Plot
Major Motoko Kusanagi, a female cyborg and leader of Section 9's assault team, is assigned to capture an elusive hacker known as "The Puppet Master." Her team, Batou and Ishikawa, triangulates his activity to a garbage truck route, where a garbageman, who believes he is going through a divorce, thinks he is using a program he got from a sympathetic man in a bar to illegally ghost-hack his wife's mind and find his daughter. They arrest both men but they were also ghost hacked by the Puppet Master, who remains at large.
Soon after, a hacker triggers the assembly of a female cybernetic body at Megatech, who also supplies the cybernetic shells for Section 9, and the cyborg escapes into the city where it is struck by a truck. Section 9 gets the body to investigate, and they find that although the body is completely robotic and has no human brain cells, there seems to be the ghost of a human spirit within it...perhaps the Puppet Master himself. Kusanagi wants to 'dive in' to the body and contact the ghost, but before she can discover the truth, Section 9 is ambushed by Section 6, and the cyborg gets away.
They uncover a mysterious Project 2501, which was initiated before the appearance of the Puppet Master, although some officials claim that the project was created in order to capture the elusive hacker. Daisuke Aramaki, the head of Section 9, hints to Ishikawa that Project 2501, and the Puppet Master, were tools of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and his escape might lead to the revelation of secrets that would embarrass Section 6 and the ministry.
The getaway car carrying the Puppet Master meets up with another and they split off in different directions. Batou stops the original car, acting as a decoy, and Kusanagi follows the second one to an abandoned building. She goes in alone and is almost destroyed before Batou arrives with enough heavy weaponry to defeat the spider tank deployed to stop her. With Batou on guard Kusanagi is able to interface with the other cybernetic body and the Puppet Master introduces himself once again. He confirms that his consciousness evolved from Project 2501, a Section 6 program created to illegally hack ghosts for its own interests. But although he is sentient he is unable to reproduce or to die, unlike all other living organisms, and he asks Kusanagi to merge with him to create a new, single entity, allowing him to die and Kusanagi to live on with his ghost. Batou attempts to disconnect the dive, but The Puppet Master has also hacked him and prevents the disconnection.
Helicopters from Section 6 approach the building with orders to destroy everyone inside to cover up Project 2501. The Puppet Master blocks their targeting systems but when he initiates the merger with Kusanagi red dots appear on both bodies and Batou cannot protect them. The heads of both bodies and Batou's arm are blown off.
Kusanagi wakes at Batou's safehouse — in a child-sized cyborg body. Batou explains that her original shell was destroyed in the battle approximately 20 hours earlier; Nakamura is being questioned and the Foreign Minister resigned as a result of the debacle. The child-sized body was the best he could get on short notice on the black market. As she prepares to leave, she acknowledges that she is no longer Kusanagi nor is she the Puppet Master, but rather some combination of the two. Batou assures her he will always be there for her, and their code will be 2501. As she gazes out over the city and ponders the endless possibilities the future could bring.
Read more about this topic: Ghost In The Shell (film)
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—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
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Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
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—John Dryden (1631–1700)
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—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)