Innocence

With Major Motoko Kusanagi missing, Section 9's Batou is assigned to investigate a string of gruesome murders—seemingly at the hands of faulty gynoids, or sex robots. But when a faulty gynoid leaves Batou a cryptic message, he begins to question the cause of their malfunctions. Suspicions of politically motivated murder and an illegal "ghost" quickly crop up, drawing Batou and his partner Togusa into a perilous web of conspiracy.

As their investigation goes on, the line between man and machine continues to blur, and reality and perception become indistinguishable. Confronting strange and dangerous foes, Batou and Togusa explore a futuristic world filled with machines and living dolls but utterly devoid of humanity.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Batou Main

Ootsuka, Akio Japanese

Togusa Main

Yamadera, Kouichi Japanese

Kusanagi, Motoko Supporting

Tanaka, Atsuko Japanese

Aramaki, Daisuke Supporting

Ishikawa Supporting

Nakano, Yutaka Japanese

Kim Supporting

Takenaka, Naoto Japanese

Haraway Supporting

Sakakibara, Yoshiko Japanese

Crab Man Supporting

Lin Supporting

Arm Doctor Supporting

Suzuki, Toshio Producer

Maseba, Yutaka Producer

Ishikawa, Mitsuhisa Producer, Planning

Nishizawa, Masatomo Producer

Reviews

Sep 17, 2023

XOArama

Recommended

I've gotta say this one does a lot of things better than the original, thanks in part to it building off of it. The philosophical arguments proposed in this one are displayed in a much more conveying and interesting way, with the scene in the mansion in particular really blowing me away. This one was a bit more grounded as a buddy cop movie at its most basic providing a stable plot to keep it going but I found that the overall plot itself was less intriguing than the first but it more than makes up for it with the great action and great discussion ... along the way. In some ways this movie scares me in the fact that the philosophical arguments in this will most likely become reality in my lifetime, and that just makes this movie all the more relevant.

*Watched in subbed*

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Jul 11, 2023

ViolentPete

Mixed Feelings

Feels like a parody of the first one. The story is the same general "We have to catch this villain with mysterious motives" plotline that shows up in half of Oshii's movies, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Issue is, GitS and Patlabor 2 were a lot more interesting and I just watched both of those, and by comparison this just doesn't have the extra spice to make it stand out. Batou's the main character this time but he isn't nearly as interesting as the Major, and a solid 50% of the script is dedicated to quoting philosophy. You could ask Batou what he had ... for breakfast today and he'd probably give you a Bible verse followed by a Confucius quote, then that wailing music would suddenly start playing for 30 seconds or so. The first movie actually brought up some interesting ideas about what it means to be human and all that shit, but in this one everything's muddled by the seemingly random quotes getting thrown out constantly.

The animation is also a general downgrade, usually the CG stuff looks fine but there are some cases with like parade floats and birds where it looks really ugly. I'm sure most people would agree that a lot of the appeal of the original GitS is that it's cool. In this case, there is some stuff that's cool but it usually just feels like it's either a retread of cool stuff in the original or it's just medium-level cool. Medium-level cool can't hold a candle to high-level cool stuff like the optic camo fight at the start of GitS or that one scene where the guy's hands split apart and type really fast.

Well, I wouldn't call this a bad movie, the problem is just that the original basically does everything better and this one often feels like it's trying to channel the original but not doing a very good job of it.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Dec 28, 2020

Zhaitan

Not Recommended

I thought the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie was alright. It had a story that (eventually) made sense. People talked to each other in a way that could reasonably be considered realistic. The music had some variety. The visuals were pretty consistently decent looking.

Innocence has none of this. The story is terrible. What you read in the synopsis is the whole story. The answer to the question is given in the span of 30 seconds at the end of the movie. It was not interesting or exciting. The story is mostly delivered through long stretches of exposition where they drop 3+ names and 5 ... philosophy quotes. Something like:
"This crime family killed this guy who killed this guy who saw this guy but then this other guy got killed by these people for this corporation. let a man walk alone, let him commit no sin, with few wishes, like an elephant in the forest. Then years ago this guy was good at this and there was this corporation that made things. Death, robots, uh, AI, and souls or something. Yeah, we're really smart."

The biggest issue, worse than the crappy story is the dialogue. Imagine if every single line in Bladerunner or your favorite mystery movie was replaced with loosely related philosophy quotes. Regardless of what is being discussed, there has to be a philosophy quote. It seems that as part of getting a cyber-brain you get a complimentary download of a library of philosophy quotes. The dialogue was so painfully uninteresting.

The music consists of the theme or snippets of it being played every 20 minutes or less. It was alright the first time, but the only music I even remember anymore is the theme song.

The visuals are a weird hodgepodge of 2D animation, 3D animation that's close to 2D animation, and really out of place 3D animation that is sometimes given light cel shading. The inconsistency is jarring. It lacks the style and charm of the original movie. There were some neat set-pieces but most of them didn't matter.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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	Poll: Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 ) aero - Aug 8, 2008	83 replies	by damnit_tomioka »» Oct 6, 11:45 PM
	Warning: Watch SAC first! Halkenburg - Jul 29, 2015	5 replies	by Satyr_icon »» Mar 28, 7:19 AM
	Does anyone know why this movie is called "Innocence"? R_2_R - Jul 30, 2022	6 replies	by El-Melloi »» Oct 7, 2022 10:05 AM
	GITS 2nd movie, for those who DID watch it kalepf22 - Apr 13, 2021	4 replies	by anime-prime »» Apr 14, 2021 2:08 AM
	New DVD coming out. tabernac - Jan 17, 2017	1 replies	by tabernac »» Jan 20, 2017 12:04 PM

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