by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
kio Ôtsuka, Atsuko Tanaka, Tamio Ôki
Intro:
... considering the friction between organic and artificial consciousness is getting to the point of stopping whole industries in their tracks in recent years, this remaster should help make the prospect of revisiting a film that has only gained thematic urgency that much easier.
An aspect of modern filmmaking that can most benefit from receiving a full remaster is also one of the bigger obstacles to that same remaster being completed: CGI. Bringing classic live-action films into 4K is, admittedly, still a laborious process, but straight-forward enough with access to the original film stock. CGI, on the other hand, often has to be redone from scratch, as simply upscaling those images isn’t feasible (like blowing up NES game footage and expecting it to compete with modern PCs). But since CGI also tends to age the quickest out of any visual effects method, updating it can restore some shine to semi-recent, dare we say, content, so long as you don’t go full Lucas with it.
With Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence, one of several attempts to follow up the genre–and-medium-defining finesse of the original, we have an ideal example of a film that benefits from the glow-up. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, it was originally made at a time when CGI on film was showing itself capable of great things (Gollum in the Peter Jackson LOTR films) but still conspicuous for the most part (the also-inspired-by-GitS, Matrix Reloaded and its rubbery ‘Burly Brawl’).
In its new form, the rendering boosts the original efforts of Polygon Pictures and makes it fit with what they’d go on to visualise, like Knights of Sidonia and the Netflix Godzilla trilogy. The detailing on Mamoru Oshii’s vision of near-future Japan and its many cybernetic denizens gets uncannily close to passing for live-action in all the right ways, whether it’s grounding the existence of a simple corner shop or emphasising the dysphoric terror of the gynoids that kick off the narrative.
But that’s all to do with the Shell; what about the Ghost that sits within? Well, Innocence is somewhat notorious for its doubling-down on Oshii’s fixations with mind/body philosophy and the nature of reality, usually in the form of way too much wholesale quoting of philosophers. It’s not the most digestible way that this information could’ve gotten across, creating something of a barrier between the audience and what are genuinely thoughtful takes on technology and the horrible ways that we treat those deemed ‘disposable’. But when it cuts through, the frequently nerve-wracking examination of how easily what we believe to be fixed can be manipulated and controlled, presented with a grim coldness that’d make Charlie Brooker ill at ease, makes for particularly grim viewing.
Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence, despite the first-year philosophy student dialogue and rather languid pacing, still holds up as another extension of Oshii’s iconic approach to cyberpunk art. It arguably hits harder than its own predecessor (which, influential as it is, tends to get overshadowed by what inspired it and what it would go on to inspire in turn) with its more unsettling approach to the distinction of the physical and mental selves. And considering the friction between organic and artificial consciousness is getting to the point of stopping whole industries in their tracks in recent years, this remaster should help make the prospect of revisiting a film that has only gained thematic urgency that much easier.