The Wachowskis showed Ghost in the Shell to Joel Silver and said they wanted to do that for real, which is the origin story the film's producers have repeated since. The borrowings are visible shot for shot: falling green code down a screen, a diver entering water as an image of entering a network, the plug at the base of the skull, and the thermo-optical camouflage that becomes bullet-time's cousin. The larger inheritance is the question, which both films treat as a thriller premise rather than as philosophy: if the mind can be edited and the body is hardware, what is left that is you.
