Story
The story was based on the original Ghost in the Shell manga chapter, Robot Rondo, albeit heavily modified from the original story. The story begins in the year 2032.
Batou, originally partnered with Major Kusanagi, who disappeared at the end of the first film is now teamed with Togusa.
Public Security Section 9 investigates a cyborg-corporation called LOCUS SOLUS (from the novel of the same name by French author, Raymond Roussel), and its gynoids—androids made in the form of young women and used as sex dolls—that have killed eight people, having deliberately been tampered with in order to trigger a police investigation. The dolls possessed a "ghost" that was created by using an illegal method using a "ghost-dubbing" machine that produces "information-degraded, high-volume copies", but killing the original in the process. Young girls were kidnapped by the Yakuza and sold to LOCUS SOLUS for this process. Two of the girls conspire with a LOCUS SOLUS shipping inspector, named Volkerson, to cause the malfunctions, and thus draw official attention to their plight.
Major Motoko Kusanagi, the protagonist of Ghost in the Shell, is listed as missing, although government agents are still looking for her as she has confidential knowledge on Project 2501. In the film, Batou explains to Togusa that he helped the Major escape because the government only cared about what she knew, and not her as a person.
In the climax of the film, when Batou is being overwhelmed by Locus Solus guards and gynoids killing each other, Kusanagi and Batou are reunited in the middle of a firefight when she downloads a part of her consciousness into an empty gynoid. After "Kusanagi" has fulfilled her task, she reassures Batou that she'll always be with him right before the gynoid deactivates. Yet, victorious Batou, when confronted with one of the girls he saved, doesn't share her joy and sternly remarks that she and Volkerson had no regard for "innocent" dolls they doomed to have personalities ("ghosts"), kill people and finally die from the hands of the law.
Read more about this topic: Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence
Famous quotes containing the word story:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Come all you rounders if you want to hear
A story ‘bout a brave engineer;
Casey Jones, that was the rounder’s name
On a heavy eight-wheeler he rode to fame.”
—Unknown. Casey Jones (l. 1–4)
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)