GitS 1st Five Minutes

I really do want to like this American adaptation, and I’m both hoping for the best and keeping an open mind. However, I’m very conflicted over this extended preview. Scarlett Johansson is a good enough actress (see, for example Under the Skin as evidence), and she’s played enough secret agent roles to pull off Motoko Kusanagi convincingly. The look and the action is commendably faithful to its source material. The CG backgrounds of the cityscape appear a bit artificial, but I can overlook that. I’m much more concerned with the way the African businessman lays on the “philosophical” discussion about as thick as syrup on pancakes literally within the first five minutes of the movie, just to allay viewers’ anxieties that the movie jettisons all of the source material’s intelligence. The original GitS movie never needed to be quite this blunt and heavy-handed with its philosophy. The need to spoon-feed audiences which appears to be a prominent attribute of this live-action movie worries me.