Ghost in the Shell (4K UHD + Blu-ray + Digital)

I'm giving this five stars, because I really enjoyed it, but I don't think it's the most amazing movie I've ever seen. It's a solid sci fi experience - beautifully performed and super stylish. I watched the original anime ages ago, at some point in the 90s I imagine. I was just starting to get into anime back then, and this was one of the few things they brought over to the US that you could rent without going to a special store to find. I'm pretty sure I got it at Blockbuster or something like that, that was how "mainstream" it was at the time. I remember being a little confused by the story. Anime, in some ways, can be a little like Shakespeare. It seems mind boggling at first, but if you read enough of it, you start to get the rythym of the language and it becomes easier to understand the quirks. Anime can be like this - often with strange and off the wall things never being explained, weird twists and concepts. It's got a lot of conventions you just get used to that are used like shorthand, for instance things like sweatdrops and the like. Ghost in the Shell doesn't have that stuff, but it's a dense story that requires some mental unpacking to get the full gist. Maybe I've just seen enough anime now I don't have the same problem I used to, but I found this movie spelled out the plot fairly clearly. The main character is mostly synthetic, except she has a human brain. It's set in a world where people augment their bodies to work more efficiently. One of my favorite images from the anime that stuck with me was the finger tips that opened and each had additional fingers for typing. It's a little redundant an augment when you can just jack your mind into a computer, but it was a fun visual nonetheless. The main character is a kind of detective - this is a simplification of her job, but I don't want to get too much into the plot - and she's trying to discover who is murdering people and stealing info from their brains. Doing so leads her to some deeper discoveries. The movie is relatively faithful to the anime. I know a lot of guff was given about the idea of "white washing," but to me anyway, anime characters are never inherently Japanese, or Korean, or from wherever the book is written. Unless it's part of their backstory, their characterization is more important than their race for me. If race is important to their character, I'd prefer the race remain the author's intent. But if it's used like hair or eye color, as mere description, I'm less concerned - which is why I don't tend to care when it's changed in either direction - black spider-man, white Motoko - if their race didn't really matter that much in the original media, I don't see why it matters much in any other representation of it. Knowing that's my opinion, you'll understand why I don't dock the movie points for this. I'm judging it strictly on its own merits. On that front, it was well acted. Everyone in it did a great job. Scarlet was really great as a kind of synthetic character who slowly comes into her emotions. She was strong and powerful. In a movie where so much depends on the main character getting you into their skin, she did a good job making me empathize with her story. The supporting characters were well fleshed out, considering they didn't get much screen time. I believed her partner cared about her, and they shared a bond, even though he didn't have many scenes with her. Anime, particularly sci fi anime, often has over the top visual style. It would be one of the hardest aspects to translate to a live action film. This move does that in spades. The city sequences are almost too arresting. I felt like I needed to watch the movie more than once just so I could actually see everything that was going on. The action stuff was well done, many scenes frame-by-frame faithful reproductions of the anime. It's pretty clear a lot of time and effort was put into making this a faithful adaptation when it came to visual style. If you enjoy science fiction visual spectacles like The Fifth Element and Blade Runner, this should be right up your alley. The story is pretty good. I don't think you'll be surprised by the ending, but if you're a sci-fi fan, it should feel fairly satisfying. I'd recommend it to people who like action sci-fi movies.

Here's the thing about this movie...being what it is and being what it is not I can only say at the end of the day, I still love it. I'm a huge fan of Ghost in the Shell, the original animated work from 1995. I've been an anime fan for some 20 years or so and have seen thousands of anime. I haven't read any reviews, but I imagine most of the self proclaimed fans of gits are crying about this movie, because I know anime fans, and they will gripe and complain about something like this endlessly. For me however, I prefer to see things from outside the 'otaku' box and simply appreciate these types of things for what they do give us. For me, seeing this epic animated film come to life in live action was thrilling. I got goose bumps. My jaw dropped. My eyes were glued to the screen. Really! They did so well with a lot of the effects that it was mind-blowing, and while I am easily amused, I am not easily impressed. A film like this was simply NOT POSSIBLE in unanimated form 20 years ago when we first got gits! That this movie exists is amazing! It's not perfect, not by a long shot, and honestly I could nit-pick it to death. I could nit-pick the acting, some of the cg, some of the story and a lot of other things about this being such a fan of the original. I really could, but I'm not that kind of a fan. I appreciate and love this for what it is, not for what it is not. My only really big gripe I have is the utter lack of Kenji Kawai musical score that made the animated film so unbelievably epic. The power of the original was not only in the story, the action, the technology barriers it explored, but in the power of the music. The original musical score, the scenes of the thriving cyber-metropolis with the haunting choir singing was what really made the original film. They should have kept the music. In fact, this movie had a lot of scenes that were just...quiet and that part, I didn't like. However, I really enjoyed the extra depth of the story, that we got more of the back story of Motoko. I wasn't a big fan of her being "Mara" until she figured out she was Motoko, that kind of fixed her being "Mara." I would have kept her name, but I understand how they put it into the story. I feel that the essence of the message was conveyed much more easily; there was a lot less that was left to interpretation in the story this way, and that was in some ways quite refreshing. I still remember the first time I saw ghost in the shell and in the late 90s and the concepts were a lot harder to understand than they are now in the world we live in which is not as far from Motoko's world. It should be epic, but at the end of the day the thing is, we aren't still living in 1995, the time in which these ideas were so completely mind-blowing to us. In 2017 this feels more like the future around the corner than the far-off future. The music that gave so much power to the feeling of the original is missing. However...the movie is amazing. It's mind-blowing. See it with fresh eyes as much as possible. Imagine if you were seeing it without having seen the original animated movie. Or love how they brought to life so much that made the original so amazing. The action scenes, her invisibility, Batou's eyes, it was there! It was amazing! Could they have done it better? Absolutely. But it is what it is and I still love it for what it is. Comparisons and staying true to the animation be damned, it's still brilliant for what it is.

Ghost in the Shell is a 2017 movie adaptation of an Anime film starring Scarlett Johansson. The movie is set in the near future in which humans are able to make cybernetic improvements to their bodies to give them better strength, vision, intelligence, etc. Basically, the more money a person has, the more that person can improve themself. The cybernetics can be hacked, which also makes the people who have them targets of cyber terrorists. Johansson stars as Mira Killian, a survivor of a terrorist attack whose body was damaged beyond repair, so her consciousness has been integrated into an artificial body called a "shell". She is a major in a counter-terrorism police force, and as the movie goes along, she uncovers a larger conspiracy after her team thwarts an attack on a business conference. For those who get the 4k set, the UHD disc just includes the movie and the handful of extras are on the second, regular blu-ray, disc. The A/V quality of the UHD disc is very good. The video transfer is not quite reference quality, but unless you are a major A/V wonk that nitpicks the video quality to death, it is not likely to bother you. The extras on the regular blu-ray include a half-hour-long making-of documentary, a featurette on Section 9, the counter-terrorism unit that Mira is a part of, and a featurette on the philosophy behind the story. So, if you like watching the bonus features, all totaled, you get just under an hour of material. The movie is good, but not great. It does tell a decent story, has a lot of action, and even tries to explain away why Johansson's character is not Japanese. I think Johansson did a good job in the lead role, and as a stand-alone action movie, it is entertaining. So, if you are a fan of the dystopian future genre, this is a good one to check out.

loved the movie very much would recommend it to anyone glad i purchased it.

100 % OK Goede verzending en besteld item beantwoorde volledig aan de beschrijving van de verkoper ( uiterst tevreden ) :-):-):-)

Great movie

Une version que l’on attendait depuis longtemps . Mais qui ne connaît pas cette équipe de choc de la section 9 et le major Kusanagi ?

Le réalisateur, Rupert Sanders, explique dans le making-off que ce film est en projet et gestation depuis neuf ans, et la vraiment bonne nouvelle pour la communauté heureuse des humains qui connaissent et/ou qui vont bientôt découvrir le métrage, c’est que ce « Ghost in the Shell », cru 2017, est une grande cuvée. Le cépage était excellent, la terre fertile et le climat clément. Rendant hommage de façon inspirée, respectueuse mais aussi singulière et créative au « Ghost in the Shell » originel (1995) de Mamoru Oshii (que l’on voit d’ailleurs dans les bonus du blu-ray, lors du passage à Hong-Kong de l’équipe du film, pour le tournage de quelques scènes nocturnes dans la ville, et aussi la scène de plongée sous-marine sur fond de gratte-ciels illuminés), ainsi qu’au « Ghost in the Shell 2 : Innocence » du même Oshii, sans oublier quelques plans venus de la série « Ghost in the Shell – Stand Alone Complex », Rupert Sanders nous donne à voir un film d’une époustouflante beauté. Plastiquement, le jeu des couleurs, des lumières, la déambulation virtuose de la caméra, la combinaison des maquettes, des décors en dur, l’incrustation des hologrammes et des compositions sur écrans verts, la maîtrise générale enfin des structures et des textures composent un objet de cinéma en tous points brillant, inspiré, excitant et magnifique. Il faut dire aussi que les équipes de Peter Jackson sont à la manoeuvre pour donner vie, corps et chair à l’entièreté de l’univers imaginé par Mamoru Oshii en 1995. Mais ici tous les artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, maquettistes, costumiers, maîtres d’armes et experts en modélisation pixellisées font un travail d’amplification gigantesque du matériau originel. On retrouve ainsi avec plaisir (d’où la bonne idée qui serait de voir aussi les deux « Ghost in the Shell » de Mamoru Oshii), et comme calquées avec précision, beaucoup de scènes iconiques inscrites depuis maintenant vingt ans dans l’inconscient collectif de tout cinéphile digne de ce nom. Mais amplifiées, magnifiées. Et tout du long des scènes d’action et d’un film assez ramassé dans sa durée (1h42′), on retrouve aussi cette composante immobile et statique du film original. Scarlett Johansson, excellente actrice nous le savons, et qui fait elle même toutes les cascades (comme dans les films Marvel), était effectivement l’actrice idéale pour incarner le Major Motoko Kusunagi en quête de sa propre identité, se déplaçant dans l’histoire de sa vie avec étonnement et incrédulité. Et c’est le point intéressant ici, et la bonne idée du réalisateur, de prendre le parti d’écrire une variante au récit premier de Mamoru Oshii (légers spoilers à venir..). Là où l’héroïne décidait de rejoindre l’océan infini de la toile mondiale dans l’anime d’Oshii, ici, dans la version de 2017, Scarlett Johansson décide de rester au sein du monde des êtres humains, ayant réussi à trouver le point origine, son point d’origine et sa famille. Au final, ce « Ghost in the Shell » (2017) est une vraiment excellente surprise, que l’on appréciera d’autant mieux que l’on connaît déjà les deux animes originaux (1995 et 2004), et mieux encore, il accomplit la prouesse d’être plus captivant et intéressant dans certaines de ses scènes que l’original, comme par exemple et surtout lors de la scène finale, plutôt lente et ennuyeuse dans l’anime d’Oshii, et brillante et puissante dans le film de Rupert Sanders.