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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

The cyberpunk tropes still had some freshness back in 1995, but today they're just done to death. While the live action film touched upon all the big ideas, I'm glad they didn't try unpack too much of it, I'd be bored to tears, I've already been there with dozens of previous books and films.

Even in 1995 the ideas in ghost in the shell had already been explored thoroughly, Dick and Gibson were all about that sort of thing. What made Ghost In The Shell exceptional was the story and the visual style.

The new film brought that style to life beautifully, I got exactly what I paid for. And even under the best of circumstances, a two hour film isn't enough time to do more than a superficial examination of some philosophical concept or another.

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>a two hour film isn't enough time to do more than a superficial examination of some philosophical concept or another.

You only need a superficial touch on a subject to intrigue someone who is interested to fall further down the rabbit hole.

Personally I can say that the 95 movie introduced a child-me to philosophical ideas about self; and that snow-balled into hours in the books exploring the ideas deeper.

Two hours isn't a long time to teach a broad concept in any in-depth manner, but it initiated an exploration of philosophy that spanned many thousands of hours for me, and I credit the Oshii film for having whatever it took to hook a very young kid into some very heavy ideas.

If anything, I see a resurrection of cyberpunk coming - because we now live in it.

Take Mr. Robot, for example. It's has a LOT of classic cyber punk tropes, with one big difference - it's not "science fiction" anymore. It's just a present day, present technology fiction.

> Take Mr. Robot, for example. It's has a LOT of classic cyber punk tropes, with one big difference - it's not "science fiction" anymore. It's just a present day, present technology fiction.

IMHO Mr.Robot doesn't really work and just uses the classic "hackers == Juvenal idealistic freaks" trope which is getting old. Black mirror is a better show. But none of them deal with the loss of humanity through cybernetic enhancements which is more what GitS is about. We don't really live in that era yet.

Mr. Robot SPOILERS below.

> just uses the classic "hackers == Juvenal idealistic freaks" trope which is getting old

I would argue that it indeed uses this trope - among many others. If you're looking at the show from the political perspective (and not from the mental disorder perspective, for example), it plays the tropes beautifully. First you see a sympathetic group of young rebels ready to defeat evil empire, and when they finally achieve it you see all intended and unintended consequences of it, and the stupidity of these naive "good" and "bad" labels in general.

> We don't really live in that era yet.

There are bionic arms and legs, but they don't make anyone loose their humanity. Also, I remember GiTS mainly from the manga, and I would say that it's more about the general concept of soul and conscience.

The thing with current bionics is that they are not... mindful in the way they are in GitS. Today's bionic limbs are pale imitations of our natural ones, though they are leaps and bounds over the stationary or slightly mechanical limbs of just a few years ago. There is little reason for someone to desire an artificial limb if they have a healthy functional limb.

In GitS they were, for most intents and purposes, better than the real thing. You could have a cybernetic eye with built in night vision and multispectral imaging. You could have a better/faster brain. You could have ultra-precision hands, fantastic for certain tasks.

But it puts into perspective, at what cost do these improvements come. If at a certain point, you replace your body wholesale for improvements, can you be sure you are who you think you are? If you cybernetic eyes lie to you, how do you know? If you have brain improvements, can they influence your thoughts or implant biases? There is also the whole "Ship of Theseus" thing going on. If you upgrade/replace your brain and body slowly, are you still you?

There definitely is a lot of soul/conscience stuff thrown around as well, but the above is what stuck with me all these years.

Definitely. Arguably it didn't die, but certainly waned. Even though GITS didn't perform particularly well, I thought it was phenomenally executed, so at least aesthetically things are progressing.

I've never considered GitS to be "punk". It's much more in line with Cameron's Aliens & Avatar.

The protagonists are not "punk" but to me the setting contains many elements that I would consider punk. The vast wealth gap, the abandonment of vulnerable populations and the areas they inhabit, and the seedy underbelly of the cities all lurk underneath the gleaming chrome and neon surface. To me this is the epitome of the genre, the incongruity between the powerful corps and their government puppets and the misery of the general population. GitS feeds the dream of super wizard class hackers and street samurai but also pays homage to the downtrodden masses left behind by progress. With a nice dash of philosophy.

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