Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 is a dead end of an adaptation

polygon.com:

Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 is a continuation of the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, but it is also, itself, an adaptation. Picking up a decade or so after the events of the series and its 2006 film Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex — Solid State Society, it offers familiar motifs, the same essential status quo, largely the same tone, and all the same vital characters. SAC_2045 claims a new title that reduces “Stand Alone Complex” to initialism. In this separation is the invitation to view SAC_2045 as an adaptation of an adaptation. It isn’t just “season 3” of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex; it’s a new life-form. This creates its essential problems: it is a lesser life-form, and it is starving to death for lack of inspiration and enough resources for its own production. SAC_2045 is too focused on its reproduction of Ghost in the Shell. It is critical only of Ghost in the Shell.

In making 2002’s Stand Alone Complex, director Kenji Kamiyama looked not only to Masamune Shirow’s original manga and Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 anime film, but to the inspirations and wider work of Shirow’s career. Watching Stand Alone Complex, one can feel the influence of The Professionals (known elsewhere as CI5), the 1977 British procedural referenced as a specific visual influence in the end notes of the manga. In the second season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, titled S.A.C. 2nd GIG, the antagonist Kuze is a deeper, softer, more textured version of Jean-Luc (called Ian Ruck in some versions), an antagonist of the 1999 anime Gundress, for which Shirow provided character and production designs. This approach gave Stand Alone Complex two things, seemingly contradictory: focus and breadth. But it’s