Ghost In The Shell
I love Manga films and have done ever since I was in my teenage years. As you can imagine, then, my interest was piqued when I first heard that Paramount were going to make a live action version of one of my all-time classic favourites Ghost in the Shell. As with all Hollywood remakes, there was a healthy amount of scepticism around my initial excitement, because one of the things that attracted me to Manga initially wasn’t just the amazing animation which in a pre-CGI world made the visually impossible possible, but the plots that these crazy cartoons contained. Unlike Western narratives, they never seemed to over explain. They credited their viewer with enough intelligence and patience to forgo unnecessary exposition, and just dropped you in at the futuristic deep end. This made the viewing experience exciting and suspenseful, forcing you to pay attention and question what was happening. So would this big screen version capture the same sense of furtive joy that the original had me feeling all those years ago? More on that later, but first for those of you who are not familiar with the original, let me tell you more.
In a future cyber-world where most of the population is cybernetically augmented, federal agent Major Mira Killian (Scarlett Johanssen), herself a cyborg, hunts down the cyber-terrorist known as the Puppet Master. He’s using his cyber-skills to hack the brains of other cyborgs and cyborgy-types. She’s not alone, luckily, and on her team she’s got Chief Daisuke Aramaki (J-film legend Takeshi Kitano), and friend and fellow robo-hunter Batou (Pilou Asbæk). There are some other cyber-people that help as well, but these are the main ones so let’s move on. They don’t know why the Puppet Master is doing this, or even who he is, but he’s a bad motherboard doing bad things and he needs to be stopped. Cue the action, as Scar-Jo fights in slow-mo, jumps off buildings shouting YOLO, and quite often wears no-clo. That stands for no clothes. You heard it here first.
Visually it’s absolutely stunning, and doesn’t disappoint. The futuristic city setting, with its skyline of holographic advertising and gigantic buildings, is surprisingly faithful to the original anime, as are its inhabitants. It’s important to note that several of the key scenes happen in glorious broad daylight, as they also did in the original. This may seem quite the random observation, but hear me out, because this is where the cracks in the shell start to appear. This clean, bright setting now feels a bit out of place. In the anime, it helped to visually enhance an important difference in the mood of the movie that set it apart from other contemporary “dystopian” science fiction. Which was that it isn’t actually dystopian at all. The future wasn’t doomed because we’d become over reliant on technology, and the earth wasn’t dying. There was no fist-shaking “what have you done, you fools” moment when someone realised that by cybernetically enhancing the human race that we’d crucially erased what it was to be human, or paved the way for a judgment day style apocalypse. Sure, I’ll admit that the Gibson-esque brain hacker antagonist wouldn’t have gotten very far using a dial up modem and a hacked twitter account, but this technological villainy was never seen to outweigh the benefits of this human hybrid future. All hail the new flesh!
The problem with the wonderfully rendered scenes of a busy and bustling brightly lit neo-city is that this imagery isn’t fully compatible with the Hollywood 2.0 plot updates. And these are the problem. For example the newly added origin story for the Major millstones the character with an unnecessary and unwelcome victim label. Also the fact that both her and her sidekick Batou’s cybernetic upgrades now come as a direct result of tragedy, rather than a choice made simply because it’s an improvement on their weak, squidgy human bits, betrays the original films underlying sense of celebrating a world full of enhanced human possibility. Basically, they’ve spoilt it. Sadly, I feel like this version far too easily acquiesces instead to the same tired “technology is bad, and people that make technology are bad” message that audiences have seen way too many times already. I guess if you were being kind you could say that it’s now more accessible, but is that really a good thing? I mean, if I want something that looks good and doesn’t require me to think, I’ll just wait for the next Marvel movie.
In summary, whilst the shell of this movie remains true, it sadly no longer contains much more than the ghost of its predecessor, which is a shame. For a film about cyborgs, this could do with a bit more meat and bones on it. Its mind is willing, but its body is weak. I can do this all day: it's humanity is only skin deep… it’s like some sort of clockwork fruit… come with me if you want to live… attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… tears in the rain.
6/10
