Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. Solid State Society

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Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.
Solid State Society
攻殻機動隊 S.A.C. Solid State Society

GitS:SSS movie poster
Directed by Kenji Kamiyama
Produced by Production I.G
Written by Masamune Shirow (creator),
Kenji Kamiyama,
Shotaro Suga,
Yoshiki Sakurai
Starring Atsuko Tanaka
Akio Otsuka
Koichi Yamadera
Osamu Saka
Yutaka Nakano
Toru Okawa
Takashi Onozuka
Taro Yamaguchi
Music by Yoko Kanno
Distributed by Flag of Japan SKY PerfecTV! Perfect Choice ch160 PPV, Animax
Release date(s) Flag of Japan September 1, 2006
Flag of United States July 3rd, 2007
Running time 105 min.
Country Japan
Language Japanese
Budget ¥ 360,000,000
$ 3,200,000 USD
IMDb profile

Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. Solid State Society (攻殻機動隊 S.A.C. Solid State Society Kōkaku Kidōtai: Solid State Society?) is the 2006 anime film based on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, which is based on Masamune Shirow's manga Ghost in the Shell. It is produced by Production I.G, who announced the film at the 2006 Tokyo Anime Fair, and is directed by Kenji Kamiyama. The film has a production budget of 360 million yen (equivalent to US$3.2 million).

In order to provide theatrical quality, the film was premiered in Japan on the satellite PPV platform SKY PerfecTV! Perfect Choice ch160, on September 1, 2006.[1] It is also set to air in Japan on the anime satellite TV network Animax from May 27, 2007. The film was also released on DVD in Japan on November 24, 2006, and will be released in the US by Bandai Entertainment and Manga Entertainment, in a normal and limited edition on July 3rd, 2007. [2] It was announced at Anime Expo 2006 that Solid State Society is not scheduled to be the final iteration of the Stand Alone Complex series.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
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The story takes place in the year 2034, two years after the events in Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG. Major Motoko Kusanagi has left Public Security Section 9, an elite counter-terrorist and anti-crime unit specializing in cyber warfare, which has expanded to a team of 20 field operatives with Togusa acting as the field lead. Section 9 is confronted by the mysterious suicides of thirteen operatives of the disbanded Siak Republic, remnants of which found asylum in Japan. They manage to catch up to Ka Gae-Ru, a former Siak Colonel who has taken a hostage in the hope of gaining safe passage out of the country. Gae-Ru says fearfully that "Kugutsu Mawashi" is coming before killing himself. (Kugutsu Mawashi can be roughly translated to "Puppeteer". This is a different character from the puppet master of the original movie, whose consciousness merged with Motoko's.)

Section 9 conducts an unauthorized raid on the home of exiled Siak dictator Ka Ru-Ma, who has been living under house arrest. They find that he has been dead for some time, due to an apparent assassination disguised as a suicide. In addition, before he died, Ka Ru-Ma wrote "Kugutsu Mawashi" on the floor in his own blood. They also discover plans for Siak operatives to deploy a micromachine virus in a terrorist attack as revenge in the event of Ka Ru-Ma's death. Batou is sent to intercept the Ma Shaba, the operative who received the micromachine virus, when he unexpectedly runs into the Major, who claims to be making an independent inquiry. The Major is attacked by Ma Shaba, who fears that she is the Puppeteer, from inside an armored vehicle that he believes protects his cyberbrain from hacking. However, before either Batou or the Major can apprehend him, he dies inside the vehicle as a result of an apparent cyberbrain attack. The Major takes a case of virus ampules and warns Batou to stay away from the Solid State Society before driving away. Batou does not immediately reveal to Section 9 that he encountered the Major, claiming instead that Ma Shaba attacked him, with no apparent provocation.

Section 9 develops a theory that the Puppeteer is a hacker surpassing wizard class who hacked into the Siak agents' cyberbrains and forced them to commit suicide. They also discover that Ka Ru-Ma's revenge plot was to disseminate the micromachine virus by infecting a number of children and releasing them into the public. Sixteen children were kidnapped for that purpose. Though medical examination showed that none had been infected with the virus, all their cyberbrains had been replaced, their memories partially erased and their personal IDs assigned to fake parents. In each case, the fake parents were "Kifu Aged" - bedridden elderly connected to the healthcare monitoring network, which takes care of their basic needs but results in its users becoming nearly comatose. Investigating the source of the children held by the Siaks, Section 9 discovers a discrepancy in the records of various government agencies that suggests that over 20,000 unreported child kidnappings had taken place over the last two years. Their investigation is halted by a sophisticated attack on their computer systems, which confirmed that someone was trying to cover up the massive number of missing children and suggested a much larger conspiracy than they were initially investigating, as the number of abductions exceeded what Ka Ru-Ma's organization could plausibly accomplish. Meanwhile, a case of virus ampules taken from Ma Shaba are left at a government building, leading Section 9 to believe that the Puppeteer is attempting to lead them into an investigation of the kidnappings. In fact, the ampules were left by the Major.

The Puppeteer hacks into Proto and the operators tending to the sixteen children rescued from the Siak operatives, and all of the children go missing. Because of this development, Batou tells Togusa about his encounter with the Major when he attempted to apprehend Ma Shaba, and voices his suspicion that the Major may be the Puppeteer. At the same time, Raj Poot, a Siak operative and elite sniper who was the head of Ka Ru-Ma's bodyguard, surfaces in Japan. Batou and Saito are dispatched to intercept him. They locate him but are discovered before their can apprehend him, forcing Poot and Saito to engage in a sniper duel in which Poot is incapacitated. In response to Batou's questioning, Poot reveals that he had received intelligence from a mole within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a representative named Munei Ito, that fingered his target as the mastermind of the assassination of Ka Ru-Ma. However, it comes out that Munei Ito himself was Poot's target. Batou suggests that Poot may have been set up by the Puppeteer. Poot agrees that this may have been the case, and says he would kill the Puppeteer, "were he only human". He claims that the Puppeteer is a child abduction infrastructure built into the Solid State, which he identifies as the healthcare monitoring network, and implies that the Japanese government is involved in its operation. Batou speculates that Ka Ru-Ma and his organization were killed because they discovered the infrastructure and attempted to use it for their own ends.

Meanwhile, Togusa tracks one of the sixteen children to the apartment of a Kifu Aged man connected to the health monitoring system. The man was the one named as the boy's guardian in the boy's altered personal ID. When Togusa picks the boy up, the man emerges from his seemingly comatose state to demand the return of the child, saying that he had named the child as his sole heir as he would rather leave his assets to the child than to the government after his death, and claiming that the child would have been abused if he were not placed in his care. He says that this is the will of the Solid State, and warns that if Togusa interferes with their enterprise he will become 'another suicide'. The man dies immediately afterward. Togusa gives the boy over to the authorities, pointing out the ID error. Afterward, he comes to the realization that had he not interfered the boy would have been passed on to social services and adopted after the death of his Kifu Aged guardian. This, he realizes, was the plan of the Solid State all along. He receives a phone call from his wife saying that his daughter has gone missing. He rushes home, cut off by someone from the GPS system. He assumes this is retaliation from the Solid State Society, but is confused, because his daughter doesn't have a cyberbrain, which would make her invulnerable to the Puppeteer's hacking. When he reaches home it turns out to be a false alarm, as his daughter was only at her friends' house. However, as he drives her to school, he receives a phone call from the Puppeteer stating that the Solid State will take his daughter away from him because he ignored their warning. His own cyberbrain is hacked over the phone.

Togusa, now controlled by the Puppeteer, drives his daughter to a cyberbrain implant hospital, trailed all the way by the Major. He is also being tracked down by Batou and Section 9, who recognized that he had been hacked. Togusa converses with the Puppeteer, who claims that members of the Solid Society, "only wish to utilize resources that have slipped through the net of society". Togusa realizes that this was how all of the children were abducted: The parents' cyberbrains were hacked, and the parents were made to personally escort their children during their cyberbrain replacement, as the procedure would not raise suspicion if the parents themselves took the children in and approved it. Afterwards, the parents' memories were altered to make them believe that they had lost the children. The Puppeteer offers Togusa the alternative of committing suicide rather than having his child abducted. Togusa accepts the alternative and attempts to kill himself just as Batou arrives, but the Major stops him before he can carry it out.

The Major explains that she stumbled across the case of the missing children while wandering alone through the net in the years since she left Section 9, and set up Togusa as bait to unmask the identity of the Puppeteer. She explains that the Puppeteer is a rhizome formed by the collective consciousness of the Kifu Aged when they connected together over a hub cyberbrain in the healthcare monitoring system. The hub cyberbrain itself is in constant flux within the rhizome. Several Tachikoma AIs - who somehow survived the events of Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG - assist the Major in locating the current location of the hub cyberbrain: the Seishomin Welfare Center, where the healthcare monitoring system is managed.

The Major temporarily rejoins Section 9 to help the investigation. They focus on Munei Ito, an ultra conservative member of the House of Representatives who advocates a racially pure Japan. They attempted to understand why he was Raj Poot's assassination target. The Major reveals that he was a part of the plan to assassinate Ka Ru-Ma. She explains that she had a contract with the Treaties Bureau, with which Munei has close ties, to carry out the assassination. By the time she got there, however, the Puppeteer had already killed him. Munei also wields de facto control over the Seishomin Welfare Center, which he and other politicians arranged as a front for an "elite training facility" - a brainwashing facility to develop new members of the "elite cadre". The Major speculates that Munei was targeted for elimination by the Puppeteer because his brainwashing facility interfered with the Solid State Society, which housed kidnapped children at Seishomin. Analyzing the building's systems and layout, Section 9 determines that Seishomin must have been built with the abduction infrastructure included from the beginning, which means that Kugetsu Mawashi must have been one of Seishomin's system designers. They decide to conduct a raid of the facility, despite the political consequences that such an unauthorized action would have, to prevent the Puppeteer from slipping away.

Section 9 penetrates Seishomin's significant defenses, with the help of the Tachikoma, who are returned to their physical bodies. Chief Aramaki confronts Munei Ito, who admits to taking money from the Kifu Aged to fund his "education" program. He justifies it by arguing that the Kifu Aged provide nothing for society but are exempt from taxation, so they must be made to pay back into the system in some way. However, he was unaware of the Solid State abduction system, believing the children in his program were orphans. A designer, Takaaki Koshiki, steps forward and claims responsibility for the Solid State system. He shoots himself in the head immediately afterward. The Major attempts to dive into his cyberbrain before his memories are lost, and enters a conversation with Koshiki.

Koshiki explains that his actions were motivated by several problems: The more than six million Kifu Aged, the rising unemployment rate and shrinking working population, the low birth rate, and the fact that thousands of children die needlessly each year as a result of abuse. The Solid State Society was his attempt to utilize the lost resources of the Kifu Aged and abused children. He altered the household registrations of children in high-risk homes to place them in the care of the Kifu Aged, giving the children new opportunities and giving the Kifu Aged a purpose in life, as well as the ability to leave a successor despite their lack of children of their own and prevent their assets from being seized by the state upon their death. The Kifu Aged readily agreed to participate in the plan. Koshiki further elaborated that he attempted to eliminate Munei because Munei intended to detain and brainwash the children to become part of the elite cadre, which was counterintuitive to the goals of the Solid State Society, which demands that the children have free will.

Koshiki then reveals his trap. He shot himself in the head only to entice the Major to connect to his cyberbrain, whereby he could hack into her mind. With his new control over the Major's cyberbrain, he causes her to perceive his face reforming to its original shape, the damage from the bullet wound reversing. The Major calls him an "arrogant, self-righteous ass", and asks him who he really is. He responds, "How many arrogant, self-righteous asses do you know?" He transforms his face through images of Batou, Togusa, the Laughing Man, Kazundo Gouda, Chief Aramaki, Hideo Kuze, and finally the Major herself. The scene then moves to Koshiki's body, in a case alongside various "puppet" bodies used by the Major throughout the film. He says that he was initially spread across many egos. However, he continues, the emergence of a collective consciousness acting autonomously results in a Solid State, which allows him to move into the society beyond as "the vanishing mediator".

The film's denouement sees Chief Aramaki and Togusa discussing the future of the abducted children, whose fates will likely be left in the hands of the justice system. The Seishomin building is being emptied. The Major is at Section 9's headquarters, recovering from the effects of merging so deeply with Kogutsu Mawashi's mind. Batou explains the story of the real Koshiki to the Major when she regains consciousness. Koshiki had gained special permission to work entirely from home via a cybernetic body, due to his skill in information technology. When he was brought into Munei's project, he built his Solid State Society into the system. However, he died of illness soon after that, and has actually been dead for two years. Because he never dealt personally with anyone, nobody noticed his death. His cybernetic body continued to act under the control of the Puppeteer. Though Batou ruminates on the possibilities that Koshiki uploaded his actual consciousness onto the network formed by the Kifu Aged, or that his cybernetic body was controlled by the subconscious will of the collective consciousness formed by the Kifu Aged, the actual identity of the Puppeteer remains a mystery. The Tachikoma kept a record of the Major's conversation with Koshiki, but insisted it had no value after Koshiki died. Batou's own memory of the conversation may have been altered.

The film ends with a direct allusion to the first movie, as the Major ruminates on her inability to bring herself to break free of the restraints placed upon her. As the shot pulls out to show the city, she repeats the famous line, "The net is vast and infinite."

[edit] Voice cast

[edit] Trivia

  • As part of the Nissan sponsorship, the movie features two concept cars designed by Nissan. The character Togusa drives a white Nissan's Sport Concept sports hatchback, and both Togusa and Aramaki travel in Nissan's 6 seater Infiniti Kuraza. [3]
  • Major Kusanagi's vehicle in the clinic scene is a modified Ferrari F430. Batou's car - also in the scene - is a Ford GT.
  • Nakamura from the first movie makes a very minor appearance.
  • The Major refers to two servant androids as Loki and Conan. A reference to the anime Meitantei Conan (Case Closed) and Matantei Loki: Ragnorok The Animation
  • The major named one of the Tachikoma Musashi, A gun wielding samurai from the anime Gundoh Musashi
  • Production I.G has ten studios numbered 1 to 10. Studio 9 was actually established for the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series and at that time Production I.G had only seven studios but the "Section 9" element was so strong that it became a decisive factor in the naming of the new structure.[4]
  • Major themes explored in the movie include:
Spoilers end here.

[edit] Theme Music

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ Production I.G. Official Stand Alone Complex website
  2. ^ Bandai press release
  3. ^ "Nissan gets animated" - Production I.G. Official Stand Alone Complex website
  4. ^ S.S.S. Behind the Scenes Part 1

[edit] External links

  Ghost in the Shell
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Manga: Ghost in the Shell • Ghost in the Shell 2: Man/Machine Interface • Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human Error Processor
Film series: Ghost in the Shell • Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence• Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. Solid State Society
Stand Alone Complex series: S.A.C. (Season 1) • S.A.C. 2nd GiG (Season 2) • S.A.C. Solid State Society (Movie) • Tachikomatic Days (Omake) • List of episodes
Novels: After the Long Goodbye • The Lost Memory • Revenge of the Cold Machines • White Maze
Video Games: Ghost in the Shell • Stand Alone Complex
Music: Megatech Body Co. • Stand Alone Complex O.S.T. • be Human • Stand Alone Complex O.S.T. 2 • Stand Alone Complex O.S.T. 3 • S.A.C. Solid State Society O.S.T.
Characters: Daisuke Aramaki • Azuma • Batou • Borma • Kazundo Gouda • Ishikawa • Yoko Kayabuki • Motoko Kusanagi • Hideo Kuze • Laughing Man • Pazu • Project 2501 • Proto • Saito • Togusa • Yano • Kugutsu Mawashi
Technology: Armed suit • Cyberbrain • Fuchikoma • Operator • Tachikoma • Think tank
Other: Public Security Section 9 • List of organizations • Philosophy of Ghost in the Shell • Seburo • New Port City • American Empire • Masamune Shirow
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