaining action sequences, and some really well done scenes. But the surface tends to be too thick to penetrate, and so the depth gets lost somewhere along the way. Fans of the original Ghost in the Shell should really see Innocence, though, as you may have guessed by now, I will not promise that you will like it. Others should not bother, unless you really get off by listening to quotes from philosophers for 99 minutes.