Not only does the story not follow the original, but the attempt at presenting Motuku Kosanagi is even poorer. Forget that ScarJo in as far from anything Asian as you can get, or that she is beautiful and a decent actress; she is simply wrong for the part. That the producers/directors couldn't see this pretty much tells the whole story. Why is she wrong? I'll illustrate. Say you want to make Robin Hood. You need a good actor, popular, one that do great action and draw in crowds. You select Jackie Chan or Jet Li, both popular, excellent actors, action people, good looking, well able to do the job. Unless it is a comic film, no one would take it seriously. That's what they did with GITS & ScarJo. Beyond that, their other errors are even worse, since whatever they did to the presentation of ScarJo doesn't make her as interesting or visually sexy and powerful a figure as the animated versions of her previously; they actually made her less sexy! Which is hard to do with a beauty like her. You don't quite get that Major Kusanagi is a real person, a mind and a soul in a robotic shell, but still a person, which provides the essential duality of her character. It's like asking Shemp Moe and Larry to play the Three Musketeers - won't work as anything serious, which GITS is. Very! The story itself is a substantially different story than Masamune originally wrote, which I suppose would be okay if it were anything near as good, which it isn't. They lost, or totally ignored, the whole Asian-Japanese influence throughout the entire movie - it has a different feel entirely, and it is an essentially dumbed down version of the questions that the original story asks. They had a chance to present a popular Japanese story, revered around the world for almost 30 years, and then made something different which is only a shadow of the original. They'd have been much better off making another anime, in 3D cgi, and sticking closer to the story and Asian feel that was in the original.