Ghost In the Shell - Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society Blu-ray Review
The final frontier?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, July 5, 2011
YouTube has become the great repository for cultural detritus, and though I haven't officially checked, I'll bet if you're not old enough to remember the old "Excedrin headache" commercials, where an animated skull opened up to reveal cogs and wheels pounding away inside some poor hapless individual's head, you can probably find it there. That cutaway to the inner machinations of the mind might have two connections to
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society. First of all, any given viewer might develop an Excedrin headache of their own trying to figure out this incredibly convoluted tale. But more to the point, several characters within this OVA have what might be jokingly termed Excedrin headaches of their own, specifically those characters with "cyberbrains" (if you have to ask, don't) who repeatedly find themselves victims of a hacker known as The Puppeteer. A slew of high profile suicides or near suicides dot the landscape of
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society, and they all seem to point to The Puppeteer taking control of various individuals' cyberbrains and programming these poor folks to kill themselves. Lest that mystery not be enough for Public Security Section 9 to investigate, we also have yet another threat of a nanite "micro-machine" virus in the hands of terrorists, up to 20,000 kidnapped children who have had their minds erased, and just for good measure, longtime
Ghost in the Shell heroine Major Motoko Kusanagi largely missing in action and (gasp!) maybe up to no good as The Puppeteer herself. Anyone used to delving into the circuitous world of
Ghost in the Shell already knows that this has never been a franchise you simply dip your toe in to get a measure of the temperature; it is instead an anime that requires a headlong dive into deep and often roiling waters, where things are often not quite what they seem, and characters tend to be incredibly verbose if not as incredibly illuminating, talking on and on in sentences that seem to make sense on their surface but which often have the direct effect of producing major "WTF?" responses in the listener. And in that regard
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society is most certainly no exception.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society is the first OVA in this franchise's long and vaunted history, and while the film offers a sleek look, impressive design and ambitious scope, it's hobbled by the one thing you might not expect from a supposed "feature film" enterprise, namely its relative brevity. While the two recent releases of edited versions of
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex's two television seasons,
Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: The Laughing Man and
Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Individual Eleven, each clocked in at well over two and a half hours,
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society is a relatively paltry hour and forty minutes, and that doesn't leave much time to develop, let alone explicate, its overly convoluted plot.
Say what you will about Mamoru Oshii's
Ghost in the Shell films, as dialogue heavy and overly plotted as they may have been, they nonetheless created a believable dystopian future world and offered several compelling characters who helped to maintain viewer interest even if individual storylines occasionally frayed to the point of incomprehensibility. It's to this outing's director Kenji Kamayama's credit, then, that he, too, creates a completely believable world, one which is redolent of everything from Francis Ford Coppola's
The Conversation to Steven Speilberg's
Minority Report, a world filled with eavesdropping, security cameras and an utter and complete lack of privacy, even in one's dying moments. But where some may take issue with
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society is in its casual dismissal of the franchise's lead character, Motoko. This outing takes place a couple of years after the second season of
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, after Motoko's resignation, but her appearance here in dribs and drabs, and then the completely predictable "is she or isn't she?" aspect of whether or not she's The Puppeteer casts an odd and sometimes cliché-ridden tint on the proceedings which some may find off-putting.
For all its complexity, the
Ghost in the Shell franchise has remained surprisingly compelling through both of its film versions, the
Stand Alone Complex series, and the just released Blu-rays of the edited, moviefied versions of both seasons of the series.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society may in fact be the first time in the so far largely successful history of the franchise where the seams are starting to show. It's nothing too serious, nothing for longtime fans to fret
too much about, but it points out the risk of regurgitating the same ideas and themes too many times, something that is probably the major downfall of this particular outing. There's still enough here to warrant a good deal of interest, and the overall feel of the piece is visceral and exciting, but there's also a feeling that the franchise may be at a tipping point and Kamayama had better think very carefully about what his next
Ghost in the Shell move should be.
Ghost In the Shell - Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society Blu-ray, Video Quality
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Starz/Manga, distributing a Bandai production, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This is a nicely sharp and detailed looking feature, with excellent line detail and an appealing, if often quite dark (as befits its subject matter) palette. As with a lot of
Ghost in the Shell outings, there's not mind blowing color in use, at least with regard to many of the characters, who can be almost monochromatic, or even some of the backgrounds, which are often impressionistic and rain streaked, evoking a very
noir ambience. That said, there are instances of nicely popping, very robust colors, which in fact pop all the more simply by comparison with the otherwise drab hues. The overall image is very sharp, with the high tech future dystopian world presented very crisply and cleanly.
Ghost In the Shell - Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
You may have an Excedrin headache by the time you make your way through the entire
Ghost in the Shell franchise in preparation for viewing this latest outing,
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society. And in fact it may simply be a case of having had to slog through so much material to get to this OVA that has at least partially colored my reaction to it. But the fact remains that this outing covers a lot of territory we've seen before in slightly altered form, and it also relies on a couple of clichés that anyone worth their salt is going to guess the outcome of the minute they're introduced. All of this said,
Solid State Society is still an often extremely exciting, convoluted thriller that has several unexpected developments and manages to keep the
Ghost in the Shell franchise alive, if only barely at times. It might be time for a little break before anyone attempts another follow up, but in the meantime, while not the best thing out there in the wild and wooly
Ghost in the Shell universe, this release is still
Recommended.
