The original is 20 years old. They are likely polling a younger generation who are more interested in modern visual garbage than coherent plot.

So to have any chance of getting even a little enjoyment from this movie, I have to find a subtitled (not a literal transcript of the English version) Japanese dub of it?

I would actually consider that. The dialogue in the English one beats you over the head. Like there's a scene where Major talks about why she likes going diving:

"Down there there's no noise,

no light,

no datastreams..."

The visuals are pretty good, but the movie is fucking terrible. I have no special love for the anime, mind you. It was good, but like most cyberpunk anime from that era it was just a mishmash of shit stolen from William Gibson books and repurposed in different ways. I just honestly think the movie was lame regardless of all that. The writing is fucking horrible. Again, it's not like anime is brilliant high art or anything, but jesus the movie is just this litany of bad Hollywood screenwriting tropes. (people intoning lame, over-used lines as if we're supposed to be blown away by them. "It's not death you should be afraid of......it's.......LIFE. It's not the noise you should be afraid of...it's..the SILENCE." that kind of shit.

That's fine and dandy that younger Japanese people aren't bothered by the "whitewashing", but that doesn't make it OK.

I remember GitS getting a theatrical re-release maybe around 2002 or '03? I think around the time SAC was on Toonami. Anyway it was a double-language release with some theatres showing dub and more arthouse ones showing the OVA subbed version. Anyway I was trying to get my girlfriend at the time into anime (smart move right?) and I must've called the box office twenty times to make sure it was the subbed version. I don't walk out of movies but I will not pay for English anime dubs. Do they do this "reverse" dubbing for other anime/video games? If so, yeah, what endlesschris said, but with Resident Evil too???

The whole movie is very much "Johnny's first year scriptwriting class project"

When acting/dialogue is bad in the original language,a dub invariably improves it even when you don't know the dubbed language. A foreign dub with English subtitles really improved The Phantom Menace for me. Similarly, when acting is wooden in the original language that shit just washes over you when you don't know the lingo. Who complains about bad acting in languages they don't even understand?

Never could even get into the original.

Kept having these minute long musical interludes panning over the cyberpunk cityscape. With the Worst Singer Ever. She sounded like that cat yowling at other cats who were eating.

Poorwill, funny you mention Phantom Menace. There was a prequels fan edit that took advantage of the effect you mention by using the Japanese audio and then rewriting the subtitles to make the dialogue not suck (wouldn't work if you understand Japanese, of course). From what I saw, it took those abysmal movies and turned them into a single, two-hour adventure with a strong anime vibe. Still not great, but the characters and plot coherence was much improved. (The story takes place in the third movie and uses the first two purely for flashbacks, which I thought was clever.)

Yeah there's a Hobbit Superedit like that too somewhere. It was mostly the same English dialog but the Dwarf songs are redubbed in the Khuzdul language, and some other things.

By the trailers they just cherry picked characters and concepts from the universe and set it to an 'evil corporation/secretive secrets' plot.

Exactly, instead of the Major being an early recipient of an experimental full-body prosthetic as a child by random chance, it looks like it was arranged by the big evil corporation after she was already an adult.

Is that the case?

It is the result of shady corporate interest, yes

It IS a terrible case of 'we cant get a good director or writers so lets get the most famous female actress we can to get butts in seats'

Yeah I haven't watched it. Saw a preview of the first 20 mins on youtube and it looked bad, so I stayed away.

Anyway, at the very least they waited a while before attempting a live action remake of an anime. I was more offended by the remakes of Oldboy and Let the Right One In, movies that had barely just been made when Hollywood was already looking into remaking them simply because audiences are too stupid to tolerate subtitles or watch films that have no recognizable star-power in them.

My girlfriend and her siblings are Korean and they were bothered by it, not so much by the fact that it was a whitewashing issue, though that was a large part of it, but more by the fact that it took a paying gig away from an Asian actress.

BUT, as Yuta explains here, Japan is so homogenous as an Asian country that they're basically not bothered by the casting and just write it off to how much like the look of the anime the character the actor or actress may or may not correspond to, white, Asian or otherwise. Their problem with Takeshi may be that he doesn't look like the anime version of Aramaki. Oh, and that they feel like he mumbles.

Takeshi was in a pretty horrible auto wreck and that probably explains the speech (Westerners like myself would most likely only notice the lazy eye and droopy right side of the face in everything starting with 1995's Johnny Mnemonic). But I've seen plenty of Takeshi films and I don't really notice dialog patterns or anything that wouldn't seem understandable, if I understood the language to begin with. And the thing is, that look (and speech too, I suppose) has kind of been his trademark persona post-accident, like the old Yakuza who loses his master and meets a kid kinda feelgood stuff. And a pretty OK Zatoichi. And in Japan he's still pretty huge. So you'd think that native Japanese folks would kinda know that??

Those twelve people also love ADOLF HITLER

It -is- Japan, so your statement may actually be accurate.

Ghost stars.

"It -is- Japan, so your statement may actually be accurate."

It was the bad guys who blew up the Hitler Building, so you may be on to something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsYYnwhn4g4

Wow. Never mind what I said above about never paying to see an anime dub.