Director: Rupert Sanders
Writers: Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbæk, Takeshi Kitano, Juliette Binoche, Michael Pitt, Peter Ferdinando
Runtime: 107 mins.
2017
Ghost in the Shell is a thin movie, thinner than the white sheet that covers a spectral being. You suspect there is some substance beneath the surface, but once you remove the sheet and look at it directly you discover that there is nothing to be seen. The apparent substance was in truth the echoes of a long distant, watered down source material.
To be more specific about Ghost in the Shell's thinness: it's an adaptation of the then-ahead-of-its-time 1995 anime of the same name. The bare bones of the plot remains the same. Major (Scarlett Johansson) is a cyborg with a human brain. She's the centerpiece of a squad of variously-upgraded soldiers working for the Hanka corporation. They track down this cyber terrorist fellow Kuze (Michael Pitt) in order to assassinate him, but Major finds that he has answers to questions she's been asking about herself. In the original this interplay has a philosophical bent; in the new release, it's all profanely literal-minded.
The plot is decent, though you've seen its shape before. We're seeing a lot of stuff that has been explored deeper and better in the twenty-two years since the anime was released. That goes for the themes as well. Characters take moments here or there to manifest vague questions about what it means to be a human or a machine, but the inquiry is only window dressing. After staring off into the middle distance for a second or two, they return to the task at hand. The relationships are thinly sketched as well, ranging between aloof and trite. Even the action leaves something to be desired. The combat style presents a physical aesthetic with a lot of potential, but it comes in brief spurts. Competent but rarely satisfying.
As far as I can tell Ghost has two things going for it. It's got a Clint Mansell score. Mansell is one of my favorite composers, underexposed compared to giants like Giacchino, Elfman, Williams, and Zimmer. The score blends perfectly with the film's other trait worth your time--its visual landscape. The VFX team nearly singlehandedly carries this movie. Ghost in the Shell is a world of interface and advertisement, two ideas inextricably tied to the drama surrounding the main character, and two ideas that are fully embraced by the production team. New Port City is brimming with 3D hologram advertisements, sometimes familiar, sometimes indiscernible, always suffocating. It's an orgy of neon, a visual map of desire. Though the establishing shots are the highlight, the whole movie looks good (with the exception of some underlit environments). The opening scene of Major's birth is astounding, and perhaps the moment when the film most comes to life.
The movie is shaggy but vaguely entertaining throughout. Although it oozes missed potential, there are still some half-baked thrills to be had. Now, however, let's turn our attention to the Topic Du Jour. In a creative community that dramatically underrepresents Asian peoples in pop culture entertainment, Hollywood has released an adaptation of a famous anime with hardly any people of color in the cast. Since this film was announced, bad PR has plagued Ghost in the Shell. Yet one should not jump to conclusions without seeing the context of the thing itself. So how does the whitewashing play? Be wary that to discuss this I'll be employing SpOiLeRs.
My initial takeaway was that the problematic aspects weren't as bad as they could have been. In the end of the film, Major discovers that her memories are not lost; they're being blocked by the corporation that employs her. Not only that, but her old human self wasn't injured in an accident like they claimed. Rather, she and 90-odd others have been harvested for their brains. The added wrinkle is that the corporate bad guys are white dudes, and the victims are Japanese political activists. Scarlett Johansson's character was once a Japanese girl whose brain was stuffed into a white girl's body.
This struck me as a compelling meta-commentary on corporate Hollywood and whitewashing trends. Both Major and Kuze are obsessed with one question in particular: What did they take from me? The answer is an identity. Major's experience is a common one in our day and age: powerful white innovators grind up the bodies of powerless people of color for their own benefit. As a bonus commentary, the victims are replaced by white people who are alienated from their body and told to medicate so that they can't access their cultural memory. So it is that the military-industrial complex propagates.
All of that seemed compelling, but further thought has brought me around to the conclusion that I am being far too generous. All of that commentary is buried deep in the subtext. If the film was actually interested in engaging with that thematic material, which it certainly ought to have, it would have been foregrounded. Instead it's treated as a cheap plot reveal that ultimately has little bearing on Major, who has no problem continuing on in her white body once she gets her pesky history cleared up.
Maybe it's even more galling that the Ghost team got so close to some compelling and subversive commentary but didn't take the opportunity. At any rate, they tried and failed to have their cake and eat it too. Ghost in the Shell has some cool ideas floating around in its husk, but its soul is ultimately derivative in the laziest of ways.
1.5 / 5 BLOBS
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