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Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

There is a moment in Mamoru Oshii's "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence" so lovely and unexpected that it dropped my jaw. Two cyborgs, agents of a shadowy government unit called Section 9, sit in an idling hot-rod, locked in a tense standoff over what best to feed a pet basset hound: dry or soft food? The matter is of special significance to these men (for men they nominally are, despite being mechanically and digitally enhanced), because they have passed beyond most of the quotidian needs driving organic life. If they drink too much, implants will neutralize the alcohol in seconds; arms blown off may be replaced with prosthetics housing onboard weaponry; limited vocabularies may be expanded by software. The dog, however, is purely organic, an innocent. She's a cyborg's lost flesh, a not-so-small symbolic matter, hence the urgent question: dry or soft food?

Devoted viewers of Oshii's original, 1995 "Ghost in the Shell" will find the basset hound familiar, along with some other figures from that landmark film (itself inspired by Masamune Shirow's manga of the same name). Batou, the dog's master and Section 9's looming melancholy presence, is doing a lousy job of getting over the disappearance of his former partner and unrequited love; Togusa, a mostly human former beat-cop, worries about Batou's depression and struggles bravely against rampant abstract thinking; Batou's lost love, Major Motoko Kusanagi, the aloof center of the original film, is present by her absence. Batou and Togusa are tasked with investigating a string of bloody dismemberments committed by gynoids, genitalia-endowed dolls that whisper in little girl voices before disrobing. Batou's first encounter with a gynoid opens the film, and it's a moment of unique horror.

The gynoid murders appear to be straight snuffs, product malfunctions to be settled by their manufacturer, the Locus Solus Corporation, and Batou wonders why Section 9's particular expertise in international cyber-crime is needed. He soon finds out, as the trail leads through a morgue presided over by a loquacious pathologist, into the den of a Yakuza clan and, finally, to an offshore information hub fallen into anarchic squalor after the bursting of another, future tech-bubble. Leavened by moments of great good humor, this stretch of the film moves along with dispatch, and even the more convoluted digressions into philosophy and technological speculation are handled by director Oshii with a mocking comic touch. The job of deflating pretensions is largely left to Togusa, whose mostly-human status confers an authority that belies his status as Batou's junior partner. He keeps the cyborgs real. In return, they keep him safe from harm, and this unspoken compact lends urgency to one of the film's standout sequences, a dimly-lit battle in a stairwell between the Section 9 partners and a berserk Yakuza enforcer.

Days after seeing "Ghost in the Shell 2," I'm still trying to nail down all the particulars of the plot, and remain somewhat vexed by the film's look. Its predecessor used digital animation to great and subtle effect: computer modeling was used to give the flat background paintings artificial lens distortion, which gave the frames a visual depth comparable to "live action" filmmaking; most of the obvious CGI was confined to computer displays and the stunning opening credits montage, which followed Major Kusanagi through the course of a bionic overhaul. Mamoru Oshii reprises that birth sequence here, but the animation is now almost entirely digital. Throughout the new film, the hand-drawn, "organic" images seem isolated within the perfect sheen of the digital material. Thematically, the device works, but it takes some adjusting to. Perhaps the greatest visual feat is the design of the gynoids, patterned after the scary erotic grotesques of German artist Hans Bellmer. His infamous dolls, ball-jointed figures of infinite, lonely kink, gave Weimar Germany one of it's signature images. As for the mechanical designs, I'd like to place an advance order for the spectacular prop-fan gunship, a mechanical crow that ferries Batou and Togusa to their offshore appointment with nemesis.

And it is there that the movie runs into a brick wall, not once, but three times. Trapped in a hall of mirrors patterned after a Baroque palazzo, Batou and Togusa experience the same moment three different ways, an interminable narrative loop that provoked in me a spasm of angry fidgeting. I tend to give subtitled films the benefit of the doubt at such moments, as the act of reading the text induces a lag-time in comprehension that no amount of speed-reading can overcome. (It does not help that the subtitles compete with shimmering layers of on-screen text and computer readouts.) Still, this narrative ox-bow is an infuriating failure on Oshii's part, and the hard pace of the film's climax feels like an attempt to make up for lost time. It succeeds, but only just, thanks to a remarkable exchange between Batou and a rogue gynoid on board the Locus Solus factory ship. It's a tender moment quite unlike any I've seen, in circumstances so bizarre that the lump in my throat felt faintly ludicrous. We're unaccustomed to emotional depth in our science fictions, and this film is a character study in sci-fi drag. A bit more discipline might have yielded a masterpiece, but "Ghost in the Shell 2" is undeniably brilliant, and the final, wordless image a special kind of haunt.