DIRECTED BY: Rupert Sanders
FEATURING: Scarlett Johansson, Takeshi “Beat” Kitano, Pilou Asbæk, Juliette Binoche
PLOT: While tracking down a terrorist, a cyborg cop discovers that her target may be connected to her own mysterious past.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Ghost in the Shell paints a vivid and sometimes disturbing vision of a future where power is consolidated in a handful of corporations and people are in thrall to robotics and body modifications. Some of the ideas remain surprising and unusual, but many more have been disseminated far and wide, leaving the story’s innovations dated and even tedious.
COMMENTS: The problem with being an innovator is that when others use and expand upon your innovations, you end up looking like you’re late to the party. Such is the position that Ghost in the Shell finds itself in; coming years after the original manga comic and a celebrated animé adaptation (which this reviewer has neither read nor seen), the new live-action film has to prove itself in a landscape that it has already influenced extensively. The result is that Ghost in the Shell, a slick-looking dystopian film interested in the loss of identity, is in the awkward position of being derivative of itself. The ad-dominated skyline of a neo-Hong Kong megalopolis is taken directly from Blade Runner. The visualization of the world as a wilderness of code references The Matrix. The incomplete android woman seems to shout-out Ex Machina. There are images that shock and amuse: a geisha robot who assumes the pose of a spider, a pair of flip-up eyes, an elaborate assembly line for building a humanoid robot shell. But too much of the film, while spectacularly realized, has a been-there, done-that vibe.
That puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of Scarlett Johansson, and she is a strong enough actress to pull off the internalized torment of a character who is intentionally devoid of personality. Considering the collection of archetypes she’s acting opposite (the loyal partner, the duplicitous maternal figure, the absurdly cartoonish villain who actually utters the line, “that’s the problem with the human heart”), she manages to make a real person out of a cypher who could easily have been little more than an ass-kicking sex object. However, given her previous turns as an alien attempting to decipher humanity, an operating system achieving sentience, and a party girl coming to grips with the untapped reaches of her own mind , it’s fair to argue that Johansson, like the movie she’s in, is revisiting old themes.
But it is impossible to talk about the actress without discussing the elephant in the room: based on the source material, her role is an Asian woman, which she is decidedly not. The whitewashing accusation is clearly an issue that resonates; the studio now admits that the controversy may have negatively impacted box office returns. It’s not clear-cut: Johansson’s performance does a lot to justify the studio’s trust in her, the history of race in manga is deeply complex, and fans in the story’s native Japan were completely nonplussed by the furor. Indeed, the new film itself stands as a kind of monument to the internationalization of Hollywood product. From the studios (American, Chinese) to the locations (Hong Kong, New Zealand) to the cast (American, Japanese, Danish, British, Singaporean, French, Romanian, Australian, Kurdish-Polish), Ghost in the Shell is aggressively global.
All this would be easier to dismiss if the adapters hadn’t written the controversy directly into the script. In this telling of the tale, the brain that is transferred into Johansson’s android body turns out to be that of a young Japanese woman. This makes the loss of identity palpable, in that this consciousness is transplanted with no respect to its sense of self, but that tragedy is terribly trivialized if you view the filmmakers as having done the same thing. The choice—whether through total cluelessness or extreme chutzpah—is a mortal blow to the story’s credibility.
Ultimately, the casting of Johansson just another example of the filmmakers trying to have it all. Her character is divorced from humanity, yet repeatedly sexualized. (In particular, in the wake of a bomb blast, the damage all seems to located primarily at her chest and genitals, meaning we are staring in the general vicinity of Johansson’s privates as a team of 3D printers reassemble her body.) It wants to be an action thriller with a brain, but the exploration of identity is entirely surface-level, while the action is perfunctory and punctuated by one-liners that fall flat. Beyond “let’s make a live-action version of Ghost in the Shell,” there’s not much of a reason for this movie, no greater vision. Since it doesn’t know what else it wants to be, it ends up being not very much at all.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Though I haven’t seen this version and maybe there’s something I’m missing—I confess, I’m with the nonplussed Japanese when it comes to the “whitewashing” controversy. If the Japanese remade Pulp Fiction, I can’t imagine anyone being upset when Asian actors were cast as Vincent and Jules. It is unfortunate that there aren’t a lot of great roles for Asian-American actresses in Hollywood, but race is really not essential to this character, and what aspiring actress can justifiably complain about being passed over for a mega-star like Johanssen? The whole furor seems like the unholiest of alliances between political correctness and fanboy culture. I also suspect Paramount is using the controversy as an excuse for disappointing box office, when the truth is that if they had made a kick-ass movie they would have done fine.
There are some good analysis about how at the least Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell is a distinctly Asian story, but I don’t remember them well now. Outside of moral reasons, though, Ghost in the Shell fans are unlikely to care much for a white hollywood superstar; fans of mainstream hollywood are unlikely to care much for Ghost in the Shell. I know people who don’t think it’s morally wrong, they just think it’s a really boring choice that makes them uninterested.
Also, I don’t think that the general Japanese opinion on it really matters since it’s a issue related to asian-american activism, not the majority of people in either country. Most people in the west don’t actually care much about the whitewashing in the first place, so comparing that to most of the people in the east isn’t really sound. People who aren’t studying social science are unlikely to realize almost all the nuances about a social issue like this, no matter where they are.
As for me personally it’s hard to really be bothered either way; anything stupid Hollywood does doesn’t stop the existence of the rest of the franchise, mostly composed of much more interesting content.
I’d care more about this movie if the videogame NIER AUTOMATA hadn’t just came out, which tells essentially the same story as Ghost in the Shell but 1 million times better. And it’s Made in Japan.
Personally, I find the controversy over the race of the protagonist much less interesting than the philosophical changes made by the adaptation, evident in both of their climaxes. In the 1995 film, the Puppetmaster proposes to Kusanagi the fusing of their ghosts. Kusanagi’s hesitation at becoming permanently different, losing her identity, is seen as childish by the Puppetmaster, and Kusanagi finally agrees. This evokes the Buddhist concept of Anatman, the denial of the existence of any unchangeable self, and posits that belief in an individual soul is part of the illusion that keeps Nirvana out of reach. In contrast, the 2017 film has Johansson never seriously consider that offer (which I felt was now out of place considering how the antagonist character was changed), and instead reconnects to the Japanese past that was stolen from her. This ending appeals to the individualism of American culture, where a person only discovers themselves when they defy the system trying to define them.
When I first encountered this, I felt that the heart of the film had been ripped out, but now I see it as just another manifestation of the difference between east and west.