The new movie “Ghost in the Shell” tries very hard to look like the 1982 cult classic film “Blade Runner” and for the most part, it was very successful in reminding me of Blade Runner and of the dark, murky and rainy futuristic world where robots are as commonplace as human beings. Given that movie and computer technology has advanced so far since 1982, I was surprised at the just average special effects for a movie with a budget of 130 million dollars, especially with all of the scenes of the outside world in the distant future that seemed like they were slapped together or taken from another movie. What is worse than the average special effects are what amounts to a very boring story, that barely keeps your attention for even 30 minutes much less than close to 2 hours. A bad sign for me is the watch test and this movie I must have checked my watch about 25 times, waiting for it all to end as soon as possible. The acting for this film is OK, but there is not much of a story to act, unfortunately. The star is Scarlett Johansson and I suspect she is hoping there is not going to be a sequel to this movie, considering the amount of work involved in making this pretty bad science fiction film.

This film is a remake of a cartoon movie with the same title made in 1995 also entitled “The Ghost in the Shell” and given the pretty high IMDB ratings for the 1995 version (8.0), I would suggest that anyone who is interested in this story should probably see this movie and skip this bad remake.

This movie is a hard one to review, understand and even try and understand why anyone liked it, as the reviews are mostly positive, which makes no sense to me. This is another example of a low budget movie trying to be different and in the process of trying to be different, creates differences from what we are used to in terms of story or plot that are overtaken by confusion and annoying tricks and references that do nothing more than annoy and confuse the audience. This movie is about a young woman played by Kristen Stewart who has a twin brother who has the same heart abnormality that she has and he died of a heart attack at only age 27. What follows is grief caused by her brother’s death, fear of her own possible early death from the same heart problem her brother had, a murder that came out of nowhere, appearances of a ghost that we are lead to believe could be her brother, but we are never completely sure of this.

This movie has references that include ghosts, mediums, murder, an overly complex plot, nudity in several scenes that involve Kristen Stewart and an ending that you would probably need to have explained by both the screenwriter and the director. What was the point of all this? I will leave the point of this movie to whoever sees this strange and weird film to decide for themselves. I have never been a fan of movies like this because I have always been a believer of “less is more” and that when you try so hard to create scenes too fancy or complicated instead of just engaging an audience, all you have is one long annoying movie. For these main reasons, I do not recommend this very strange film.

Before the release of Jaws in the summer of 1975 there really wasn’t something like a summer blockbuster type of movie. Jaws, is based on the Peter Benchley book, was the first movie of its kind and the very first summer blockbuster. Horror movies and scary movies we had, but nothing like this. Nothing where a Giant Great White shark terrorized and killed several residents of an east coast beach town. And nothing like the opening scene of this movie where a woman is killed by a shark at night while swimming in the ocean. Accompanying all of this was the music of John Williams which was brilliant and never more effective than the now famous music when the shark would start to attack someone. It is hard to imagine more perfect theme music for Jaws than the musical score for this great film.

Over the years we all have learned through documentaries and stories we have read about the extreme difficulty everyone who worked on this film, on Martha’s Vinyard with the mechanical shark that they named “Bruce”. To get past many of the non-stop mechanical shark problems, the director of Jaws, Steven Spielberg eventually realized that showing less of the shark would be more terrifying than showing more and this, in fact, made the film even more scary than it would have been otherwise. In the end, despite so many production problems and the film constantly being overbudget, Jaws became the greatest box office movie hit up to that time.

All of the main stars in this movie were all at the peak of their acting skills, Richard Dreyfus, Robert Shaw and Roy Scheider and all of them probably thought at the time that the movie would be a bomb, mainly due to all the problems with the mechanical shark. Perhaps the greatest scene in the movie was the exact moment in time where the Great White shark showed his face for the first time, as Scheider was pouring blood into the water to lure him to be captured and killed. His slow backward walk towards the middle of the boat and his now famous line to Quint, played by Robert Shaw, “We are going to need a bigger boat”, is the one line in the entire history of all movies that has been repeated more times than any other.  I cannot even begin to count how many times I have heard someone say, “We are going to need a bigger something” in a movie. Another standout performance for me was Murray Hamilton’s portrayal of the town mayor, who throughout the entire movie, cared more about the money the township would be losing, rather than saving lives. His acting and bad decisions during so many arguments with Richard Dreyfus and Roy Scheider provide some of the most frustrating and funny moments in the movie. Hamilton’s character is a politician and a personality that all of us have had experiences running into and disliking.

The ending of Jaws including several scenes of Hollywood overkill and showing some things that a shark would never do, including launching its entire body into the sinking boat, but the big explosive ending created the satisfying blockbuster ending we were all waiting for. The concept of a summer blockbuster had to start somewhere and Jaws started it all 42 years ago.