I hate to be a
naysayer, but...
Last night I watched the first four episodes.
Normally I love nonlinear, artistic stuff. Hoewver, Lain just seemed hackneyed, clichéd, with all the generic neo-anime signs (a network changing life and the meaning of reality a'la Ghost in the Shell, confused adolescents gaining new powers through their hormonal rushes a'la Akira, being fluffy and random for the sheer sake of being artistically disconnected and kind of forcing the issue, unlike, say, Key the Metal Idol)... I personally thought that Perfect Blue did a much better job of handling this storyline (and even though I've only seen the first four episodes, I can already tell where the whole thing is going).
Of course, I'm still going to watch the whole thing since I paid $80 for the whole series (because so many people so-highly recommended it), but during the first four episodes, I just couldn't help but MiST the whole thing as a defensive reflex.
It just seems trite, cliche, and banal. I'm sorry. I tried to like it. I'll continue to try to like it. But at this point, it hasn't given me anything to like.
That and they did such a half-assed job of the sound and voice acting and writing and direction. It was also very disappointing for a Pioneer release (given that their DVD treatment of Tenchi Muyo was a HELL of a lot better). I can live with them putting it only in stereo instead of dolby digital, but the menus just plain suck, and it goes straight into playing it after inserting the disk (a BIG no-no on things where people will likely want to choose the languages before starting it). The bitrate seems to be sufficiently-high, at least, but in general, both the series and the presentation of the series seem half-assed, at best.
If you want to see something which (IMNSHO) does a much better treatment of the subject matter, see Perfect Blue. It starts out coherent and draws you in (rather than starting out incoherent and being overly-artistic about it), it doesn't try to technobabble to explain stuff (and what they do explain actually makes sense, whereas Lain is FILLED with all sorts of techno-bullshit explanations for real-world stuff - a mortal sin in my book), and it doesn't dawdle, establishing and re-establishing stuff like Lain constantly does. (The first four episodes of Lain could have been done just as well, if not better, in probably 20 minutes, and roughly correspond with about the first 20 minutes of Perfect Blue.)
Maybe my attitude will change when I've seen more of it, but in the meantime, I'm just plain unimpressed.
* magenta braces for the XP pack-rape
Okay. The second disc of Lain is MUCH better. To answer peoples questions: I'm watching the DVD version, subbed of course (though the problem with Pioneer's DVD releases is they usually use the dubbed lipsynch; they did this with Tenchi too, and this can be very distracting), but I still found the voice acting in the first disc to be atrociously bad. With the second disc, the production quality is improving, though, and it IS diverging a lot from the Ghost in the Shell cliche (the evolution of Internet sentience), but is also grabbing more of the Akira cliche (kids' psychic powers being harnessed for
Evil).
To deal with the techno-bullshit, I just pretend it's happening in an alternate reality. The techno-bullshit I refer to is all the stuff with the psyche chips, the drug chip, and all the other techno-nonsense which happened in the first two episodes. Fortunately, after the establishing of the pseudo-technology has been gotten past, they're focusing less on trying to make it seem believable (which only ended up hurting it) and more on just driving the STORY.
This is a Good Thing.
Basically: okay. I spoke somewhat too soon in my criticism of Lain. I had only seen the first disc (which has the first four episodes). It's getting better. However, I did say repeatedly that I had only seen the first few episodes, that I wasn't quite giving up on it yet, and that I would come to a more educated judgement later. And as I've just said, it is getting better.
BTW, anyone who feels the need to point out the blatant references (such as "Wow, isn't that the old Be logo?" and the like) is kinda annoying. Same goes for the people trying to spoil it by pointing out what the plot's about - like I had said before, I ONLY WATCHED THE FIRST FEW EPISODES. PLEASE don't try to spell it out for me yet. I'm not a fucking moron or anything. 'kay?
Anyway. Since people seem to need things spelled out around here whenever I'm criticizing something they hold true and dear: I was very unimpressed by the first disc. Its production quality was pretty low, and it spent more time trying to bullshit about the technology than trying to make a compelling story (and what story it did advance seemed pretty cliche). The second disc is much better. Although it requires having watched the first disc for context, it has pretty much dropped the silly pretenses and gone on to something I can appreciate, though I'm still not quite ready to call it art.
After I've watched the other two discs, maybe I'll have elevated my opinion of it even more.
Oh, and another niggle: I never said that Ghost in the Shell was about a sentient network AI changing reality, just changing the meaning of reality. That's all that was in the first disc. The actual physical changes didn't come until the second disc.