A streamlined and simplified, yet still visually appealing and engaging Hollywood take on the classic Japanese cyberpunk anime.
Following a near-fatal terrorist attack, Mira Killian (Scarlett Johansson) is transformed by Hanka Robotics scientists into a nearly full-body cyborg. Only her brain remains human. Her new body is “tuned” for special operations, and she joins Section 9, a government organization that combats particularly dangerous crimes committed using cyber technology. However, when Mira is assigned to investigate a certain Kuze (Michael Pitt), who remotely murders Hanka’s bosses by turning their own developments against them, she begins to suspect that the corporation is not as virtuous as it claims to be.
Scarlett Johansson received $10 million for portraying the main character.
The Original Anime’s Impact
In 1995, Japanese animators led by Mamoru Oshii released the full-length animated film “Ghost in the Shell.” While the film’s significance in the national cultural context is debatable, its international role is undeniable. It was a time when foreign viewers were flocking to Japanese animation, and “Ghost in the Shell” quickly became one of the “canonical” films that fans showed to skeptics. “Look, friends,” they’d say, “at the kind of cartoons the Japanese are making, while Disney tells childish tales about singing animals.”
Indeed, in contrast to harmless family animation, “Ghost in the Shell” was striking and impressive. It was a potent mix of political thriller, science fiction action, and philosophical cinema. In between powerful shootouts and frightening and enchanting visions of the near future, the film stretched an ideological thread from Shinto mythology to fashionable postmodern and posthumanist quests. The smarter and more educated the viewer, the more they could glean from Oshii’s creation, based on Masamune Shirow’s comics. And while some simply admired the multifaceted work, others were inspired by it. In particular, the Wachowski brothers’ “The Matrix” was created as an attempt to recreate and surpass the cyberpunk coolness of “Ghost in the Shell” in live-action cinema.
The Hollywood Adaptation
In the second half of the 2000s, Hollywood studio DreamWorks acquired the rights to create a remake of “Ghost in the Shell.” Work on this project was delayed, as the Americans encountered an obvious problem: the original is too complex for the “lowest common denominator” that Hollywood blockbusters are created for. Oshii’s film was not intended for a mass international audience. Hollywood, on the other hand, must work for it. Elitism is death to them.
As a result, the plot of “Ghost in the Shell” was significantly reinterpreted. While the main theme of the original was the technical evolution of humanity, expressed in the gradual convergence of cyborgized people and thinking artificial intelligences, Rupert Sanders’ film (the director of “Snow White and the Huntsman”) puts the malevolence of megacorporations, which control human destinies for their own benefit, at the forefront, something completely absent in Oshii’s work. Without going into spoilers, it can be said that the new “Ghost” is closer to “RoboCop” than to the Japanese animated film. This is a film with clearly defined heroes and villains, a clear morality, attempts to play on the audience’s emotional strings… The philosophy of Shirow and Oshii is relegated to the background, and it is significantly simplified.
At the same time, the film largely reproduces the scenic beauty of the previous “Ghost” and recreates its battle scenes, adding a few new ones that are much less effective and noticeably more banal. For those who know the original well, this creates a sense of disorientation. The film quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and walks like a duck, but it’s not a duck. That is, not a remake of “Ghost in the Shell,” but a new film.
Let’s give just one significant plot difference from the beginning of the production. While the Japanese film begins with the main character illegally eliminating a foreign diplomat (in Oshii’s film, Section 9, among other things, does the government’s “dirty work”), in the American film, in a visually similar episode, the heroine valiantly shoots robots and criminals attacking a Hanka manager. Do you feel the nuance? Hollywood morality cannot allow the main character to be a government-employed killer.
Unfortunately, Sanders was not able to successfully integrate everything that migrated from the previous film into the new narrative. For example, the heroine, as before, is called “Major,” but why would she hold a high rank? Oshii’s Major was a woman with a long military past. Sanders’ Major has only been in Section 9 for a year, and she has not served in the army before that. Even “Lieutenant” is too much for her. In essence, she should be considered a trainee, no matter how excellent an employee she is. Bureaucratic mills grind slowly.
Final Thoughts
What can be said about the film if we abstract away from its background? It’s a stylish and visually rich futuristic thriller, in which, however, there is little to praise for long. The bizarre, mesmerizing shots from the film’s trailers are mostly meaningless “dummies” (that is, fragments without much meaning), the acting is monotonous (as it is in Oshii’s film), the plot is typical for such narratives, the battle scenes in the context of current blockbusters are not striking… Not bad by genre standards, but far from a masterpiece.
The film was shot in Wellington (the capital of New Zealand) and Hong Kong. The design of the metropolis in the 1995 cartoon was inspired by Hong Kong.
Paradoxically, in a film that has a scene in which Scarlett Johansson undresses and jumps from a skyscraper (the heroine has a system built into her that makes her body invisible), a couple of episodes with Takeshi Kitano are best remembered. The Japanese veteran played the chief of Section 9, who in the new film, unlike Oshii’s cartoon, not only gives orders but also personally participates in the final action. Kitano is old, but he is still a superstar! The actor also shocks by speaking Japanese, while everyone else uses English.
Finally, let’s write what we think about the absence of Japanese actors in other main roles. When a scandal erupted in America over the fact that Johansson got a role that was originally Japanese (the heroine of Oshii’s film is named Motoko Kusanagi), no one remembered how Akira Kurosawa once turned the Scottish “Macbeth” into the Japanese “Throne of Blood” and how the Hollywood turned “Seven Samurai” into “The Magnificent Seven”. This is a normal phenomenon in the cultural communication of Japanese and Western creators. Why should Sanders have broken the tradition? In addition, Johansson’s Western physiognomy has a plot meaning in the context of the film… We can’t write more - it would be a spoiler.