So, obviously the main reason I watched this without watching the show was because Mamoru Oshii directed it. But it was also available in English on Amazon Prime when I had other things I needed to do, so that made doing so pretty convenient. It's a good movie. I just felt like I was missing a lot because I didn't know the characters and it's a very characterization-driven story. It seems like it's almost fair to say the story doesn't make sense if you don't understand Lum's dynamic with the rest of the cast. At it's most basic level, it's not too complicated. But, on another, there was a really good scene where a character performed some process of elimination to figure out what was going on and it all came down to the relationship web. Which, honestly, was a pretty impressive payoff even if I didn't fully understand.
Oshii is hit and miss for me because I love basically all of his visual ideas in the abstract, but I frequently find the results somewhat or very boring outside of certain highlights. This film is very much in that vein. I like basically all of its ideas, but it didn't seem to come together such that I could watch it in one or even two sittings.
