Dazzling ‘Ghost in the Shell’ lost in translation
Print Edition
“I’VE been having glitches,” Scarlett Johansson’s part-human, mostly cyborg robot said in “The Ghost in the Shell.” “It will pass.”
Rupert Sanders’ remake of Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 influential anime classic, from Masamune Shirow’s Japanese manga comics, is a dazzling dystopia. Yet like its sleek, cybernetic protagonist, it’s haunted by a fundamental defect — a bug in the system — that can’t be dispelled, that doesn’t pass, despite the considerable cyberpunk splendor of Sanders’ eye-popping visual feast. It’s the rare movie to earn its “Blade Runner” comparisons. But it also earns its controversy.
Oshii’s anime film — from which the Wachowskis plundered for “The Matrix” — was a moody, mysterious futuristic tale with striking imagery and a buzzing existential drone. Sanders (“Snow White and the Huntsman”), working from a script by Jamie Moss, William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, streamlines much of the tale and builds out the backstory with a more conventional narrative of self-discovery for the Major (Johansson), whose body (her “shell”) we see majestically assembled around a human brain (her “ghost”) in the opening credits.
The result doesn’t have the same eerie chill as the original, but preserving just a sliver of the hard edge to Oshii’s film would still make “The Ghost in the Shell” more extreme than most any other of today’s franchise hopefuls.
Yet casting Johansson in the lead role (earlier dubbed Major Motoko Kusanagi) in a quintessentially Japanese story makes for a perpetual disconnect “The Ghost in the Shell” can’t resolve, though it tries to. Her body may be a robotic artifice but the history of Hollywood whitewashing Asian characters is all too real.
Major is an asset, a weapon for the Hanka Corporation, and part of a counter-terrorism force that includes her partner Batou (Danish actor Pilou Asbaek) and is overseen by Chief Daisuke Aramaki (veteran Japanese actor and filmmaker Takeshi Kitano). They soon begin pursuit of a hacker named Kuze (Michael Pitt), and track him through the crime scenes and the data trail he leaves behind. The closer she gets, the more glitches begin obscuring the Major’s vision.
New Port City is the futuristic Tokyo-like setting, and though everyone is infused with robotic and digital enhancements, the Major is a one-of-a-kind hybrid. Feeling ever more removed from her “ghost,” she’s cut off from her memories.
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