Patlabor 2 features scenes of characters speaking at length, weighing, rationalizing, and speculating about the world and its history. Oshii is a thinker, and this is the most blatant way he shows it in his films and tries to share his thinking with an audience.
Dense and memorable words can easily distract from the other elements of a film. There are also many who will say that a film isn't supposed to have a "message"; such things would be better conveyed through nonfiction media. Many of those viewers will tell you a movie's effect comes not from its "ideas," but its moods or illusionism.
Films have many dimensions. We all know they can profoundly affect people's thinking and behavior. Some people deny art affects reality at all, but I don't even think those people really believe that. Still, it is true in some respect that "messages" or "ideas" don't have the significance a lot of people attribute to them. At best, the reception of a "message" expressed in a movie will be highly unpredictable and individualized, and therefore difficult to describe. It will not be at all clear what kind of impact the idea will have on life outside of the theater.
But propagating an message is not the only reason to include it in an artwork. An explanation of some idea can be part of the overall effect, a device to change the viewer's mood or direct their attention. This is something I think of when I see Mamoru Oshii's films and their lengthy scenes of characters discussing their core philosophical themes. Some people accuse Oshii of trying to be "profound." Maybe he is; but we can appreciate not only that Mamoru Oshii approached his artwork as a "thinker", but also his idea of the medium he works in. The dialogue's purpose is to drive an effect as much as it is to be didactic.
Patlabor is an anime and manga franchise about a section of the Tokyo police which uses mecha called "Labors." ("Patrol" + "Labor" = "Patlabor".) Oshii directed the first two Patlabor films. The first film feels like a film based on a TV series. You can sense that the characters have some shared history that isn't outright stated. It feels like an episode of something.
Patlabor 2 is different, closer to Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, and carrying much loftier ambitions. In an old Animage interview about this movie with Mamoru Oshii and Hayao Miyazaki, the TV series barely comes up. In this film, Japan is threatened by a mysterious insurgency. As the characters attempt to figure out its origins and motives, their worldviews are challenged and they discover the true scope of the material processes underlying the functioning of the whole city.
To paraphrase Oshii, Patlabor 2 is a film about the failed promises of the 20th Century. These include broad and specific, global and local promises. The film is partly responding to the Japan Self-Defense Force's overseas dispatches; it suggests that domestic peace depends on violence abroad.
It opens with a group of JSDF Labor pilots engaged in combat in a foreign country. We can see the electronic displays inside the Labors through which the pilots see their surroundings. The film shows us combat directly, but we understand the pilots see it through electric eyes. They still die. The last survivor exits his Labor near the ruins of Angkor Thom and silently observes them. He steps back from the screens and recordings and comes face-to-face with ancient history.
Like Antonioni's Red Desert or Curtis Harrington's The Four Elements, this is a film that treats industrial complexes like exotic ecosystems, in which you can sense that a massive hunk of steel is a fluid substance. Its atoms have flowed to where we see them and will end up somewhere else in the future. The process is driven by fire and bullets like we saw in the film's opening scene, which the film largely captures through electric eyes.
Other parts of the film depict the city. It adopts strange perspectives: at night, the contours of the street are invisible, only inferable from the arrangement of cars that look like ghost lights hanging in a void. The glass panes of skyscrapers become giant mirrors bearing distorted reflections. There are advertisements everywhere that seem oddly out of place. The city becomes something we can't take for granted. Its presence is strange, something that demands explanation. Because of this, and the way the film hones in on alternating characters, the impact of the insurgency creates immense tension.
The Patlabor series focuses on Section 2, Division 1, a Patlabor unit within the Tokyo Police. One of the main characters is the captain, Shinobu Nagumo. Patlabor 2 focuses largely on her rather than the other characters of Division 1, and goes into her history with Yukihito Tsuge, a former JSDF officer. Tsuge is the man we see at the beginning of the film who faces the Buddha at Angkor Thom after watching his unit die. He's the one responsible for the insurgency.
Once, Tsuge and Nagumo shared a common cause. By the time of Patlabor 2, he has become completely disillusioned. Nagumo has settled into her role with Division 1. Their meetings in the film are its most beautiful scenes. They're moments when the world is represented to us in images that aren't mediated through surveillance devices or some purpose of serving industrial production. But they don't last. Tsuge and Nagumo both come to perceive the world in the same alienated way the audience does. Tsuge's insurgency is his response, but it ultimately heads for a dead end, and Tsuge knows it. Nagumo presses on, but completely grasps Tsuge's drive.
Like Angel's Egg and Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor 2 shows us how credulity in a world of violence and chasing shadows is smashed. But it leaves us even more in the dark about where to go next than those films do. Instead, it gives us tragic, doomed intimacy: at the end of the film, Nagumo handcuffs Tsuge's wrist to her own, then grasps his hand.
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