It looks like a live-action movie about anime, about Artificial Reality, about Gaming and Society. Yes, this is Correct.It Looks like a Movie about a Fictional Game played in a Fictional Dystopian Future. Yes. . .But mostly Not quite what you think.It will NOT give the average viewer the usual Hollywood thriller blood 'n' guts Bang-Bang FPS shoot-em up. Instead, the creators of this movie, which could NEVER have come out of Hollywood, are using the Artificial Reality/Game to pose a dramatic question. Some reviewers have called the plot/pace slow...No-- it's called 'Drama', folks. It's not a recorded screenshot of ADHD paced shoot-em-up gameplay foisted on us and called a Movie. It's a Movie that dares to call itself a Drama and pose a QUESTION about Gameplay. It's seems 'slow'-- because you are supposed to wonder what IS ACTUALLY happening.Yes, it is about What is Artificial vs what is Real. But it does it with music, lighting, a play on color and a poetic sense.If you are willing -and able- to sit back and take in this movie as a Dramatic Event instead of the expected Blam-Bang-Boom action flick, you will be surprisingly moved.The Opening Theme at the beginning is stunning. The Musical Performance at the end is simply Beautiful.Girl-Friend Test! If she sits thru the first hour and then can't stop watching...she's a keeper.

A typical Mamoru Oshii style film. Slow, heavy handed but often effective use of lens filters, dreary soundtrack, poor Foley work, cinema noir poses and some art-house meanderings. The story is so so, reasonably similar themes can be seen in a lot of work coming out of japan these days. Virtual reality or online identity cross merging with the real world. It is very anime in parts but I am not sure anime works for live action. In anime you can forgive some of the stiffness or the poor Foley but in live action it makes it feel a bit dead. A problem I have with all Oshii's film. The main actress is good. She does hold the film together. Not much is asked from her in terms of character development or script but she gives more than is on the written on the page and imbues the film with a feeling of lose, fading away, remorseful acceptance. I liked the film. I enjoy the theme. I thought the CGI was done well and there were some nice shots. The metaphors are a bit much but that is to be expected with Oshii. Boo to me but I wish he'd make GITS 3.SPOILER (NOT REALLY)I very much did not like the last scene. The is a scene where an orchestra perform the theme of the film Avalon with cuts going between a conversation outside and the orchestra inside. This for me was the worst scene. The filming of the orchestra was very standard TV style with no use of creative lighting to reflect the colour of the music, no close-ups of any of the instruments, no style at all just bad TV. Then it was clumsily cut with the conversation outside which were meant to reflect the lyrics of the opera. I thought it was very poor. And I thought the dog in the car was just stupid.

This slow burning film takes us on a journey into the realm of virtual reality game play. The cleverness in this movie is the way it portrays reality as dull and murky where a pet dog is the only exciting and uplifting thing in ones life. In contrast - the large syndicate multi player world of gaming is depicted as being a far more interesting and exciting world, so much so that we as the viewer are hooked on the virtual world story more than the real world. The movie is a visual feast of contrasts, its deliberately slow, has some very cool VR action scenes and you will be rewarded in the final third act when you realise why the movie has you invested in the virtual storyline as it truly plays with your mind.

The orange tone to everything was just yucky. Oh yeah, the main character lives in a ghetto that is all orange-tinted with orange-tinted people. Meanwhile, to mentally escape from this crushing poverty of the body, she plays a full-immersion video game (which sucks in that no rules are clear and no logic follows the gameplay). She apparently earns an income playing the game but she is revealed to not be an employee of the game company?. Lots of non-speaking pauses later the story drags on slowly. She uses a glitchy orange computer interface with an operating interface that is so visually annoying and I can only suspect a Microsoft future release.Meanwhile, I the viewer, ask basically why she is wasting her precious time in some moronic game when she barely has the necessities of life? Oh yeah, playing games is fun, but what is the point when you're almost starving? While she is piddling her life away playing some lousy even-more-orange-tinted lame full-immersion video game her dog runs off (probably looking for an owner who pays at least a moment of attention to it and feeds it regularly) or is stolen from the woman (while she is ignoring her lousy orange-tinted reality).Meanwhile she obsesses over some game her game-playing team lost the entire uninteresting movie. Yawn. So she wants to be the best of the best, go get them Ash Catchem (got to bore us all). Golly, this main character sucks as a human being as well and has no redeeming qualities aside from her physical beauty (which she could barter for some manner to escape her crushing poverty).So she reaches the "Real" level and it, at least, not sucks horribly and she is sent to kill a former comatose teammate mentally living in the "Real" level. Finally the sucky boring bland orange-tinted movie is no longer a tedious chore to watch, but has the potential to say something along the lines "the main character is trapped in imaginary computer-generated poverty and she is actually in the real world now". Perhaps she will do the murder deed and live in the real world now? Well, she kills the guy and he vanishes in a digital effect. Wow! Thanks idiotic director. You suck, you suck so very much, director.Here the director had an iota of a chance to redeem himself slightly by burying this lousy lame moronic cruddy movie with a philosophical twist.The director could have said, "The REAL WORLD is there and if you live in it and contribute to it to make it better, it won't be some cruddy orange-tinted poverty land." A clever way to make this suck-tacular movie a agonizingly slow lesson on basic civic pride (for the 1% of the viewers that haven't found something actually entertaining to watch at this point or are movie-masochists).Nope, director. The director had to screw this all up by tossing in some cruddy digital effect and ruin all chances of redemption for this awfully lousy movie which was a waste of money, a waste of time, and a waste of viewer trust.After that, it ends. Good riddance. I hope the director chokes on it. I'm putting this HACK on my "avoid at all costs" list for any other films his name is attached to.