In the opening of the 1995 movie, why did that one guy's head explode after he was shot?
Because they were delayed explosive rounds for taking out cyborgs — first embedding themselves through any subdermal plating and then exploding with enough force to guarantee the destruction of whatever organics they still have left in them.
In the marketplace, the thug that Batou is chasing (Corgi?) opens fire at Batou, and one person and one sign are taken out, rather cleanly. The problem is, he is using High-Velocity Bullets which explicitly tear the target to shreds. How did the thug cause so little damage opening fire with several such rounds in a packed marketplace? Shouldn't there have been Ludicrous Gibs?
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence:
In Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, exactly how did Batou and Togusa even know to go after Kim? (You know, the creepy, doll-obsessed hacker who'd been hacking Batou throughout the film.) I've watched the movie three times, and as far as I can tell, one minute they're traveling to the region where Locus Solus is headquartered (I was also a bit confused about the "Northern frontier" referred to, but presumably it's in the contested region between Japan and Russia), then there's a parade, and the next thing you know Batou's beating up old contacts to find Kim. Were we just supposed to assume the two were doing legwork during the parade that Oshii didn't care enough about to show us? (Not inconceivable, given Oshii's predilection for philosophical rumination over plot mechanics.) Or was Batou assuming that since Kim was one of the few hackers skilled enough to get past his protections and was in physical proximity to Locus Solus, he must be working with them? Or was there something else I missed?
As far as this troper was able to figure, Batou simply knew that Kim was in town, and wanted to ask his professional opinion about Locus Solus, since he's an expert, and presumably has plenty of contacts in the area. That's essentially what happens when they first meet. It's generally a good tactic to find out as much as possible about the situation when you're in a hostile territory, and any potentially friendly contact who can give you some briefing is a bonus. Kim just happened to be in cahoots with the company, and was trying to take out Batou by the orders of his superiors.
Also, at the end Batou said that he knew who was who tampered with his brain in the convenience store. He probably suspected it at least so he went to Kim to confirm.
Another for Innocence. Why were the 'gynoids' so tricked(pun intended) out? This probably falls under Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids, but its a little jarring how they were giving the Major and Batou trouble.
Well, take just about any robot nowadays (Asimo withstanding) and control it to kill someone, and you'll have difficulty taking it out unless you hit the control surfaces, pneumatic/electric lines, or gears/moving parts (and successfully dislodge/jam them). You can't just really fill it with holes and expect it to die. So, take a more sophisticated robot, designed to last many years without extensive overhauling, and tell it to attack, and, well, that's a problem. If all the systems have tertiary backups, you need to do a ton of damage to take it out. If you still think they'd be too namby-pamby, remember that in the mid-90's lots of kids lost hair after their parents had to rip "Baby Eats Your Hair When You Stick Your Hair Into Its Mouth And It Gets Caught In The Gears" off their heads. After bashing them with hammers.
Granted, there's that. But the gynoids were supposedly civilian models, as compared to combat cyborgs like the Major and Batou. I would think it would be little bit of overkill to design them so tough. After all, that's what spare parts are for.
These were incredibly expensive specialty items sold in secret to an elite clientele. That's probably the only sort of thing in this world, or the future, that will be "built like they used to"; planned obsolescence is actually a bad idea in this situation. And again, they weren't particularly tough — you can put a few rounds through a Tickle Me Elmo and it'll still work fine.
Batou was a legally powerful Cyborg on what amounted to a fancy police force. If he had been in a chassis designed for open warfare, he'd have looked more like one of those suits of powered armor. Being in Section 9 probably made getting that gun arm easier, though. Incidentally, didn't the Major show up by taking over a Gynoid?
That actually bothers me most — it's believable that a huge number of competently-built gynoids would be a problem for Batou, but why would any of them be built with the upper body strength to handle a big gun, as Kusanagi does? I'm even willing to stretch and accept that the lower body strength (enough to take off a dude's head with one kick!) is a structural necessity for real fancy bipedalism; I don't know what materials are involved, whatever. But if you're designing sex dolls that can fire assault weapons one-handed you pretty much deserve what you get.
Gynoids are presumably built to last a fair amount of time, and unlike humans their "organs" don't regenerate, so they'd be built with extra strength and structural integrity, allowing then to degrade for a longer amount of time before rigorous maintenance was needed.
There is also the possibility that the parts used for movement etc. were chosen by the principle of "okay, what is the cheapes thing we can put here that fills the specs" and as minaturized parts probably are more expensive/complicated to manufacture you could end up with a part more powerful than strictly needed.
I'm a little unclear on who is causing what to happen during the climax of Innocence. For starters, who released the gynoids in the Locus Solus ship and caused them to go berserk - Motoko, Locus Solus, or Kim? It seems to be implied that Kim's death triggers a "latent virus" in the security chief's cyberbrain that releases the gynoids and loads their combat software (why do they have this in the first place?) - presumably as a countermeasure in case Locus Solus ever betrayed him? It's kind of unclear. It seems unpikely that LS would have done it themselves, since the LS scientists all seem to be surprised by the gynoids' sudden release and several of tgeir own security personnel end up dead as a result. If Motoko was responsible, that seems like a hell of a lot of overkill just to keep LS distracted. So I'm pretty sure it was Kim, but again, that entire sequence is confusing (awesome, but confusing).
Kim's cyberbrain is locked during the final sequence. Togusa uses him as a glorified firewall. It's ambigious, but it seems that Motoko releases the gynoids in order to get access to one of them, but this causes the "virus" that makes them go out of control to activate as well, and they all go in a rampage. It seems that the scenario is the result of several different actions coming together to an unplanned catastrophe. Mr. Folkerson programmed the gynoids to become free of their restraints and go crazy, so that the authorities would be called to investigate, and the children would be rescued, but he didn't account in the possibility that someone would activate them all during the said rescue. Motoko needed one to infiltrate the ship from the inside, but she had to take the risk and activate them all to do it.
I'm really unclear on why the people who made the gynoids needed kidnapped children and had to ghost dub at all. Was there something special about these particular gynoids? If the move showed the characters interacting with one of these models and we saw that these gynoids were more human-like than a regular model, or if we heard repeatedly from talking with other people that this model of gynoid was more human-like than other models, then that would be an explanation why the ghost dubbing was necessary, but as neither of those things happen, we are left with no idea why these gynoids needed this special process to be made.
