Movie Reaction: Ghost in the Shell

Formula: (I, Robot / Her) * Lucy + Robocop

Some movies are a hard sell. On paper, everything looks right about it, but it still can't generate much excitement. That's how I feel about Ghost in the Shell. It has Scarlett Johansson, who is a legitimate movie star and can draw an audience. She proved with Lucy that she can carry an action movie without the rest of the Avengers crew. This film is adapted from a fairly popular Japanese property, which has a built-in fanbase. The style of the movie evokes the best of what the Wachowskis (The Matrix) and Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) among others have to offer. It even has a killer visual that can be used in all the trailers and TV spots: ScarJo revealing that full body suit, diving off the top of a building. Despite all this, it had a hard time convincing me that it was something to be excited about. "Hard sell" and "not excited about" are thoughts going into a movie though, not coming out of one. It wasn't until I got to seeing the movie, that I could determine there still wasn't much to be excited about.

I will give my standard warning now that I know nothing about the source material, so I don't particularly care what they "got wrong" or what "makes more sense if you know the manga". I'm looking at this movie. The movie is about Major Mira Killian (Johannson). She was a person, until every part of her body except for her brain was replaced with robotic parts. This makes her claim of being "human" questionable but makes her claim of being a super soldier unquestionable. She is the key piece to a special anti-terrorism task force. Someone is killing a group a researches who work for Hanka Robotics, the company who made Mira. While Mira and her team investigate and try to stop these killings, Mira learns there's something more nefarious going on with Hanka that she may be the center of.

Storywise, it's a familiar conspiracy story, with a helping of wrongly accused and on the run, and a dash of plucky misfits take on a large corporation. All things any movie fan knows well.

The movie leans heavily on the visuals as a selling point. Similar to the story though, at this point, it doesn't look very inventive. I assume it was at the time of the manga's release, but it seems like every 5 years for the last several decades, some director hires a few future theorists to come up with the same, sensory overload but grimy, "everything tied into a computer" view of the future (Blade Runner, Robocop, Total Recall, Minority Report, I, Robot, etc.). In a lot of ways, the movie reminds me of John Carter. John Carter of Mars was the original space opera, but by the time it finally became a film, the same thing had been done dozens of times before by works that it originally inspired. The Japanese style of Ghost in the Shell was a nice enough change. Not enough, but something, nonetheless.

Speaking of Japanese, let's talk about the whitewashing. I wasn't going to go into this too much, partly because I wasn't comparing this as an adaptation. I was even going to go as far as saying "as long as the movie is good, I don't really care about the casting". Then, in the movie, they point out that ScarJo was originally a Japanese girl before being put into her ScarJo body. That just seems strange to me. They literally point out that they made an Asian character white. Then they don't even explain why, in this Asian city, they would do that. Even a token attempt to explain that would put me at ease.

Regardless, ScarJo is good in this. I don't buy the internal conflict she's supposed to be going through. I think that is more on the script and direction than her though. She kicks ass well, which it what's most important. I don't recognize a lot of the cast, but they uniformly fill their roles as needed. Polou Asbaek gives me an "Action-star Eddie Izzard" vibe (Was that just me?). Michael Pitt's delivery in general reminds me of a glitchy robot (in a good way), so it's awful fitting that they cast him as a glitchy robot. It's always nice to see Juliette Binoche. Takeshi Kitano plays Aramaki. Either that actor is some Japanese screen icon or Aramaki is an incredibly beloved character (or both), because he gets the "legend treatment" in this. He's a bigger BAMF than ScarJo, it turns out, and gets to speak Japanese the whole time. I'm too lazy to look up which it is, but that's the kind of thing normally reserved for Harrison Ford showing up in Force Awakens or Tim Curry doing the narration in Rocky Horror Picture Show. Peter Ferdinando's Cutter is an aggressively forgettable antagonist.

Ghost in the Shell is a hard sell for what turn out to be justifiable reasons. The production design isn't as inspired as it once would've been. They appear to have overplayed their hand on the bankability of Scarlett Johansson: her name and a flesh-colored full body suit aren't enough to sell a movie without a clear hook*. The decision to make the movie PG-13 is becoming more of a liability as movies of its ilk are increasingly turning to R-rating. Personally, I was shocked to find out it was PG-13. It felt incongruent with the type of movie it was, like they were holding something back. Where last week, I was too close to appreciate Power Rangers, I feel like I was too distant and unfamiliar with Ghost in a Shell to appreciate it. It's fine, but mostly forgettable.

*Compared to the Lucy's advertising, I don't have a great idea of what to expect from this. By next year, I'm not sure I could pick this out of a lineup with Aeon Flux and Ultraviolet.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend