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Comment by anotheryou | Hacker News Reader

No sympathy whatsoever. They kinda inverted the main plot.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

What they made: A (slightly technophobic) very human and involentary cyborg fighting for humanity and letting the equally human anti-hero die to keep on fighting for the human race against digitalization and greedy other humans. Also: strange human trafficking sob-story.

What it was: The first cyborg without any human tissue remaining fighting for justice and falling in love with the genderless anti-hero who is first machine gaining conciousness. They fall in love, unite in death, are reborn as a child and are the first thing far beyond humanity: a human soul and AI hybrid, the first life-form beeing native to the physical and the digital world. Also a loveletter to technology.

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Other than the "love", you've hit exactly on why I dislike the movie.

I don't care who they cast or recast if they would just get the point of the story, but western media has no concept of how to do a proper narrative about identity and can't accept any story involving technology that isn't bemoaning it and "exposing" how dangerous it is to us and society as a whole.

In other words, western media becomes a drooling idiot when discussing either of these topics.

That is very true. I kept hearing about how they copied the original so closely. But they changed the story and characters, besides the size of Major's boobs. I would have gotten past the distractions if the core of the story had been there.

> ...western media has no concept of how to do a proper narrative about identity...

I must be misunderstanding your complaint, because it seems that everyone's favorite metaplot is about identity these days. Off the top of my head:

- Frozen: choosing own future and identity over what was given you

- Dark Knight: projecting an inaccurate identity to protect people

- Zootopia: overcoming prejudice by breaking glass ceilings

- The Crown: how to manage contradictory identities (head of church, head of state), overcoming prejudice

Especially on the nose:

- Westworld: I don't want to get into too many plot details, but there are absolutely questions of identity, both for humans and for artificially intelligent machines.

Westworld is a really interesting thing. They partly live from what they (ironically?) criticise: Boobs and Gore for entertainment. Incerdibly well made though, I hope the "us against them" of machine and humans will blur a bit further.

Just because it's their favorite, doesn't mean they do it well. Some of your examples are perfect for a surface look at identity. They focus on how our concept of identity affects our day to day life and how we can manipulate that to help or hurt. Others, like Frozen, really have little to nothing to do with identity and instead are that tired plot of "figuring out who I am" which, yeah that's kind of what identity is but it's not really looking at the concept of identity.

But that's not what GitS is about.

I'm referring to a more philosophical approach, even an abstract one. GitS specifically is looks at identity as a malleable thing. To a "western audience", in the original film, The Major is no longer The Major at the end. Or at least, they'd be reassured by her familiar voice and reassure themselves that it really is still her and they haven't lost their protagonist. "Well, she sounds the same and seems to act the same, must be the same person."

This is again a very surface look at identity. I'm not saying this is bad subject material or even wrong, but it gets very old when every movie throws in you face how deep and interesting they are because they're about "identity" when really they're just about "stuff people do in situations" or applying a rigid concept of identity to some character's struggles.

A good summary. The original and the movie have nothing in common aside from the setting and some character names.

The visuals were amazing, but the movie might as well have been named "cyborgs in hong kong".

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