I Watch Films: Ghost In The Shell (1995)

 

Ghost In The Shell (1995)

In 2029 in New Port City in Japan Major Kusanagi is a cyborg soldier for Section 9. At the request of Section 6 she assassinates a foreign diplomat to prevent a programmer defecting. She’s got thermal camouflage so she can’t be seen.

Possibly in retaliation a foreign ministry official is ghost-hacked. The shell is the body, the term used mostly by the cyborgs whose parts are owned by the government, the ghost is the consciousness, so his body is taken over. Trying to find the mysterious Puppet Master who did this they track telephone calls being made by a garbage collector on his route. It turns out that his life is a fiction; he’s also been ghost hacked.

The film continues, moving between meditations on what it means to be human, complex plots of espionage and betrayal and violent action scenes that are still very strong nearly thirty years after. The live action remake was good, yet everything that made it so is here, stylish and stylised, and crammed into a tight 85 minutes. A superb bit of cyberpunk anime.

Watch This: Energetic, stylish animated thriller
Don’t Watch This: Maybe watch The Matrix instead
Also: The live-action remake