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Comment by NTripleOne | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it was an extraordinarily pretty film, although I think they really dragged out the whole "HEY LOOK HOLGRAPHIC BILLBOARDS" thing, I lost count of how many sweeping shots of buildings and their attached holograms I saw...

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I may be remembering it incorrectly but I think that was a pretty common motif in the source material.

Google-image Ghost in the Shell cityscape: there is not a single ad hologram in the original (do correct me if I'm wrong though). The holograms shown are not as futuristic, they are green luminescent and pixelated, such as in the helicopter tactical view and the making of cyborg opening scene.

There are more in Innocence, especially during the parade scene, but even then the city itself is much more raw, like SAC and esp. SAC2G nails it. There's way too much of a Blade Runner feel in the live action movie.

In the artbook they mention how they wanted to emphasize how pervasive augmented reality had become in their world.

I guess giving the solograms - what they call them - a lot of airtime is one way to do that if you don’t want to explain why they’re there in the actual story.

Unfortunately to both myself (intimately familiar with the source material) and my father (zero knowledge at all), the shots increasingly came off as "look at all this work we put in to these, please appreciate them... please?" as the movie progressed.

Not that I'd mark it down for it at all, there's no shame in wanting to show off your work (especially when it's that good looking), and they never dragged on too long, they were just... oddly more frequent than expected.

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