The action is at least shot for clarity and doesn’t fall victim to overediting, but the mechanics of each slow-motion spectacle feel as rote and predictable as the narrative. And there’s a facile novelty in that, especially in such an expensive-looking production, and when so little else feels worthwhile – least of all how the various characters navigate these sequences. (His previous film was Snow White and the Huntsman, which was stale but at least looked great.) He reconstructs the anime’s big set-piece moments – the scurrying geishas, an invisible punch-up in an urban lagoon, the stomping arachnoid tank – with real finesse. And if Rupert Sanders has a real talent, it’s as a visualist. What’s left, in the absence of a compelling story to follow, is the thrill of seeing iconic visual beats transmuted into live-action. Ghost in the Shell’s own adaptation suffers because everything about it worth adapting has already been adapted. Hollywood has spent the last two decades grafting Ghost in the Shell’s various component parts onto every near-future dystopian sci-fi shindig released since. When the Wachowski’s pitched The Matrix, they declared that they wanted to create a “real” version of the anime. At this point, Ghost in the Shell is a victim of its own influence. Yes, you’ve probably figured out where this is going, and no, you don’t get any points for guessing that maybe Major has been told a few porkies about the origins of her brain, or that the soulless for-profit corporation might have something to do with the renegade master-hacker, Kuze (Michael Carmen Pitt), who’s nabbing the minds of Hanka scientists. Responsible for Major’s next-gen innards and skin-tight, formfitting bodysuit is the robotics corporation, Hanka, and it’s snarling CEO, Cutter (Peter Ferdinando). What was once Major Motoko Kusanagi is now Major Mira Killian (Scarlett Johansson), a cybernetic squad leader in the elite government counterterrorism unit, Section 9. It once again imagines the vaguely-Asian glass-and-steel metropolis of New Port City a soulless warren of grim slums and advertisement-festooned skyscrapers.
Sanders might have convincingly borrowed the aesthetic and anarchic spirit of Oshii’s work, but the exposition-heavy screenplay, by Jamie Moss, William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, fails to plumb it for anything meaningful. Ghost in the Shell ’17 wants to spoon-feed its audience the same cyberpunk meal, but never gives them anything to chew on.
At what point, it asked, does the soul converge with the system? Transhumanists call it the “singularity” – the hypothetical confluence of man and machine. It had things to say about the nature of humanity and the rapidly accelerating development of technology.
GHOST IN THE SHELL 1995 EXPLAINED CRACK
But crack open the body and there’s nothing there but fistfuls of wiring. Sanders’ film has an awfully pretty shell deliriously inventive production design buoyed by visual effects that look every cent of their $110 million price tag. The property suggests that “Ghosts” are the minds and souls of individuals, extracted and preserved for rehousing in “Shells” – sleek, state-of-the-art robotic bodies. I suppose there’s a thread of grim irony running through the neon hardwiring of Rupert Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell, a live-action reskinning of Mamoru Oshii’s seminal 1995 anime (itself adapted from Masamune Shirow’s cult 1989 manga).