攻壳机动队

评分：

6.0 还行

原名：Ghost in the Shell又名：攻壳机动队真人版

分类：动作 / 科幻 / 犯罪 / 地区：美国年份：2017

简介：近未来，人类的各种器官均可实现移植，一时间机器人、生化人、仿生人充斥世间，与人类

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更新时间:2023-07-24

攻壳机动队影评：[Film Review] Ghost in the Shell (1995), Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) and Ghost in the Shell (2017)

Mamoru Oshii is a titan of Japanese animation (together with Hayao Miyazaki and Katsuhiro Otomo, they are often acclaimed as the “triumvirate of anime films”), and GHOST IN THE SHELL is irrefragably, his pièce de résistance. A philosophical meditation on “men versus machine” dilemma, the film and its sequel, GHOST IN THE SHELL 2: INNOCENCE, both based on Shirow Masamune’s manga, formidably visualize a cyberpunk city that kaleidoscopically patterns after Hong Kong (top-notch CGI technique welded with traditional cel animation).

In year 2029, cybernetic technology has been widely used to enhance human bodies and even supplant body parts with their cybernetic counterparts, and a “cyberbrain” is manufactured to allow human brain to connect with the Internet and various networks. The term “ghost” refers to this augmented consciousness which inhabits in an augmented body “shell”, hence the title.

Major Motoko Kusanagi (Tanaka), a cyborg with such enhancement, is the team leader of “Public Security Section 9” and assigned the task to track down a mysterious hacker “Puppet Master”, who can hacker into an individual’s ghost, hypnotize their mind and control their action. In time, the tortuous investigation reveals that the Puppet Master is a ghost created for political purposes by Section 6, who becomes sentient and dwells upon its own existence, ergo, accentuating the philosophical theme of “what constitutes a human being”, something which also give Motoko pause about her own humanity, through a ghost-merging process, eventually a new Motoko-cum-the-Puppet-Master ghost comes into being inside a new shell, that’s all she wrote in GHOST IN THE SHELL (1995).

INNOCENCE follows the aftermath but the protagonist now is Batou (Ôtuska), Motoko’s team member. Together with Togusa (Yamadera), a fellow operative with fewer cybernetic upgrades, the pair investigates the bizarre cases of homicidal gynoids, aka. doll-like sex robots. Without apparent cause, these gynoids malfunction and murder their owners. Aided by Motoko, now in a ubiquitous, disembodied presence (until the final climactic combat on board a headquarter ship), Batou, with Togusa mostly functioning as a clueless sidekick, will get to the bottom of the crime, a conspiracy theory muddled by corporate cupidity, girls-trafficking, Yakuza involvement, reality falsification and “ghost” abusing, further blurring the finitude between human and machine, a sentient gynoid should be automatically considered less “human” than a human girl? This is the conundrum will soon arise in the real world (presently we are only 6 years short of 2029), and Oshii’s prescience cannot be overstated.

The two anime pictures are consistent in their fantastical, retro-futuristic world-building suffused with subdued, sometimes even bilious colorways, and oriental built environments.. Thrills and chills can by elicited by efficacious action sequences and bold dismemberment, and Kenji Kawai’s exotic, soaring score is nothing if not unforgettable. However, when all said and done, Oshii’s twofer is more food for thought than ocular stunner, plain solemn in its own dispiriting lifeworld where a moment of tenderness (like the scene between Batou and his pet dog) is the best sop to a wide-eyed spectator.

Hollywood’s 2017 live action remake has an innate Achilles heel by casting Scarlett Johansson as the Major. Sanders’s film is beset by whitewashing controversy and cultural appropriation ever since the onset (especially when the plot discloses that the Major is indeed a Japanese woman before being augmented, which certainly adds insult to injury), a perennial cancor within the Tinseltown's modus operandi, and naturally that ought to be chalked up to its box office underperformance. That said, credit where credit is due, the film does imagineer a jaw-dropping cyberpunk world which exhibits high fidelity to Oshii’s creation, a highly digitalized Hong Kong retaining its gorgeous beauty spots and adorned by large holograms, on a technical level, this remake shall not be nibbled for inadequacy.

Unpremeditatedly, watching all three films in a row exposes the disparate ideologies between the Far East and the West. If Oshii lingers on contemplating a far more cosmic, holistic situation that complicates the cardinal question of being human, the version from Hollywood, which manages to amalgamate elements from Oshii’s two films, shifts its focus stalwartly on the individual side , any philosophical ideation is discarded as soon as Major Mira Killan (Johansson, eking out emotion with great restraint) grasps that all her memory is doctored and is bent on seeking out her own past. Things must be personal enough and the evil and inhuman corporation’s motive must be comprehensible enough to keep audience engaged, that is the philosophy of Hollywood tent-poles. Yet, it is exactly this deviation that downgrades the remake into something inextricably more conventional and banal, a dumbed-down version of the original. It lacks both gravitas and pathos that makes Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER (1982) the Holy Scripture of Sci-Fi existentialism.

Among the unexceptionable cast (Takeshi Kitano’s cool-as-a-cucumber aplomb is over-exaggerated), the only grace note is that we have a gracious Juliette Binoche playing a mother-figure scientist to Mira and she singlehandedly saves the film from plunging into a complete emotional vacuum. One of the chief purposes of live action is, theoretically, to add emotional weight to the lifeless 2D-animated characters, but Sanders’s film botches that up spectacularly. Overall, Sanders’s remake attempts to bridge the oceanic cultural disparities and ultimately, bears a grafted fruit that can barely appease either side.

referential entries: Michael Crichton’s WESTWORLD (1973, 5.7/10); Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER (1982, 9.2/10); Denis Villeneuve’s BLADE RUNNER 2049 (2017, 8.4/10), Luc Besson’s LUCY (2014, 5.2/10); Satoshi Kon’s MILLENNIUM ACTRESS (2001, 7.9/10).