My Take Radio

Ted Turner, George Lucas and Steven Spiel­berg should all be con­vuls­ing in their graves over this one, despite none of them being dead yet. Mamoru Oshii has made them look like even big­ger fools than they have man­aged to do on their own. This, ladies and gen­tle­men, is how you remake your clas­sic film: you actu­ally make it bet­ter. You don’t replace guns with walkie-talkies. You do not worry about who shot first and hire Ste­vie Won­der to cre­ate your CGI. You do not piss hor­ri­ble pas­tel paints all over the mas­ter film copy so that future gen­er­a­tions never know what a clas­sic was really sup­posed to look like. Ghost In The Shell 2.0 is quite sim­ply, a mas­ter­piece reborn and restored. Just like the movies I have alluded to above, there was noth­ing wrong wit hthe orig­i­nal film here. It is sub­lim­i­nal, full of action and it makes you use your brain for a sec­ond — some­thing movies never seem to do any­more. I have owned this movie on DVD for nearly as long as I have owned a DVD player and lately I have wanted to burn it in a rit­ual fire pray­ing for some­thing bet­ter. The prob­lem with every DVD ver­sion of this film is that there is this hor­ri­ble haze around the char­ac­ters in all of the numer­ous dark or night-time scenes. Not to play on the title, but it seemed as if the char­ac­ters were ghosts a lot of the time. My prayers got answered with this blu-ray release because video was com­pletely cleaned up. Even the audio, which was fine before, is bet­ter on this disc. Any­one who doubts this can go into the spe­cial fea­tures and watch the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the movie. Once your eyes stop bleed­ing, con­sign your­self to watch­ing only 2.0 from now on. I wish I could show you just the open­ing scene side by side from the orig­i­nal and the 2.0 ver­sion to illus­trate my point. There are some sub­tle dif­fer­ences where the scenes were redone in CGI, but noth­ing where it harms the integrity of the final prod­uct. The bot­tom line is that if you have never seen this movie before, buy this ver­sion; if you have seen it or if you already own it on DVD, give it to some poor shmoe who never saw this and buy this blu-ray. You will not be dis­ap­pointed, espe­cially if you can get it for $14 like I did (Best Buy).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAK2PVKio0g]