Feels like a parody of the first one. The story is the same general "We have to catch this villain with mysterious motives" plotline that shows up in half of Oshii's movies, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Issue is, GitS and Patlabor 2 were a lot more interesting and I just watched both of those, and by comparison this just doesn't have the extra spice to make it stand out. Batou's the main character this time but he isn't nearly as interesting as the Major, and a solid 50% of the script is dedicated to quoting philosophy. You could ask Batou what he had for breakfast today and he'd probably give you a Bible verse followed by a Confucius quote, then that wailing music would suddenly start playing for 30 seconds or so. The first movie actually brought up some interesting ideas about what it means to be human and all that shit, but in this one everything's muddled by the seemingly random quotes getting thrown out constantly.
The animation is also a general downgrade, usually the CG stuff looks fine but there are some cases with like parade floats and birds where it looks really ugly. I'm sure most people would agree that a lot of the appeal of the original GitS is that it's cool. In this case, there is some stuff that's cool but it usually just feels like it's either a retread of cool stuff in the original or it's just medium-level cool. Medium-level cool can't hold a candle to high-level cool stuff like the optic camo fight at the start of GitS or that one scene where the guy's hands split apart and type really fast.
Well, I wouldn't call this a bad movie, the problem is just that the original basically does everything better and this one often feels like it's trying to channel the original but not doing a very good job of it.
