It seems that the rights for the production of a Live-Action movie of that all time masterpiece (and one of my all time favourite) in manga/anime/science-fiction that is Ghost in the Shell have been sold to DreamWorks and that the designated director will be Stephen Spielberg.
A R G H!
That has been my first reaction to the news, and apparently I’m not the only one being worried around.
It’s not just the always present fear of the fan-base to see its sacred and favourite passion torn away by someone who doesn’t have a clue what he/she/it is dealing with, and not even only the reasonable and pratically proven rules that a 2 hours Hollywood movie won’t be able to express nothing even remotely close to the complexity required by something like GITS. I mean, I loved Jackson’s work on the Lord Of The Ring, but nevertheless, I felt some pain in seeing how badly the transposition was from the book, and we’re talking about something I regard as a miracle: I was expecting far worse. Maybe Peter Jackson had the right ideas, maybe he was lucky, maybe he simply found himself inspired enough to give his maximum, and still the result was great but somehow disappointing for “us” fun, and rightly so, I believe.
Now take Spielberg, the present one not the E.T or Schindler’s List or Amistad one, but the producer/director who destroied A.I and raped War of the Worlds and Minority Report… it’s a nightmare coming true for any GITS fan out there. Just like knowing that except for a miracle (and I’d call a cancellation of the live-action project one) your favourite creature is going to be tortured and eventually killed in a way only Hollywood is known to do, and we all are aware of how much Hollywood-ian Spielberg is, especially lately. We’ve seen this happening before with japanese productions taken to the big-screen by the USA industry, we’re going to see it with Dragonball (again: unless the usual miracle) and I really fear not even Maj. Kusanagi could escape safely this time.
There are things that should never be included in a “let's make a movie to pile up some cash“-list, certainly GITS is one of them.
Nothing is listed on IMDB yet, let’s hope this is going to remain on someone’s desk forever!
