yokoyakamori

I was skeptical of seeing this movie after having already seen the 1995 animated version by Mamoru Oshii, but some of my friends wanted me to come and see it with them, so I just went along with it.

After finishing the movie, my friends enjoyed it, but I was just disappointed beyond all belief. The reason is because this movie had everything that could have made it a great adaptation. The visuals are phenomenal, the actors/actresses were spot on, and the action scenes was enjoyable to watch, so why don't I like it? Well, it is because the writing is utter garbage.

One thing I noticed was that the main antagonist of the film wasn't The Puppet Master, but Kuze, from SAC: 2nd Gig. Kuze, however, has remnants of the Puppet Master, which confused me. I ended up finding out that the Kuze in this film was the combination of three well-established antagonists in the GiTS franchise molded into one (The Puppet Master, The Laughing Man, and Hideo Kuze). I am not sure whose bright idea it was to mesh these three characters together into one, but his did nothing but create an inconsistent antagonist that felt empty when given nothing more than some bland revenge story to go by. Even the major's story was pretty bad, given nothing to latch onto and hope she succeeds in her journey. Her issue was that we are given no time to understand or sympathize with her and are only told her story instead of shown.

Another thing that bothered me was how forced and clunky the line delivery is for most of the movie. Hollywood starts to anger me off when it thinks its audience are a bunch of idiots who believe they must be spoon-fed every line of dialogue/exposition because they believe we aren't smart enough to understand complex ideas/themes. It is painful as all hell to have to be told everything about this movie without leaving things up to our interpretation, which was something I enjoyed in the 1995 version of GiTS. The complexity of the themes had been watered down so heavily by the bad writing that it is literally just shapes and colors.

For the positives: The visuals were gorgeous, the actor/actresses performed and understood the characters very well, and the action scenes served to make the movie thrilling to watch.

Overall, Hollywood needs to work on writing better scripts. They can make movies look good, but they don't give them any substance. I wanted to like this movie, knowing how much work was put into it just by watching it, it honestly shouldn't have been as bad as it was. But having incompatible ideas from previous work of the franchise, Kuze being a mesh of three already known antagonists from other GiTS stories, artificial and clunky delivery of dialogue/exposition, and the overall generic and predictable plot that Hollywood always churns up, this movie just couldn't reach its full potential.