Kokaku kidotai

The film that made Oshii’s international reputation is a cool cyber-thriller which posits some interesting questions about the essence of ‘identity’ and cuts to the quick of all those fantasies about ‘New Flesh’. Set in Hong Kong in 2029 it centres on Kusanagi Motoko, an officer in the state security forces. She is a near-cyborg whose mind and body have been technologically altered to the degree that her essential consciousness – her ‘ghost’ – is all but adrift. Ordered to trace a computer criminal known as the Puppet Master, who has hacked into diplomatically sensitive files, she discovers that her target is not a human but a cyber-generated sentience at the heart of a conspiracy engineered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A sentience, moreover, with a particular interest in Major Kusanagi herself… Ito Kazunori’s script remains surprisingly faithful to the shape and meaning of Masamune’s original Manga, but the film (like its ‘ghosts’!) has a life of its own. Powered by Kawai Kenji’s remarkable score, it prefers cybernetic abstraction to plodding exposition and assumes that love is stronger than death when it comes to cyber-viruses. A technical and conceptual triumph for Oshii. (T.R.)