Watch: ‘Ghost in the Shell’ Water Fight Sequence

I was one of the people, early on, who railed against the idea of making a Ghost In The Shell live action film. It wasn’t about the supposed whitewashing of the Major with the casting of Scarlet Johhansson, it was really just the fact that there’s no reason to mess with something that’s great unless you can improve it some how. At the end of the day, I’m sure the Rotten Tomatoes score for the film will reflect the feelings people have around the film more than the feelings they have about the actual movie. I think that is a shame. Who knows if the film will be objectively good? I don’t. I do have a hunch, however, that this film will be this generation’s visual equivalent of The Matrix. The special effects in this film are something that keeps pulling me back.

A big part of why the effects interest me is WETA, Peter Jackson’s production company/ SFX house. They did a lot of work on the film, especially on practical effects robots and practical effects for The Major herself. It would have been so easy for the studio to do this whole thing in CGI, but the depth created with practical effects keeps forcing me to look back to new coverage on the film, despite any furor that surrounds it.

Case in point, they’ve now released three new videos. The first one is a clip from the water fight scene that is in the trailer. After that, there are two trailers about how Director Rupert Sanders has worked to re-envision the world of Ghost in The Shell and another on how WETA built the practical effects for the Shelling sequence in the film.

Ghost In the Shell hits theaters on March 31.