Cullum, Ghost in a Cyber-Shell

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       For some reason, the whole time I was watching this movie, I kept thinking about the movie called Surrogates, with Bruce Willis, and that movie scares me. Not because its meant to be a horror film, its actually quite good, but its set in the future and people hook themselves up to a computer and live their life through a cybernetic version of themselves (or whatever they want to be, look like, ect). Which brings me to the point I'm trying to make here, technology scares me, but it also fascinates me. I really enjoyed Ghost in the Shell because of the fact that a lot of it has to do with technology and how you can manipulate it to make it a bad thing. It also has a little bit of corruption in there, like in Botchan. Let's not forget another big issue in this film : identity crisis. In Black Swan and in Perfect Blue the main characters were going through MAJOR identity problems. 

The movie is set in the year 2029. Technology is far more advanced than it was when the movie was made, and pretty far off of what technology we have today. I feel like, the way we depend on technology now, that one day the world as we know it might be similar to the one in this film. In Akira technology is used to basically stalk the population and control them subconsciously. In Ghost in the Shell, people are able to be brain hacked. There is a character called ‘the puppeteer’ and its hacking into people and causing all kinds of rukus. The creator of the puppeteer ends up being Sector 6 and the government. Let’s be honest here, if the idea of someone being able to ‘brain hack’ you doesn’t scare you, you deserve to be brain hacked. 

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In Ghost in the Shell a lot of the world is cyborg, and of course there are still some humans.  In the film, they have cyberneticlly enhanced cops. The main one were focused on in the movie is Major Motoko Kusanagi and she is 95% cyborg, I think, and she was cyborged at a very young age. In our world, modern day and how it has been forever, people have always questioned their identities. People are constatly asking themselves ‘what is my purpose’ ‘why am I here’ ‘who am I’ ‘who do I want to be.’ In the film, the characters are doing the very same thing. The main one is our very own Major Motoko. In Perfect Blue Mima goes through a similar identity issue. Mima has everyone telling her who she should be and people even try to murder her and rape her because she isn’t being who they want her to be. Motoko isn’t even human (mostly), so try to think of the questions about identity she is asking herself.