Touches You

Great Film overall

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Masterful piece from Mamoru Oshii. Production design is tops. Everything says "Ghost in the Shell" without the title, the DNA essence of cyberpunk ultraviolence genre of Japanese anime. The plot does have a beginning, middle and end. Listen to the narrator's voice. She begins with the history of the Garm Wars, setting the backdrop for the players. The narrator ends the movie setting up the conflict of man against the alien army of mechanized giants. The sound design is exquisite. You can turn off the video and just listen to all the elements. The movie did not have a hundred million dollar budget, but production delivered some amazing eye candy CGI. The bulk of the static camera work did not call too much to itself and the editing was solid. The music orchestration is hypnotic, grounded to GIS yet having that other worldly effect. I would love to see a sequel.

This production is not for everyone, and I admit to not being particularly interested in the integrated video game / CGI type of fantasy sci-fi production myself, but this was interesting enough to warrant a watch, and I'm not regretting having done so.Admittedly, the plot is rather clumsily constructed, which detracts somewhat from what this could have been.Having said that though, the actual artistry committed to this creation is something to behold. Having been confined to a relatively limited budget, this was an impressively ambitious effort, perhaps overly so, but it is visually a spectacular expression of the artform.For me at least, Mélanie St-Pierre's character as Khara made the film. Without her, not sure how well this effort would have fared.To be fair, this production starts out very strong, with Khara and her cadre of clonettes on board their warcraft, the inital scenes with the mysteroius Driud entity and it's wily cohort, prying their way into the AI core, the invasion battle scenes . . . but OK, no spoilers here.But then, as the story begins to stretch out as a meandering journey through various travails, it just seems to lose steam along the way, with various action scenes tossed in as props to keep the excitement level artificially inflated.By the ending scene (the film is divided into a series of acts), it just seems that the writing was getting tired, and just had to throw in the proverbial "to be continued" invading hordes of the whatevers as a sort of departing plot prop (no spoiler here, there are numerous other details not included in this description).It's somewhat unfortunate, as there were several potential story threads and philosophical ponderings which could have been much more richly enabled and elaborated upon, but were left somewhat vacant.Garm Wars is an interesting template which could be further developed, but definitely could benefit from more finely honed story crafting to match the remarkably rich visual motifs into which this template has been enmeshed.I want to give its creators credit for a fascinating effort, and wouldn't be against seeing another, more well developed (and funded) effort in this direction.I'm torn between a 6 and 7 rating . . . but am giving a benefit of a doubt, let's go with a 7.

I stumbled upon this movie during bad weather stuck inside home and I enjoyed the acting and the great FX. It seems like the Japanese are able to lend a much more pronounced artistic effect with their FX styles. However, I was very disappointed with the three endings. The first ending which used a childlike 'China doll' to represent evil forces seems like a cop-out to me. The second ending with mechanical snakes was just weird. In both cases - it was like the film maker had run out of ideas OR budget with which to end the film. Maybe I missed something of meaning hidden in that imagery. And the 'third' later ending showing another follow-up war was confusing. Was it a hint at a sequel? To my way of thinking, I felt that the movie's actors and viewers deserved a better ending.

This seems to be an experiment in live-action-slash-CGI anime filmmaking. Visually creating that crossover in itself seems to take center stage, with the story coming in second.At many points, the film succeeds beautifully in its proof-of-concept. The re-creation of anime-style scenes via live-action is often pretty startling.I found the CGI integration a bit weak, probably due to the low budget. Although the 3D animations themselves were fairly impressive, their "green screen" blending with live actors and scenery was usually much too conspicuous. The authentic anime flavor was much more pronounced during scenes that used old-fashioned cinematography, lighting, and filter effects to evoke the feel of drawn Japanese animation cels. But when that did work, it really worked.It also appears there wasn't enough left in the budget for certain transitional shots, resulting in a jerky pace.I'm a fan of Lance Henriksen and Kevin Durand, and they do provide some substance to the characterization, but again this wasn't quite enough to make the story feel like it had real depth. This movie seems more about looks than anything else, but I think that was the intention. If this gets Mamoru Oshii some studio attention to pitch a similar but bigger-budget movie, we can probably call this a success.