I'm rewatching the first Patlabor movie at lunch time and I really do love it so much.
It's funny to me how the detective scenes feel like they're straight out of GitS, while the investigation Shinohara runs feels like an extended episode of the ova, complete with high budget gleeful face distortions when he gets mad.
There are a lot of moments in the TV show where Goto could just genuinely be a lazy ass who doesn't really care, but the film centers him by moving him off center. He's put everything together days, even weeks, ahead of everyone else, but he can't do anything about it. So it's not that he doesn't care, only that he moves slowly.
As a detective story it's intriguing, because it posits Goto is like Sherlock's brother Mycroft, never moving from his position in the back, either in his office or his squad car. But he has a kind of total understanding.
Meanwhile, that doesn't matter -- without Shinohara, Hige, even Noa, he'd have no ability to act on that information.
I also feel like a lot of the visuals imply Shinohara is getting teed up to replace Goto in a decade or so. He's as smart and as stubborn, but of course loud and rash, in apparently a similar way to "Goto the Razor" in the past. That's an idea easy enough to take from the plot itself, but Oshii keeps putting them against railings, in similar postures, similar hair colors. At one point we see only the backs of their heads, which differ only in that Shinohara has that customary young man anime haircut.