Ghost in the Shell

Ghost in the Shell (***)

"Memory cannot be defined but it defines mankind."
"I wonder where I'll go now. The net is vast and infinite."

Somehow I managed to go this long without seeing either of the Ghost in the Shell movies. so I used my newfound streaming Netflix account to check out the first one tonight. I've already seen a bunch of "Stand Alone Complex" on Adult Swim--not the whole run beginning to end, but a lot of it--so I was already pretty much aware of the characters and the basic themes going in. The show can sometimes be really dense and talky, and the dialogue can be really stiff and wooden sometimes, but it's still more than interesting enough to watch because of it its around a very cool cyberpunk setting and the ideas about humanity, personhood, and identity at it's center. I feel much the same way about the movie. A lot is jammed into less than 90 minutes, and at time it's a bit difficult to follow. It had to be damn near impossible to follow for most American audiences when it first released in 1995 if they didn't really know what to expect going in. There's a hollowness to a lot of the scenes and characters aren't developed much. And yet, it's still an easy work to admire because of the vision of a future where the line between human and machine is no longer clear that it creates. It reminds me in some ways of the Metal Gear Solid games, which deftly weave amazingly complex conspiracy plots and present a lot of interesting ideas (some of which, especially in MGS 2 and 4 are actually similar to the ideas of Ghost in the Shell) and yet also feature lines like "Snake, do you believe that love can blossom, even on the battlefield?!" It's not nearly to that extend here, it should be said, it's just a comparison.

At the film's start, Section 9 is investigating a series of ghost hacks of government officials. Alright, so right off there's some splainin' to do. The "ghost" in Ghost in the Shell is the mind, the soul, the consciousness. Whatever you want to call it, it's the intangible thing that makes a person and person. So a "ghost hack" is a hack of a person's mind, made possible by the fact that much of the human population is now living in partial or total cybernetic bodies. Section 9 is a police force that investigates crimes such as this. They communicate with each other through a neural link without speaking. They do their detective work by tapping their brains into computer systems. Section 9 is helmed by Chief Aramaki, who is developed more as a character in the show, but for purposes of the movie basically serves as the old intelligent dude who's been around the block before. The point woman on the ground is our protagonist, Motoko, or simply The Major, who has a fully cyborg body which the filmmakers have deemed we need to see in the nude about 6 times over the course of the 83 minute movie. Alongside on the team is Batou, the man closest to major, whose unchanging prosthetic eyes seem to complement his stoic military man personality. There's also Ishikawa, who we don't get to know much, and Togusa, who was chosen for the team for a diversity of opinion because he's still almost entirely human.

After a brief gunfight/chase sequence, the culprits of the ghost hacks are tracked down. The one who isn't killed in the firefight is brought in for questioning. In the interrogation room, the man, a garbage man by trade, has it explained to him that he himself has been hacked into, his mind planted with false memories of having a wife and kids that don't actually exist. A "simulated experience" it's called, one of the genuinely unsettling ideas in the Ghost in the Shell universe. The case starts to trouble Motoko, as she begins to question whether she can deem anything about her own life as a certainty since her body is no longer human. Section 9 realizes that the ghost hacks can be traced by to a master hacker, a Puppet Master. The turning point of the plot comes when Section 9 comes in possession of the cyborg body of an unknown woman who, seemingly unrelated, was struck by a car, and it eventually becomes clear that the very nature of the Puppet Master is as much a question as his identity. The whole thing makes for an interesting, if hard to follow on the first viewing detective story, though it's mere 83 minutes leaves you wanting a bit more. The same can be said with a lot of animated movies, I suppose.

Most of the English voice actors (the dub was what was on Netflix) are those who would go on to do the voices for the "Stand Alone Complex" series. One exception is Motoko, whose voice doesn't sound as good here, I don't think. As a whole, the voice acting is decent but seems kind of stiff. I think some of that is some of the dialogue they're working with, although I also think that more recent anime dubs are usually better crafted, "Stand Alone Complex" included. More interesting in the soundtrack, which compares a bit to the other big watershed movie for U.S anime fandom, Akira, in that it has an eastern influence. Wikipedia tells me that the main theme is actually based on a Shinto prayer.

Ghost in the Shell was about what I expected. It was enjoyable, if a bit too self-involved and stiff at times. As far as early breakthrough animes go, I much prefer Akira. Maybe that sounds inconsistent because I just chided Ghost in the Shell for being hard to follow, and Akira is by all rights far more incomprehensible at times, but there's something about the way Akira all comes together that I love. Even though it was made seven years earlier, the animation seems to have more richness and more life to it, and combined with one of the coolest soundtracks I've ever heard, the movie delivers more of a punch for me. I still think Ghost in the Shell is something of an important work, though, because of its philosophy and its ethics and its unprecedentedly lucid cyberpunk vision.

Smarter than the Aver-age Flying Cat

Lunar Silver Star Story Playthrough
Playtime: 00:00-02:51

That's right kids, mixing it up a bit. This is a game that I've genuinely never played before, other than the first hour or so once. My initial thoughts about Lunar are, first of all, that it's a lot of fun, and secondly that it moves quickly. It's like a JRPG in the hurry-up offense. It has all the traditional elements of a JRPG, including a story, albeit a pretty simplistic one to this point, but doesn't really spend a lot of time dallying at all. A little under, I've been through the first three areas, and just felled the first boss: the weird gelatinous creature on the pirate ship. The game doesn't have any huge blocks of dialogue, the load times are minimal (given that it's a top down 2D game, this would seem to go without saying, but the load times on the PS1 Final Fantasy ports are putrid), and battles usually last less than a minute. When an RPG presents an interesting world to explore, it's fun to slow down and let yourself be immersed in it, but I'm finding this a nice change of pace after having played two FF games. Recall that in FF IX it took a good hour to really get into the game proper after a menagerie of cutscenes and battles of no real consequence.

Like pretty much every JRPG, Lunar is a coming of age story. Our protagonist is Alex, a teenager growing up in a quaint little town who, much like Link or Zidane or a thousand other RPG characters, is actually more than meets the eye. He has the same green eyes as Dyne: the legendary dragonmaster, Alex's hero. And so, after passing the trial of the legendary white dragon, awakened from his slumber, Alex sets off to find his destiny, accompanied with his loyal flying cat Nall, his friend of the fairer sex, Luna, with a renowned singing voice, and his loud, obnoxious, tubby friend, Ramus. Later you meet Nash, the requisite arrogant bastard character. Each character gets a little CGI cutscene to introduce them with some kind of dated looking, but still decent animation. The voice acting is hardly great, but given that this was made at around the same time as Symphony of the Night ("What is a man... a miserable little pile of secrets!!!") and Mega Man 8 ("But it cannot fall into Dr. Wah-wee's hands!"), it's hard to complain about. At times, there's actually voice acting over the regular top down pixelated graphics, which is just kind of bizarre more than anything and doesn't really add much. The game has a pretty good sense of humor, and some very Americanized humor. I'm not sure how much of that is the result of localization or if it was in the original Japanese. Talking to random people in towns will produce some pretty amusing little asides.

The battle system has some elements of Chrono Trigger (undoubtedly other games also, I just associate it with Chrono Trigger) in that enemies will move around during the battle and there are certain area-of-effect spells that will hit more enemies the more they're grouped. In Lunar, your characters also have to physically move to melee attack enemies, and can't fully traverse the screen in a single turn. This is a little bit frustrating, as it doesn't specifically define exactly how far you can move, and on a couple of occasions a character has basically burned a turn just moving toward an enemy that I thought he could get to. Additionally, if you tell a character to attack a nearby enemy that then dies at the hands of the character who went immediately before him, that character may select a much farther away enemy leading to the same result. Not really that big of a deal though. At the time, I don't have a lot of variety in abilities but that's slowly improving, especially now with the addition of Nash as a caster. In general, battle is usually fun and fast moving. It does seem a bit odd to me that it took this long to get to a genuine boss battle. Hoping the rate of those will pick up a bit.

Overall thus far, Lunar is a fun game that you can pick up and get into the meat of quickly, without a lot of stops and starts along the way. I don't know if it's really high art as much as some of the better Final Fantasys are. The story is very simplistic and there's a lot of just getting you from point A to point B without a lot of flavor added in. The humor is genuinely amusing though, and it holds your interest. More to come.