The classic anime makes its way to the big screen.
There's a lot that Ghost in the Shell could have done wrong to mess up this live-action adaptation of a beloved franchise. While there are still plenty of conversations to be had about the casting controversy surrounding the movie, Rupert Sanders' film is respectful and successful as an adaptation that strives to capture the same intellectual conversation about identity, ownership and consent that are presented in the source material.
The best thing Ghost in the Shell has going for it is that it doesn't strive to be a frame-for-frame remake of Mamoru Oshii's 1995 anime film. Instead, it draws on elements from the wealth of source material, from the manga to the TV series like Stand Alone Complex to, of course, the original film. In doing so, Sanders captures the Ghost in the Shell aesthetic and experience and is able to translate the tone for a modern audience.
In this take on the story, we meet the Major (Scarlett Johansson) when she is being brought in to get her cybernetic body (an excuse to get a glorious recreation of the shelling sequence, designed by Weta) and then jump to a year later when she is an active member of the government-run group Section 9. While on a mission, she encounters a mysterious terrorist hacker named Kuze (Michael Pitt) and begins to experience glitches that seem to hint at a bigger mystery surrounding her.
Johansson has a challenging role in Major, and she works hard to have her stand apart from her enhanced human counterparts. Johansson tries to make Major feel different from those around her, holding her body in a different way and walking with intent. As a cyborg, she's not concerned about how she looks or how people interpret her; she's all business. While not all of Johansson's physical choices work, it's clear what she was going for in Major's movements. Pitt's Kuze is similarly stylized to be set apart from his human and enhanced counterparts, and he presents an interesting foil for Major.
Of the supporting cast, Pilou Asbæk is the standout as Batou, Major's right-hand man in Section 9. He offers the warmth that Ghost in the Shell is sometimes lacking, and Asbæk brings a charisma to the character needed to serve as a counterpoint to Major; he often is the only one to bring out any softness in her. Though she is flanked by the Section 9 team, the majority of them play a minimal role, with only Batou, Aramaki (Beat Takeshi), Togusa (Chin Han) and Ladriya (Danusia Samal) getting much screentime. As much as Section 9 is often just set dressing, that team is a representation of the way Ghost in the Shell is supposed to be set in a more globalized futuristic world. Small touches like Aramaki always speaking to his team in Japanese are supposed to represent a world where technology has torn down most cultural barriers, which is an intriguing concept the movie could have pushed even further.
There is a good amount of interesting ideas like that presented, but Ghost in the Shell often dials itself back to simplicity. The villain could and should have had more depth to bring some of the movie's themes to fruition in the ending, and Major's struggles with identity didn't get the sort of emphatic conclusion they needed. The plodding second act tries to get deeper into these problems and glitches Major is contending with, and you feel every minute of its two-hour runtime.
The film's biggest problems lie in its third act, though. For all that it focuses on more intellectual themes, the film doesn't stick the landing and isn't clear on what its actual messaging is. Many of these unsubtle talking points show a lack of faith in the audience understanding what is going on, and the ending is a bit too cut and dry after some of the messier conversations it brings up. A lot of the third act's issues tie back to the movie explicitly revealing who Major was before her ghost was placed in her cyborg body. While the reveal has a lot of interesting connotations about what was taken from this person in the transition to a robotic body, Ghost in the Shell makes a mistake in not exploring them more. This reveal of her origin story should have tied back to the underlying themes of identity and consent more directly instead of letting the audience make of them what they will. The film seems to want the audience to draw its own conclusions about how to interpret the true evil at the heart of the story, but makes the mistake of not offering its own opinion.
Story problems aside, Ghost in the Shell is visually beautiful. It's bold science fiction, envisioning a fully developed futuristic Neo Tokyo-like New Port City that at once is faithful to the source material but also takes it one step farther. Comparisons to Blade Runner's immersive, dirty future are a compliment, and some of this movie's best scenes are simple world-building when Major and Batou are walking the city streets, catching up with vendors and feeding street dogs. This is a world that feels real and lived-in instead of cold and unpopulated as some other science fiction films have struggled with depicting.
The most stunning shots in the movie are the sweeping landscapes of New Port City, with massive CG ads popping off the buildings. But the visual beauty of Ghost in the Shell goes deeper than that, to the framing of certain shots to be immediately reminiscent of the gorgeous cinematography of Oshii's 1995 film and translating the impossible-to-recreate fight sequences to live-action. And while it's hard to top Kenji Kawai's soundtrack for the original film, this new scorecomplements the adaptation while also paying the proper amount of homage to Kawai's work.
In that way, Ghost in the Shell largely succeeds as an adaptation. Going in, I felt that the biggest way Ghost could miss the point was if in its translation of an iconic scene like the fight against the Tachikoma at the end of the 1995 film it focused on the battle instead of what comes after, which is the actual climax of the film. Having seen the live-action adaptation, it's clear Sanders understood that it's not the cyberpunk aesthetic, cyborg enhancements or cool battle scenes that set this franchise apart, and the climax of this movie is similarly introspective. But as much as Ghost in the Shell understands and weaves big concepts through its narrative, the fact it can't fully execute these ideas in the third act lessens its impact as a take on this franchise that otherwise can stand on its own.
The Verdict
As an adaptation of an iconic and beloved source material, Ghost in the Shell understands what makes this franchise special and does a good job translating that to the big screen. It looks great and doesn't feel like it's just copying the anime and manga's aesthetic, instead capturing what makes them stand apart to begin with. The story stumbles in the third act and doesn't fully bring its talking points to a satisfying conclusion, but Ghost in the Shell's successes outshadow its problems.
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