Ghost in the Shell (2017)

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

 3/10

Starring

Scarlett Johansson

Michael Pitt

Pilou Asbæk

Chin Han

Juliette Binoche

 

Directed by Rupert Sanders

 

If you’ve seen the Ghost in the Shell (1995) anime movie or the Stand Alone Complex (S.A.C.) series, you get the basic idea that there are so many ways they could have spun this. The whole Ghost in the Shell story is very complex, easy to follow, and the certain gaps make it fun, mysterious, and captivating.

The movie starts differently from the anime, S.A.C. series, or manga. In this film, there is very little introduction to Major’s (Scarlett Johansson) life before joining Section 9. Then we get some other introductions to a few of the characters. All of this is unneeded, but I guess they wanted to give the movie a little depth.

The underlying plot is similar between the anime, film, and manga. It’s about a person called the Puppeteer. The whole movie is set in the future, where a huge majority of humans have had some cybernetic upgrades done and are all connected to the internet by default. Some have had changes to their limbs, others to their organs, and some are more robotic than human with only a few organs left. The Major is one of those who only has her brain left in her cybernetic body. In this movie, she’s like the first to actually have this done. The difference here, compared to the anime and manga, is that the Major is set up as an experiment commissioned by Section 9 for an adult female. While in the original plot, Major had the whole prosthetics done to her body since she was 6 years old.

In Section 9, they are dealing with a case involving a hacker tagged "the Puppeteer," who is hacking into humans and using them to commit murders. It was noticed that those murders are not random, and the people being killed are actually members of a unit that commissioned and worked on a certain project.

The Major is somehow connected, and the hacker wants her to know and meet with her.

The movie has a pacing problem, which is intensified by its sudden need to add some self-reflection traits to Major’s personality—something not present in the anime. I guess the movie dedicating itself to giving us backstory on Major’s body and Batou’s eyes was, to me, a bore and an unneeded presence that further added to the boring state of this movie.

Concerning the supposed whitewashing of the movie’s characters, I don’t object to any movie getting a remake and becoming Americanized along the way, just as long as the movie is done well.

Many others objected greatly to the whitewashing of this movie (they have their strong points), but I felt the whitewashing was the least of this movie’s problems. The major challenge of this movie is that it’s very boring.

There is no need to see this film. The anime Ghost in the Shell (1995) or the Stand Alone Complex (S.A.C.) series do better justice.