Set in the near future, where the line between human and machine has faded so significantly that people are now knocking about with robotic limbs, internal organs and eyes, the plot follows Johansson’s Major, a cyborg supersoldier who investigates the suspicious occurrences surrounding her past. It’s an absolute visual feast, complete with enthralling action scenes and a strongly adapted plot that – yes, I’m daring to say it – more than justifies its creative choices. And it’s a shame, because Ghost in the Shell is far from the soulless Hollywood remake many expected and still claim it to be. There’s no Verhoeven political satire or black comedy, none of Besson’s sly exuberance or Ridley Scott’s lofty themes: just run-and-gun action through these gorgeous vistas.The subsequent backlash was completely understandable and pretty much killed any chance of the film receiving positive reviews across the board. Designer Jan Roelfs’s minutely-detailed concrete and neon dystopia, packed with Blade Runner-style bobbing 3D holograms, Total Recall-style nightclubs and RoboCop-style shootouts, starts to pall, however, once you realise that it’s not in the service of a bigger idea.
Rattling along at high speed, and in vertiginously swooping 3D, it’s nevertheless a thrill-a-minute ride (especially on an Imax screen, where the images have startling clarity). Yet underneath the relentlessly busy plotting lies a comparatively simple revenge story, rather than a twisty Matrix-style yarn. Skilful if derivative, in that ubiquitous CGI-heavy, Marvel Universe fashion, they vary from a brilliantly flashy gun-battle with deadly geisha-bots, and the soaring slo-mo water of a smackdown fight in a flooded plaza, to a confusing and overblown finale.Ĭonsistently elevating bullet-riddled spectacle over substance, the film’s treatment of its characters is essentially functional, using them as moving parts in the narrative’s well-oiled machine. They’re window-dressing, however, in a piece that is forever rushing to the next action sequence. Prone to deep pronouncements about Major’s soul, Ouelet provides the film’s few thoughtful moments. The film, again underlining her essential humanity, plants potential ‘family’ members around her, such as Juliette Binoche’s motherly engineer Dr Ouelet.
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There’s a bat squeak of attraction as she runs her hands over the freckled face of a human hooker, but she’s motivated by hunger for connection rather than carnality.Īs Major races to track down hacker and serial scientist-killer Kuze, Johansson gives her an affectless, preoccupied, slightly robotic air that’s animated only by her questioning eyes. A determinedly sexless Scarlett Johansson plunges through much of the film clad only in the Major’s nipple-less, flesh-coloured bodysuit, her curvy, shiny, stylised form recalling Metropolis (1927) but resembling a battling shop mannequin. Similarly, there’s little interest in questions of sexuality and gender around cyborgs. Compared with Westworld’s sophisticated examination of the sentience of synthetic beings, it looks frankly perfunctory. With an underlying unease at the idea of the Post-Human, the film barely touches on the interesting question of whether adulterations are an imposition or an evolution. In the brave new world of New Port City, where people are routinely adulterated with technology, the villains are those who sacrifice the human to the machine. Rather than curiosity at the prospect of a human-techno fusion, the film registers a palpable anxiety. Where Oshi’s version is most concerned with what Major will become, Sanders’s film is intrigued, in a Bourne-ish fashion, by how she came to be. Most audaciously, it chooses to treat Major’s creation as a superhero-style origin story. Far more interested in heavy-weapon duels than Cartesian dualism, the live-action version slims the Ghost in the Shell story down chiefly to its action elements. Its pick-and-mix approach even extends to some shot-for-shot homage to Oshi’s film, in an arresting ‘shelling’ scene opener showing the high-tech Frankenstein assembly of anti-terrorist cyborg-warrior Major around the brain of rescued refugee ‘Mira’.ĭiscarded, however, is Oshi’s energetic exploration of the philosophical questions raised by the existence of cyborgs.
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Melding the bustling techno-dystopia of Mamoru Oshi’s classic 1995 Japanimation version with plot elements from the 2002 Stand Alone Complex TV series, the film (like its weaponised cyborg heroine) is a glossy, expertly augmented hybrid. Kuze Michael Pitt (as Michael Carmen Pitt)
Aramaki Takeshi Kitano (as ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano)