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FTN Has Seen Thirteen Minutes Of Ghost In The Shell!

March 16th, 2017 by Andrew Comments

Ghost in the Shell, the live action remake of the Japanese anime of the same name, hits UK cinemas on March 30.

Paramount Pictures has been screening an abridged version of the movies’ opening scenes, and Following The Nerd is gonna give you a run down of just what’s included in those 13 minutes, as well as our feeling of what the final movie will be as a result of this.

Bear in mind, this will contain speculative spoilers.

Sadly (or positively, depending on your point of view), if you’ve seen the footage released in the trailers and early footage from the promotional presentation of the opening ‘shelling’ scene captured and released by IGN, then you have already seen most of what is contained within the movies’ opening moments, there are other glimpses in the released trailers which I am going to speculate on, so while we do know a bit more of the picture, we’re far from seeing the whole picture yet (don’t ya just hate when the trailer does that… Fast & Furious franchise, that was aimed at you), but what seeing this opening footage does is to put the trailer footage a bit more into perspective.

The opening shows a covered body being wheeled in on what appears to be a hospital gurney, pushed by technicians wearing ‘Hanna’ labelled clothing. We got some of the aforementioned ‘shelling’ scene, showing the cyborg body being built in a very close visual style to the original Anime. (The version shown in this was edited down, but we suspect this was just to keep the opening moments brief before getting to the first main action scene of the movie, as is usually the case with these promos – we know a longer version of the shelling exists as per the IGN leak).

Part of the released ‘Major wakes up’ scene follows, with Juliette Binoch explaining that the Major’s body was damaged and this new ‘shell’ has been created for her – but in addition to this is a scene with Binoch and Joseph Naufahu (playing a new character according to IMDB called ‘Cutter’) discussing after how, despite her objections that the Major is not just a weapon, she will be assigned to Section 9, the promo then cuts ahead to one year later.

The main content of the promo is the action scene that has been shown mostly in trailers, taking reference from the original Anime, the Major is observing a meeting at a sort of digital geisha from the op of the building, and must intervene when a group of armed men attack. What we’ve seen of this in the trailers has been at different levels of completion, with some effects missing or incomplete, but the promo we saw appeared to be complete, much like the version seen in the latest trailer, the effects of the scene look visually incredible, with the cloaked Major smashing through the window of a building whilst still cloaked, it’s a very nice live action facsimile of the animated version, and the scene is competently handled.

This scene goes on longer than in the trailer, and if it’s an example of how they have tried to be visually faithful to the original Anime, with a visually impressive city filled with holograms and perfectly suited to the cyberpunk genre, we look forwards to seeing how the rest of the movie holds up.

Speculating again – HUGE POTENTIAL SPOILER WARNINGS – from what we saw in this and from the trailer footage, with a geisha-bot we see calling out to the Major in a child’s voice asking her for help, signs of the Burning Man, and the character of Kuze, it seems that the adaptation is not just of the original movie, but uses that as a base to build upon using a combination of elements from all of the versions – including ‘Innocense’ and the ‘Stand Alone Complex’ series. How well they have incorporated these elements is unclear, but we’re looking forwards to seeing how they do.

Co-host of the Monday Movie Show, Andrew is a huge movie fan who is into all sorts of things movie related, as well as a fan of all things nerd. In his spare time he likes to work at script writing, that is when he's not spending it on something movie or nerd related! www.followingthenerd.com