The live action movie was terrible. The shoehorned love story was completely unnecessary and ruins the character development. It’s also a textbook example of whitewashing.

But the most egregious thing is that it completely misses the point of the original by making Motoko explicitly human. In the original, it is an open question whether Motoko is a human or an AI that believes itself to be human, which the antagonist AI continually questions her about. It must be this way for the plot to have any meaning. Without this central conflict around self-identity and self-knowledge the story is empty, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”