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Ghost in the Shell (2017) Review Thread

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O

Oersted

Member
220px-Ghost_in_the_Shell_%282017_film%29.png


Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4VmJcZR0Yg

Official synopsis

Cyborg counter-cyberterrorist field commander The Major (Scarlett Johansson) and her task force Section 9 thwart and humiliate criminals, hackers and terrorists. Now, they must face a new enemy who will stop at nothing to sabotage Hanka Robotics' artificial intelligence technology.
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Official homepage

http://ghostintheshell.tumblr.com/


Reviews


Led by a resolute Scarlett Johansson, Rupert Sanders' pulse-quickening, formally stunning live-action take on the manga classic both honors and streamlines its source.
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https://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/ghost-in-the-shell-review-scarlett-johansson-1202017667/

If the "ghost" of anime classic Ghost in the Shell refers to the soul looming inside of its killer female cyborg, then this live-action reboot from director Rupert Sanders really only leaves us the shell: a heavily computer-generated enterprise with more body than brains, more visuals than ideas, as if the original movie’s hard drive had been wiped clean of all that was dark, poetic and mystifying.
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http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/ghost-shell-review-987891

Marshaling the very latest in digital photography, stereoscopic imaging and cutting-edge effects, “Ghost in the Shell” is a technical knockout, a here-and-now valentine to what design wizardry Hollywood can pull off in 2017. At the same time, it does so in service of a tired tale full of repurposed visual tricks, storytelling clichés and big-studio concessions, to the extent that the film offers a sleek modern polish to a story that feels about 15 years too late.
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http://www.thewrap.com/ghost-in-the-shell-review-scarlett-johansson-2017/

Paramount’s all-new live-action reboot emerges as a dazzling logistical display with a missing file where the human interest might once have been stored.
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http://www.indiewire.com/2017/03/ghost-in-the-shell-review-scarlett-johansson-reboot-1201797998/

This version may not break new ground, but it revisits familiar territory with a vibrant sense of style and welcome restraint. It exemplifies the kind of respectable and utterly unnecessary remake that now defines the Hollywood business model.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...489b735b3a3_story.html?utm_term=.2a8919454866

The filmmakers have put all their chips on the aesthetic. It's exhausting to watch them curate what parts of the story's Japanese origin are worth keeping and which can be discarded.
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http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/ghost-in-the-shell-movie-review.html?mid=full-rss-vulture

Years in the making, Ghost in the Shell is an expensive, carefully calculated, corporate version of a manga that was anything but.
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http://www.filmjournal.com/reviews/film-review-ghost-shell

The new Ghost In The Shell is a strange creature, an art robot, a cine-droid that replicates the pace and look of anime in the uncanny valley of live-action. It isn’t a remake of Mamoru Oshii’s sci-fi animated feature, which is a classic of the genre, but a very studious homage
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http://www.avclub.com/review/beguiling-ghost-shell-more-replicant-remake-252941


At times, Ghost in the Shell is beautiful, even stunning. But these visual pleasures can't mask the narrative emptiness.
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http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ghost-in-the-shell-2017


Currently 53 at Metacritic and 42 % at RT with a average score of 5.5


Will add more reviews

Lock if old
 
M

MMarston

Was getting caught part of your plan?
The puns in these blurbs...

Anyway, missed the my free screening last night but they compensated me with passes for the weekend.
 
T

Theorry

Member
Weird. This morning it was at 73% RT and rising. And now it suddenly dropped.
Still gonna see it. No brainer for me.
 
H

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
Not that surprised. It basically seems like they just recreated the original anime movie without any real interesting additions or changes on their part. Its seemed creatively bankrupt once I started seeing the trailers and clips with them regurgitating uglier versions of classic shots from the original film. ScarJo seems like she's sleep walking through everything I've seen.
 
H

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
At the same time, it does so in service of a tired tale full of repurposed visual tricks, storytelling clichés and big-studio concessions, to the extent that the film offers a sleek modern polish to a story that feels about 15 years too late.
Click to expand...
This is how I felt after seeing the trailers and reading some of the summaries. This film, and the changes it made from the original 1995 film might've been a good sell 20 years ago but today it's just tired.
 
I

Inferno313

Banned
Reposting my thoughts from the OT:

Saw this last night at an advance screening. Taken on its own, its a slightly above-average PG-13 action flick with fantastic visuals and an incredibly cool main character. As an adaptation of the source material, I feel a little similarly about it as I do the recent Beauty and the Beast. It manages to pull off the big, big moments from the original well enough, it adds a few interesting wrinkles of its own, but ultimately loses a lot of the elegance that made the original so special. The ending is also sorta butchered.

The race thing is... interesting, though as a pasty white dude I'm probably not the best person to speak to that issue. It did strike me that the film seemingly has a lot more to say about the nature of its production, in almost a metatextual way, than I expected. It makes an interesting attempt to try to talk about issues of identity and cultural erasure In homogenous societies, moreso than the original. Now, does this make the central casting an interesting meta step that fits with these themes, does it represent the writing team trying to make the most out of some problematic casting, or does it make it a deeply hypocritical film? That's the question I'm still wrestling with. I'm inclined to suspect that it's all of the above.
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L

Lights and Waves

Member
Seeing it tonight for free thanks to a trial membership to Crunchyroll. I'm expecting the worst from Ghost in the Shell, but I'm glad that asian americans like ScarJo are getting the representation they need!
 
K

kmax

Member
Struckmann gave it an
A-
. Others have pretty muched echoed the same thing. Scarlett's doing a good job, and the visuals are great, but the writing is bad and the plot is utterly forgettable..
 
H

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
It's available with STARZ on Amazon but not directly through Prime.
 
S

Soldiussnaku

Member
Dammit, my conerns about a rote, standard, pure hollywood-esque story that plays it toally safe seems to have come true. The trailers hinted towards that with the whole 'find your family' dialouge.

I understand why they had to change large parts of the orginal story, complex and deep as the themes are, but I hoped they retained some of the genre bending elements from GITS.

At lest they funelled the splendours orginailty of the GITS anime into the visuals, at the expense of characters and a story that sticks.

Will still check this out, but probably on the buy one gets one free offer in my local cinema.
 
Z

ZealousD

Makes world leading predictions like "The sun will rise tomorrow"
It's really dumb that Rotten Tomatoes does this binary thing between fresh and rotten. Everybody was acting pleasantly surprised back when the score was above 60%. It drops to 59% and suddenly everybody's like "what a shame".
 
J

jelly

Member
Never warmed to the trailers, it always looked off. Too much focus on visuals and echoing the anime too closely.
 
I

Inferno313

Banned
ZealousD said:
It's really dumb that Rotten Tomatoes does this binary thing between fresh and rotten. Everybody was acting pleasantly surprised back when the score was above 60%. It drops to 59% and suddenly everybody's like "what a shame".
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To be fair, this is about the score that I'd expect after having seen it. The 73% I saw this morning threw me for a loop, and I kinda liked it.
 
H

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
ZealousD said:
It's really dumb that Rotten Tomatoes does this binary thing between fresh and rotten. Everybody was acting pleasantly surprised back when the score was above 60%. It drops to 59% and suddenly everybody's like "what a shame".
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As others have mentioned it's more like the freefall from 73% to 59% that's shocking people. 73% is "mostly watchable" while 59% is like "super divisive and or just bad".
 
S

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
The filmmakers have put all their chips on the aesthetic. It's exhausting to watch them curate what parts of the story's Japanese origin are worth keeping and which can be discarded.
Click to expand...

Only if that's what you decided to do for the whole movie.

I'm guessing normal viewers don't really do that.
 
W

WhiteRabbitEXE

Member
ZealousD said:
It's really dumb that Rotten Tomatoes does this binary thing between fresh and rotten. Everybody was acting pleasantly surprised back when the score was above 60%. It drops to 59% and suddenly everybody's like "what a shame".
Click to expand...
Honestly the binary thing is way better than score averaging. Given how subjective it all can be, the number of people that were at least somewhat positive vs at least somewhat negative is a more useful metric to me. Averaging opinions distilled into numbers across a wide variety of scales doesn't really make much sense.

Like, in principle I don't see how "guy 1 thinks it's a 10/10, guy 2 thinks it's a 1/5, so clearly it's a 6/10 film" makes more sense than "one guy liked it, one guy didn't"
 
D

demosthenes

Member
Haly said:
As others have mentioned it's more like the freefall from 73% to 59% that's shocking people. 73% is "mostly watchable" while 59% is like "super divisive and or just bad".
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Just bad for me is like under 40%. 50% in a simple way is 50% enjoyed it, and 50% didn't. I don't consider that bad.
 
Z

ZealousD

Makes world leading predictions like "The sun will rise tomorrow"
WhiteRabbitEXE said:
Honestly the binary thing is way better than score averaging. Given how subjective it all can be, the number of people that were at least somewhat positive vs at least somewhat negative is a more useful metric to me. Averaging opinions distilled into numbers across a wide variety of scales doesn't really make much sense.

Like, in principle I don't see how "guy 1 thinks it's a 10/10, guy 2 thinks it's a 1/5, so clearly it's a 6/10 film" makes more sense than "one guy liked it, one guy didn't"
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But there's also a pretty clear difference between "more than half the people who watched it liked it" and "only a third of the people who watched it liked it", yet both are called "rotten".
 
I

Inferno313

Banned
ZealousD said:
But there's also a pretty clear difference between "more than half the people who watched it liked it" and "only a third of the people who watched it liked it", yet both are called "rotten".
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Yeah, I wouldn't mind if they added some kind of rating between Rotten and Fresh from like, 40-60%. Always seemed weird that a majority of critics liking something, even if it's just a majority of 55%, is considered a "rotten" movie.
 
H

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
Inferno313 said:
Yeah, I wouldn't mind if they added some kind of rating between Rotten and Fresh from like, 40-60%. Always seemed weird that a majority of critics liking something, even if it's just a majority of 55%, is considered a "rotten" movie.
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It will be called Thor 2.
 
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