Ghost in the Shell 2017: Lean & Mean Edition

As a big fan of the original anime movie, I was somewhat disappointed by the original live action Ghost in the Shell release, which I saw in theatres. The main criticisms I had were around the dumbing down of the material, significant changes to the overall visual style, lack of story coherence, and the score. Nerdwriter does a very insightful comparison of the visual elements here, which really resonated with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2soHxEN79c&feature=youtu.be

This edit does a fantastic job at fixing these issues, as much as possible in a fanedit, while also improving the pacing. I think removing some of the 'on the nose' explanations helps the viewer focus on exploring core cyberpunk elements themselves. Trimming sub plots to focus on the main story arc works really well, and gives more relative time to the core Major experiences.

Thoroughly recommend over the main theatrical cut.

As much as I enjoy the unfairly maligned 2017 film adaptation of the Ghost in the Shell manga, this leaner and tighter fan-edit outdoes it in my opinion. Every change made is 100% smart and justified, it really improves the pacing -- which is kind of amazing since the original cut is an already well-paced film -- and somehow even manages to better capture the spirit of the original source material. Really great stuff.

Wow. If I didn't know better, I would say this was a studio cut. Great narrative decisions and fantastic editing.

I already liked the original cut of this movie. but this edit is so much better. it improves the pacing and all the other changes are completely justified

As a fan of the franchise (and even the original cut of this film) this edit was amazing. My main complaint of having things dumbed down and over explained in the movie was fixed, which already made this edit an improvement, but then the additional editing used to speed up the pacing and give the movie more focus also helped the story's flow. The editing itself was also executed very well, with no noticeable cuts in audio or video. Overall everything that changed here was an improvement and was done perfectly. The only scene that I would've possibly kept is the "prostitute scene" because of what it adds to The Major's identity questions like in the 1995 film, but given that the scene is so short it doesn't make a huge difference to the film and would likely slow down the pacing, so I'm willing to give it up. Otherwise this was a great edit that pretty much improved the movie in every way it could've.