YCAU

But that's the thing. They mixed up so many elements from the original movie and series it doesn't ask the same questions at all. Here we have two people whose brains were put into bodies and reprogrammed. This is not the case with the original, where you have a different mind of sorts that doesn't actually need a body and isn't bound to a brain. And at the climax, the answer to "join me" was "yes", but this movie had a "no".

That's what's confusing to me. Why recreate so many scenes if they're trying to tell a new story? Why use Kuze's name and some details of his backstory, but put him in the place of the Puppetmaster with a wholly new theme to explore? Why is it important that Batou not have his fancy eyes until halfway in, rather than many years before, or if you're changing it anyway, why have them at all?

If they made an original story with the same setting and characters, I might have liked it more. But it seemed like they just included some iconic scenes from the original to draw in the fanbase and gave a bait and switch with something new, and conclusions I found much less profound and interesting. I found it... lazy. Like the writers didn't respect the original, and just said "what do we have to make up to get from set piece remake 1 to set piece remake 2?" "oh hey let's use this name I heard from way later on in the story because IDK." Again I must compare it to the slipshod work of the Starship Troopers adaptation. Certainly nowhere near as bad (I do think this movie was good in some respects), but they made many of the same mistakes in terms of reusing and deviating from source material (Why did you make X change? Ignorance, rule of cool, deliberate tone shift? It's unclear.).

Oh, and she blinked. ;)

The effects were cool, but I wish they hadn't randomly remixed elements from the franchise with a story that directly goes against the themes of the original. Then ending was diametrically opposed to the ending of the original. While I think the effects were great, the intellectual treatment reminds me of the knife throwing scene in the Starship Troopers adaptation...