Before I dive into this review, I wanted to provide some background for it. I have watched both Ghost in the Shell movies, stand alone complex, Arise and Solid State Society. I watched Ghost In the Shell two times. I know many will say I wasted my money, but I wanted to give an honest review. So the first time was in a regular theater and the second was IMAX 3D. Here’s my thoughts.
Ghost In the Shell is a new story written by William Wheeler. Wheeler’s other screenplays include Queen of Kwate, The Hoax and The Lego Ninjato Movie. If you haven’t heard of any of these titles don’t worry you aren’t missing anything amazing. Wheeler essentially went through the stories of the first Ghost in the Shell movie, and the Individual Eleven story arc. He gutted some ideas from both, the movie for iconic scenes, elements and the villain Kuze from Individual eleven. He then slapped threw it all together without the essence of what makes Ghost in the Shell an amazing series.
To make matters even worse the Steven Spielberg (yes THAT Steven Spielberg) produced movie was directed by Rupert Sanders. You might not be familiar with that name but you are very familiar with a film he directed called Snow White and The Huntsman.
Ghost In The Shell plot-wise is an utter and complete trainwreck of Americanization. The main theme is corporations are evil and only want to make weapons of war. To make matters worse the only actors who seemed to have studied the characters they were playing were Takeshi Kitano who played Chief Aramaki, and Chin Han as Togusa. It seems as if the rest of the cast were told NOT to research the characters they would be playing.
Scarlett Johansson plays The Major. While she is awesome as playing Black Widow, as The Major she is utterly disappointing. It feels like she is trying to be Kristen Stewart playing The Major in a really hacked up fan fiction. The Major is a woman who one year before the events of the movie had her brain cyberized and placed into a robotic shell. Throughout the movie she is just all mopey and self pitying. What makes The Major a deep character in the series is just gone. Also one year and she has the rank of Major? Ummm nope sorry not possible.
Major is assigned to Section 9 the cybercrime division and is partnered with Bato played by Pilou Asbæk. If you think Major was disappointing Bato is even worse. Each of his scenes were just painful, it was like he was just reading the lines. The majority of the movie he just stands behind the Major and utters short lines. His series backstory of course is gone as are his signature eyes, which get introduced in this movie.
Rating this movie PG-13 was another nail in the coffin for Ghost In The Shell. It severely limited what could be done in this movie. It was almost as if the production companies still believe that since anime is a cartoon it’s for kids. With a better script and director the movie should have been a hard PG or an R rating.
Overall Ghost In The Shell has been horrifically ‘dumbed down’ for American audiences instead of following Marvel’s method of catering to their fans. Until major production companies in America learn to treat popular Anime series movies with the same level of care and respect as a Marvel movie; we fans will have to continue to suffer these horrific adaptations.
As I stated before I saw this movie twice. If you’re looking to save money wait for Ghost In The Shell to come out on Red Box. But if you absolutely must see this in theaters go see it in IMAX. Watching the visuals taken from the Ghost In The Shell anime are amazing in IMAX and honestly it’s the only bearable way to watch it.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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