Staring lazily at the edited Premiere file in front of me in my college TV station’s editing bay, I continued to wait for my friend to arrive to pick up his cell phone charger. It was late at night, I was alone, and the only sound was my project through my headphones. A haze set over me, and as I turned to the noise of my friend’s hurried foot steps, my mind and eyes seem to have to readjust to a world outside of the brightly lit screen. He called me a “life-saver” for keeping his power cord safe, and dashed back out of the room. I turned back to the bright LCD screen, and wondered “Are we finally reaching this point? Are we on the first step to becoming cyborgs? Relying on our network-linked devices for output and input and recharging?”
Many of these same questions were asked and analyzed by the late 80s manga (Japanese graphic novel) The Ghost in the Shell, and more infamously, its 1995 animated film adaptation. Inspired by the technologically advanced, but polluted and fading world of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell showed a world not too far from our own, where the internet has become a vast digital landscape that people can literally plug their brains into to connect. Our protagonist is Major Motoko Kusanagi, a human brain and spine hooked into an entirely synthetic shell resembling an adult woman. She is the first of her kind, and does not know who she was (including what gender or sex), or how her body ended up in such a damaged state. These blank spots matter little to the Major however, and instead she determines her dilema is how to define herself now; being more cybernetic than human. This does not stop her from being the top agent at Section 9, a secret government police force that takes on special cases that usually involve someone’s brain being hacked, or government officials being threatened. Philosophy on the line between human and machine, stories that play out like a cyberpunk procedural crime drama, a detailed and familiar future that serves as a warning to our own rapidly advancing technology, and a really well animated dog. Ghost in the Shell has the makings of at the very least a decent action film when run through the Hollywood machine.
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Unfortunately, Rupert Sander’s Ghost in the Shell, like every live-action America adaptation of a Japanese anime, completely misses the point of its source material, and what it substitutes instead is middling with frustrating moments of potencial. The general feeling is a Hollywood boardroom where they were presented the aspects that make Ghost in the Shell, and then chose tired clichés that were vaguely similar to these elements as substitutes, to not overtax american audiences.
The main character tries to figure out how to define herself? That sounds pretty complicated. Lets just make her want to learn her past, and use amnesia plotline #46.
Who was she? How about we reveal she was a fighter in a resistance fighting against an evil organization. What? That sounds like every movie ever made? Well, then make it look really pretty. They won’t care.
Despite depth of detail and visual creativity, in my experience it is never a good sign when the only quoted reviews you see for a movie refer to it as “visually stunning” or a “groundbreaking spectacle”. There are exceptions of course, but this tends to be given to a film with little else to offer, and Ghost in the Shell is no exception. Now, all this cynicism and negativity does not change one large positive; I believe this to be the best american anime adaptation. After everything this film dumbs down, sidesteps, and misinterprets (not to mention the whitewashing casting controversy that I will not go into here for the sheer breath of articles covering it), the execution is still better than others of its ilk. Scarlett Johansson is well casted as the Major, and the delivery and mannerisms of her performance show she had studied various iterations of the character and combined them to make hers, right down to the way she runs. It is a performance that deserved a better film. There are entire scenes, both in visuals and dialogue, that are ripped from the original animated film, and they are well executed thanks to the acting and quality of the special effects. These scenes also bare no purpose to the story that this film is trying to tell, and feel like a hollow way to appease fans. Pacing is slow, and not in the way that the original film was to built atmosphere, but because the film lacks energy. The loud women from a sorority in front of me in the theater, who clearly weren’t there because they were Ghost in the Shell fans, grew quiet and bored fast.
What is left is a film too dumbed down and generic to appeal to fans of its source material, and too dull and derivative to appeal to casual audiences. The moments that work show the promise of a solid sic-fi story, but are buried under clichés, and a general feeling of shallowness. It is a husk, a…no, not a ‘Ghost in the Shell’, because that implies a soul.
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