Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045 - Season 1 Review

Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex 2045 is a brand new show that's on Netflix right now. The first season, all 12 episodes, are available and this show follows the members of Section 9, led by Major Motoko Kusanagi, as they explore a new and ever-evolving threat to mankind. I love the first Standalone Complex show. I think it's an excellent anime. It's one of my favorites. I remember seeing it for the first time and I remember being so blown away by it that it really changed the way that I looked at anime. It was one of those first shows that made me want to think deeper about what I had just seen and try to look into the implications of the show and read up on it. Shows like that, and strangely FLCL, had a similar effect on me. They both kind of dropped around the same time for me, when I saw them anyway, and I thought a lot about those shows and made me want to research them. And so Standalone Complex means a lot to me. Whereas the original Standalone Complex was 2D animation, this show is 3D CG animation. For some people, that's going to be an instant turnoff. There's a lot of people that don't want to look at an anime that's fully 3D CG. And in my case, I do prefer 2D animation. I just think it looks infinitely better. I think the possibilities for storytelling, strangely, are deeper and better when it comes to 2D animation, even though you'd think that 3D animation would open things up. For some reason, it makes it feel more limited to me. And while the original Standalone Complex show experimented with things like 3D animated cars, this show, for the most part, was fully 2D. There was also a 2.0 version of Ghost in the Shell, which was a remastered version of sorts of the 1995 movie. Sort of a special edition with enhancements. It was horrible to look at, and I always hated it. It was also an easily available version of the movie. It was really easy to find that version of the movie, and a lot harder to find an HD version of the fully untouched original classic from Mamoru Oshi. Gratefully, they have released that on Blu-ray, and I love watching it still to this day. So this franchise has used 3D technology in various ways throughout the course of their movies and shows, but this is their first time to fully utilize it, and I think the effect was poor. This is not to say that the show can't be good as a 3D show. I mean, look at Clone Wars, for instance. The first season of Clone Wars doesn't really look all that impressive. The character animations are very dull and very wooden, but if you look at the final season of Clone Wars, it's fucking amazing. So it's not that this show is bad because of its CG. A CG show can definitely be good, and I'm hoping that with Season 2, which they have talked about making, and since this first season ends on a cliffhanger, I'm hoping they do, I really, really hope that with Season 2, they just put more money into it, more effort into it. A lot of talk has been thrown around that this show resembles a PS2 game, so let's actually talk about a PlayStation 2 game. That of Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex, a game I have and have played, and is actually kind of good, surprisingly. Keeping in mind that the PlayStation 2 was not an HD console, if you compare the two, there are definitely some similarities. I could see this entire show being a cutscene for maybe a PS3 game, so unfortunately the look of the show is so distracting that I had a really hard time getting invested in the story. The other issue I had with this show is that the story doesn't really get started until about halfway through. The first six episodes of this 12-episode arc are very scattered. You have Section 9. They're essentially mercenaries at this point. They're not being used in an official capacity by the government anymore, but they have remained a team. They have a new recruit that they constantly make fun of because he's a rookie and he's kind of shitty at his job, and he just kind of disappears after a few episodes. He's like, bye, see you later, I guess we're done. Okay, that was a character that was in the show for a while. Those first six episodes explore some social economic problems, some class issues. You have people who are literally fighting back against the 1%. Some of that is interesting. A lot of Ghost in the Shell has very political implications, and this show certainly doesn't back away from them, but it just feels like the show isn't building to anything. It feels like the story isn't really becoming a story yet. Finally, in the last half of the show, they start to explore post-humans, people who have been enhanced cybernetically or through control by outside forces to be insanely strong. One of them is punching people's heads off, actually punching people's heads off. He will hit people in the face and their heads will fucking explode. It's kind of cool, actually. And as these enhanced individuals rise to become a threat, this is when the show becomes more interesting. Togusa is also sort of exploring a younger kid who has become obsessed with Orwell's 1984 and he might be developing terrorist tendencies. This is when the show gets a lot better. The final six episodes, if you can push aside the fact that the animation is subpar and could be considerably better, this is where I was like, okay, this actually feels like standalone complex to me. This feels like the characters have something interesting to do. They're not just sort of wandering around looking for a job. There's even one episode that is completely detached from everything else where Bato goes to a bank and he discovers that the senior citizens of this bank, they're basically being used by this really terrible boss and their money's being stolen and they're staging a robbery and he decides to kind of help them out. Definitely one of my favorite episodes, completely taken out of the continuity of the show. It was just a nice little standalone, no pun intended, episode. I tried my best to look past the fact that this show, which is coming out many years after the original, looks worse than that show. I tried to look past that, but I couldn't help but mention it, especially this hilarious like meme worthy scene where this naked post-human guy is fucking doing backflips. There's just like a lack of self-awareness where they didn't look at that and think, wow, that looks fucking hilarious. But gratefully the characters are at least maintained. The camaraderie amongst Section 9, particularly Motoko Kusanagi, Bato, and Togusa. These characters still work well together and I like what they did with them. There's some really great subversion of what I thought was happening where characters are able to use their cybernetic enhancements to hide in plain sight or to make someone think they're dead, but they're not. I won't get into spoilers because odds are a lot of you haven't seen this show yet, but they do a pretty good job of surprising you in the final six episodes. It just takes a long time to get to them because it feels like this show has no idea what it's doing, which is so strange to go into a show, especially one that's that's fully computer animated where you can put the camera anywhere you want and feel like you don't have a plan. Something else that I greatly missed was Yoko Kanno's music. Her themes, her soundtracks for the show. I love them so much. I've listened to that music for years, not just the intros, but the music throughout the entire series. Really incredible vocal choral arrangements. This show has a lot of BWAAAM music. I was like, what is this, 2010? Did Inception just come out? Are we still doing BWAAAM? Like, we're over that guys, come on. I'm gonna give Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex 2045 a C. Like I said, I was just pumped for a new show in this continuity and I do think that they started to figure out what they were doing towards the end. I have greater hopes for season 2 if they do end up making it as they seem to be planning to. I have greater hopes for that and I hope that they can also improve the animation. Like I said, I am NOT against a fully CG show. You just have to compete with what else is out there. You can't just put out some PS3 looking shit. You have to compete with the world of CG animated shows and you look at the final season of Clone Wars, this just doesn't cut it. Guys, thank you so much as always for watching. I'm curious to know what you thought of the first season if you happen to check it out on Netflix. As always guys, if you like this you can click right here and get Stuckmanized!