u/VibeCheka

With caveats, the 2017 movie is good, actually.

It's imperfect--it doesn't depict the mind-body problem as well as the 1995 movie does, its characters lack the demonstrated political and intellectual savvy of their counterparts in Stand Alone Complex, it doesn't lean into the engineering realism of any of its predecessors, and over-relied on lifting iconic shots directly from said predecessors--but it's actually much better than what its detractors said, and the thing that everybody got upset about--a white actor cast as Motoko Kusanagi--is actually its most critical and genre-subversive aspect. Cyberpunk of the last 50-odd years (100-odd if we count Yoshiwara in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) has been depicting the 'encroachment' of Japanese culture and capital as an insidious force in 'western' societies. In the 2017 movie, the white-racialized forms of both Motoko Kusanagi and Kuze are revealed to be that of their shells, not their original forms; they were originally both Japanese, and were forcibly re-shelled by a Japanese cybernetics corporation operating in Japan with an American CEO. This inverts the preestablished trope entirely. Rather than the rest of the world being a victim of Japan's cultural and economic exports, Japan is host to postwar American capital and political influence.
Also, just as an aside, Kuze is the most thematically faithful adaptation of Frankenstein's Monster that had been put to the screen up to that point in my opinion (Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation is now the best), and they didn't even stoop to the level of giving him or someone else a line naming this directly, which I admired.

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u/VibeCheka — 1 day ago