Review: Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

One could say that Innocence thinks so much that it ultimately has very little to say.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Photo: Go Fish Pictures

Critic Armond White has held the Matrix films liable for our film culture’s aesthetic shrinkage, but if you want to get technical, Oshii Mamoru’s The Ghost in the Shell is really to blame. Oshii’s 1995 manga imagined a virtual world inhabited by augmented human lives and supervised by downloadable crime enforcement officers. Things run smoothly in this futuristic landscape until a secret agent (the titular ghost) becomes conscious of its existence and demands political asylum from its creator. These ghosts (in essence, the glitches in their respective film’s matrixes) would crop up again in Oshii’s visually inventive Avalon, an overly conceptualized psych session concerned with the meaning of reality in a technological video game world where modern day Prague represents a kind of bonus level.

Now comes Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, the story of Batou, a law enforcement android, and his mostly human partner, Togusa, and their journey to destroy a sexy brand of “gynoid” committing suicide by cutting up humans. And from seedy back alleys to dioramic castles in waterlogged netherworlds, these characters engage in a running debate on the nature of reality and self-mechanization via their countless run-ins with a series of dolls and lowlifes.

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Oshii is largely concerned with the obsolescence of the human race, and some of Innocence’s more frightening, jaw-dropping sequences imagine a synergy of the real and the artificial. Oshii’s attention to detail is ravishing and his distractions of time and space evoke what it must be like to be trapped within the confines of M.C. Escher’s “Sky and Water.” Pity, then, that Innocence is so impenetrable, both aesthetically and philosophically.

However stunning some of the film’s set pieces may be, the whole of this multi-minded, spectacularly obtuse creation seems as if its been loosely connected by simplistic philosophical principles linking sex, technology, politics, violence, and human determinism. Though Oshii is clearly fascinated by our fixation with replicating human life, the film’s philosophical ruminations on simulation and mechanization are wearisome at best, and because the film’s aesthetic technology is more pervasive than its actual heart, the film may leave some thinking less about life and more about the firewall on their computer’s virus protection. One could say that Innocence thinks so much that it ultimately seems to say little.

Score: 
 Cast: Ôtsuka Akio, Tanaka Atsuko, Yamadera Kôichi, Ôki Tamio, Nakano Yutaka, Takenaka Naoto, Hirata Hiroaki, Sakakibara Yoshiko, Terasoma Masaki  Director: Oshii Mamoru  Screenwriter: Oshii Mamoru  Distributor: Go Fish Pictures  Running Time: 100 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2004  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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