It is unfortunate that it seems Shinji Aramaki's vision takes precedence over Kenji Kamiyama on this one, corrupting part of their legacy with this series. I was generally apprehensive about their previous forays in to 3DCG things of the like, and although with this the 3DCG doesn’t look that bad on the Netflix budget and can actually look quite impressive, the show still becomes lifeless both writing-wise and in action. The fight with a naked Patrick Huge, the self-insert of the character designer Ilya Kushinov along with his anime girl maid harem that look like every image he has ever drawn, is laughable on many levels. I had already guessed the whole twist that unravels in that episode in the second episode anyway, since the writing in this is action Sci-Fi and not heady cyberpunk. Ilya Kushinov the known plagiarizer, and even without that bit, is a generally average artist that attracted too much praise given his worth and simply does not have an art style that reliably translates into GitS, especially seen in Motoko among other female characters.
Getting in to the new attachments to this show, we have the introduction of a new character, Stan, nicknamed Clown. His design looks like a Fortnite character and perfectly exemplifies what it seems the creators expect from the exposure to a Netflix audience. He is brash, says the most obvious statements, and serves absolutely no purpose. Pazu and Borma are gone for the first half, the Netflix audience wouldn’t remember them anyway, and instead we have Stan. Most of the first half of the show coincidentally also takes place in America, which has apparently been united under the Empire instead of balkanized with the previous Russo-American Alliance.
This whole sustainable war point simply isn’t interesting and feels like it came out of How to Design a Futuristic World 101, first take some 1984 and then make the concepts more "modern" hmm yes perfect. We already got a close-to-cyberpunk media that did the whole war industry thing better it's called Metal Gear Solid, and the person who did the soundtrack for some of the games on that is the composer for this show as well. A war industry has never been a new concept, and here it is surface level as hell. It even makes itself really obvious what the whole political implications are in the first scene of the show. You’ve got the new GHOST merc group under Motoko and Batou getting chased by “sustainable war victims” in dingy trucks and it just serves as a mindless car chase action scene that gives the little info dump about how The World Be. Then, across the next 3 episodes you will be treated to more car chase scenes which take up the main attraction of the episodes. They really cash in on this mainstream audience they’ll be getting by abandoning what made SAC actually interesting and turning it into stupid action backed up by a hackneyed mystery about “post-humans” (doesn’t even make that much sense given the existence of cyberbrains already inhabiting that concept and all that but who cares amirite) who are just cyborgs that downloaded aimbot and they decide to center the whole show around investigating these people.
There’s this part in one of the episodes where we get the whole virtual chatroom bit, Togusa is watching four disguised guys talk about GHOST so he can get info on them and one of the guys leaves the chatroom, Togusa intercepts him and FLYING PUNCHES him in the VIRTUAL WORLD to STEAL HIS DISGUISE. You cannot make this stupid shit up, none of this shit feels like the Cyberpunk world of the original series despite this supposed to be taking place EVEN MORE into the future. In the end one can’t help but wonder, what is there for anyone to get out of this except for those who have never seen Ghost in the Shell, that being the Netflix Audience? There is nothing, and even if you have not seen Ghost in the Shell, just watch the movies (not Arise not Arise not Arise not Arise), and the SAC show.
And I swear to Allah If I have to see that stupid ass pink haired woman and her moe anime girl idiotic mannerisms one more time alongside her generic dime a dozen kushinov face fuck you ilya kushinov you absolute hack draw a new face for once
(end rant)
