Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie (2015)

Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie (2015)

Dir. Kazuya Nomura

It's not stated on the box art, but Dir. Kazuya Nomura's film is a continuation of the Arise version of GitS and a sequel to the Pyrophoric Cult (2015) episode(s), so before viewing it would be beneficial to watch all of Arise.

Set in the year 2029, it begins with a hostage situation that doesn't quite go to plan and the assassination of a very public figure.

Working independently of Public Security Section 9, Motoko and her team investigate further, discovering new and elaborate twists and turns alongside the unfinished story of the Fire-Starter virus that P Cult toyed with.

As any modern computer user will know, progress is happening at an alarming rate, often leaving hardware and software developers playing catch-up. The alternative to keeping up is to abandon the current model and work on a newer, more compatible one; but the new tech will eventually succumb to the same fate and the cycle begins anew.

When it comes to cyberization in a future society, that same process will leave those who can't afford to upgrade with little or no hope. Replacement parts and/or repairs for older technology will become hard to find or prohibitively expensive. The solution for many will be a slow-death or, for those that are unable to accept the inevitable, a more immediate exit: suicide.

The plot of The New Movie is complicated. If I understood it correctly, it boils down to what I mentioned above and how that relates to what's termed the "Third World". Various parties want to push the advent of new tech, while others want to halt it. In the middle are the profiteers, individuals or corporations who care only about personal agendas or bottom line profits.

Even if I failed to pick up on something crucial that ties everything together better than I feel it managed to do, there are still a number of unresolved issues that, for the third time in the Arise reboot, make the whole thing feel unfinished. Some of them were maybe intentional, to leave a lingering doubt or enable a viewer to speculate, but some (e.g. the parents) feel like oversights.

Interestingly, the characters have been slightly redesigned from how they appeared in Borders 1-4 and PC, bringing them closer to how they appeared in the original Ghost in the Shell (1995) film directed by Mamoru Oshii. And even though Arise is a separate thing, there's a part of The New Movie's plot that could be connected in a very direct manner to Oshii's film.

In closing, even though I enjoyed most of the individual parts of the Arise reboot, and would recommend it to fans of the franchise, when looked at as a whole entity — in order to give an overview of how it handled the progression through beginning, middle and end — structurally it's a mess. The loose ends of Borders 1-4 and the restructuring of those same Borders into eight TV episodes (Alternative Architecture), the barely functional bridge of Pyrophoric Cult (in either of its two forms), and the incompleteness of the concluding film all contribute to a feeling that what was planned out was changed partway through, and the resultant damage to the continuity and plot threads was too much (or deemed too unimportant?) to attempt a proper fix. That's purely speculation on my part, but I feel the evidence is there to support it.

Although, given the complexity, evidence to the contrary might also be there. Such is the nature of GitS - it's open to interpretation, meaning conflicting POVs can exist simultaneously.