Whether you are still on a high from The Matrix Revolutions or are somewhat reluctant to wait impatiently along Calder Way for an hour and a half behind the rest of the student body, there's a good chance that all you Matrix-lovers will be hungry for something else to satiate your philosophical sci-fi action flick fix this weekend.
You need look no further than Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii's seminal anime masterpiece from 1995.
Shell is set in a conceivable near future where corporations have supplanted nations as the world's prime movers. In translating Masamune Shirow's graphic novel, screenwriter Kazunori Itô spins an intricate web of complex allegiances, top-secret weapons and an ever-shifting balance of power in its vast urban technoscape.
The nameless Asian city that art director Hiromasa Ogura constructs seems like a first cousin of Blade Runner's dank cyber-noir vision of Los Angeles, and it is just as visually remarkable.
Because it mixes deliberately-paced cyborg shootouts with moody, existential monologues, Shell lends itself easily to other comparisons with that film, which is a high compliment considering the Ridley Scott epic is quite possibly the best sci-fi action film ever made. The distinction between the two is that while the latter was about death and the transient nature of things, Ghost in the Shell is about life and the eternal nature of things, human or otherwise.
"Life is like a node that is born within the flow of information," an artificial intelligence being theorizes at one point in the movie. There is no difference, it argues, between the data that gives an AI being its unique identity and the DNA that gives a human being his or hers.
This is definitely a movie for those whose favorite scenes of The Matrix trilogy were the Architect or Oracle bits. That's not to downplay Shell's action sequences, because they are alternately suspenseful and dazzling in execution.
The impression that truly lingers, however, is the intense metaphysical possibilities the film presents at which our imaginations can only glimpse. The lead character, cyborg crime-fighter Kusanagi, is imbued with more intelligence, conscience and ambivalence than most fully-human characters in most live-action films.
Her simple soliloquies on the nature of her existence are every bit as pertinent and profound as the wordy treatises of countless renowned philosophers.
The "Ghost" of the title refers to the invisible human soul within every cyborg. Kusanagi is guided by her intuitive ghost in her hunt for the "Puppet Master," a mysterious figure who has figured out a way to hack into people's brains and force them to do his bidding.
This is one of Ghost in the Shell's persistent thematic elements: humanity's decline as a result of the pervasive influx of technology in the modern world. Shell actually presents this theme semi-optimistically, even romantically, as opposed to the paranoid urgency of other recent films dealing with this same subject matter.
Oshii does an excellent job of generating a great deal of suspense in building towards the climax, but then amazingly he replaces what we expected to be a glass-shattering showdown with a strictly psychological journey reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This thought-provoking finale forces us to look at the rest of the movie in an entirely new light and to anxiously await the sequel, which will be released sometime next year.
