is exactly the kind of film you’d expect from a movie that opens with nanomachine sperms inseminating the CPU cores of androids, and I don’t ever want to watch it again. The incredibly slow-burn, noirish follow-up to filmmaker Mamoru Oshii’s original adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s manga mulls over its themes more than any commentary or action really needs.
The highlight is a now-iconic festival sequence set below the towering skyscrapers of Iturup, featuring massive ornamental puppets and huge, baroque floats on parade in the streets and canals of the island super-city. The familiar children’s choir of composer Kenji Kawai’s soundtrack accompanies the spectacle, inspired by the Taiwanese festival to the sea goddess Mazu.
The perspective character, the hulking cyborg Batou is working out a case for Section 9 with his new partner, a younger Togusa only recently assigned to the intelligence department specializing in android terrorism. They follow a trail of bodies left by a new model of intelligent android companionship robots — unfortunately called “— that more resemble porcelain-toned dolls than fully human forms.
An android coroner of sorts suggests that the dolls have not self-destructed or gone rogue, but died by suicide. The implication haunts Batou as he constantly recalls the decision of the Major in the original film to transcend her human form entirely. Oshii establishes different humanist philosophies out of each character’s desire for children, pets or dolls.
The resolution of the murder investigation ties the themes together well and offers the most enduring commentary for the film’s re-release in 2024. Much like AI in our world, the work of the sexaroids that have been murdering their high-profile clients is the climax of alienation in a corporate techno-state. It’s revealed that the tech making these androids so compelling is the cloned “ghosts” of actual humans, transferred into the dolls in a process that kills the original women.
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