Films The Official bit-tech Movie Thread - What have you seen lately?

Ghost in the Shell [1995] - Shorter than I remember/10

 

…that’s it?

One of the most influential cyberpunk anime/manga of all time and it’s “shorter than I remember”…?



(For clarity, I am joking . Someone could tell me it’s the worst thing they’ve ever seen and it wouldn’t change my opinion one whit .)

 

The Mona Lisa... bit on the small side.

Both of those things can be true at once.

 

Funny thing is, I thought exactly that when I saw it. "Is that it?! SRSLY?"
Then I thought "Can all these d1ckheads not read the "no flash photo-ing" sign?", followed by "Why is that security homme not doing a damn thing about it?". I looked at it for a bit because I felt I ought to, then we left and looked at the MASSIVE heavenly rapture murals in the preceding hall. Totes mega.

 

So real.

The line "Mona Lisa: the original basic b*tch" has taken up permanent residence in my psyche.

Anyway, Ghost in the Shell! Byron, fight me. I actually don't like the film as a finished product at all, because the animation is so bad and has so many cut corners. Bits of the film look amazing and the overall storyboarding, script etc are great, but it's like they didn't finish making it. It's literally like watching a storyboard rough cut.

It's one of my favourite sci-fi works but I never watch it because it looks like ass.

I'd love a remake with actual decent production budget and consistent, fluid animation in some format or another. I mean, imagine the Blue Eye Samurai making it. Jesus Christ.

 

You wot?! You try’n’a start summing?!



You’ll note I didn’t say it was the best anime film ever made, I said it was one of the most influential anime & manga of all time .

Compared to the original manga, and even the various TV series, the original film does feel rushed and a bit disjointed. But at the time it released, it did have a lasting impact. Admittedly in a very niche part of popular culture - in fact so niche at the time that I’d hesitate to even call it “popular culture”. But it most definitely was influential.

And I still love it. Not necessarily because of any particular artistic innovation or merit, or because it “moved the needle” in some way, but because of the impact it had on me.

 

What's your opinion of the sequel, Innocence? I found that very hard work, but specific individual scenes are so mesmerising and beautifully made that I have them saved on Youtube for regular rewatching. It doubles down on that weird cheap animation shortcut of just looping 3 frames of animation for talking, and does it worse than film 1, though - there are bits where the frame literally doesn't move for 15 seconds or so. That's some saturday morning cartoon level cost-cutting. But then the opening cinematic is one of the most gorgeous pieces of CGI ever rendered, so they clearly had budget for days. It's so confusing.

 

I've always thought GITS (1995) was a technical masterpiece. It's one of the first animated films outside of Disney to really mix hand drawn and CGfx together, the way they did it was also absurdly labour intensive. Any time optical camo gets used, they animated the whole thing by hand, then the effect was created by taking the cells of (Motoko/the tank etc), applying the distortion effect as an outline one frame at a time digitally, then applying that distortion over the background cels by hand, which they photographed. They were really making it up as they went along, even down to coding a lot of the software themselves. Plus they did it on $3million, when Pixar spent $30million on Toy Story the same year.

However, I see where you're coming from when some of the reduced motion gets a bit too reduced. Also, 2.0 blows.

 

as in Ghost in the Shell 2.0, the 2008 remaster, or Innocence, aka Ghost in the Shell 2

Haven't watched the former and my only real recollection of the later was it was just... weird...

 

In a word, conflicted.

Visually, it’s stunning. Absolutely stunning. Personally, it felt like the static frames and reduced frame count during some scenes was more of an aesthetic choice than something to reduce the budget.

But in terms of the story and narrative… it’s just… confused. It seems to go a lot of different places, and doesn’t really know what story it’s actually telling.

I still really like it, if for no other reason than the visuals.

It doesn’t always pay to dig too deep into the narrative when it comes to anime. Akira, for example, is a brilliant film, and massively influential even to this day. But if you dive into the story far enough, it’s just… weird. Neon Genesis Evangelion is another one; massively influential, and cited to this day as one of the best anime series ever made. But its story line gets very weird, and none of the subsequent films really did that much to help clarify the original ending. At least, not until the recent four “reboot” films.

 

GITS2.0, the 2008 'remaster' where they aggressively colour graded most of it piss yellow for some reason, then replaced a bunch of sequences with very crude looking CG... and the sound effects are redubbed from what I can only guess is the half-ass.com stock library.

Why and how anyone thought it was a good idea is beyond me, it's genuinely terrible.

GITS 2: Innocence I liked. It isn't as good as 1, but it takes some of the weirder reality warping aspects of GITS and runs with them. Plus the premise is full on dystopian cyberpunk, which I approve of.

 

it was also based on part of hte original book with kids being "copied" and them causing a ruckus with the copies to get attention.

tbh i hated the super serious Ooshii rendition of gits, i much preferred the book and am pleased the new series is staying faithful to it.

 

Stand Alone Complex was less serious, but I found it grating in places. My only clear recollections now are one great early episode about Batou's war veteran past and the robot spiders having terribly annoying voice acting. Earsplitting, even. And there was a great running plot about the faceless J D Salinger-quoting hacker disrupting everything. I should've finished that show, it seemed to have legs, but the robot voices just drove me away through sheer pain

 

QFT. I had it one a year or so ago when doing Lego building and after a while was thinking "WTF?".

Ohh, I likes me a bit of SAC, both seasons. I guess the robot voices I just learned to put up with.

 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - Eh, s'alright/10

Watched this on the old Prime, though for some reason the audio was extremely quiet. Worth watching from a visual perspective, but Anna Big Eyes Joy is just not convincing as a tough protagonist and has a couple of "nah, you wouldn't be able to do that for real" moments. Chris Hemsworth seems to be having fun in the role though.

Not as bad as some of the reviews would have you believe.

 

We watched Fury Road on a stroll round the 'Dam once. Can't remember if we had to leave but it was....intense.

 

Mandalorian & Grogu, Fun romp/10

Is it a great Star Wars Movie? No. Is it well shot, coherently told and entertaining story/movie? Yes. Don't have high expectations and its a good way to pass a few hours. I did find the english speaking Hutt's a bit jarring given Jabba's role in Star Wars to date and I'm not sure (mild spoiler) I believe that his son would be a "good" hutt just because he didn't like his dad (end of mild spoiler).

The puppetry of Grogu remains a highlight and whilst they very much play into how cute he is - it works.

My 9 yr old son loved it despite not watching the Mandalorian (but having seen the movies) and is now back filling the TV series so it worked on that target audience!

I didn't read reviews before hand but got the impression they were fairly negative. It's not anywhere near the calibre of Andor but it felt like more of the same of the Mandalorian series which is absolutely fine in my opinion.

 

"My 9 year old son loved it" feels like about where Star Wars should be, and why I'm okay with the franchise chugging along as it is, and also exactly why I'm tuned out and won't bother to watch any more of them.

Fury Road was intense. I'm committed to rewatching it. Some of the action setpieces are unbelievable. I'm still not sure if I like it as a film - on a basic aesthetic level I really dislike a lot of what makes it tick, just as a matter of taste. Suicidal petrolhead rednecks, OTT metalcore machismo, white trash slavery, the waterless post-apocalypse, the washed out orange colour palette...none of it is really appealing, even as I appreciate the incredible technical achievements within. It's viscerally unpleasant in a way horror films sometimes must be, but emotionally it isn't a horror film. It's aiming for dark action gratification. But I can't relax and find it gratifying because it's so gross. Does that even make sense?

 

Master of the Universe (2026) - I won't rate it, I will just say, director had a task and he succeeded, just the right amount of nostalgia, modernisation and self awareness, had an absolute blast!!
Don't be put off by Leto if that is anyone's worry, many times I forgot he was Skelator, however, his performance was fantastic!
Don't make me wait too long for the sequel with what was shown in the 3 end credits scenes

 

I haven’t ever seen anything good with him in. Or him be good in it. I actively haven’t watched TRON 3 and I actively won’t watch this because I risked watching too many others with him and was disappointed every time

I’m glad you found the film to be better than the turd it looks though!