Hollywood genre film and Japanese anime aesthetics have long circled each-other in reciprocal but often wary admiration, punctuated by occasional outbreaks of honourable mutual inspiration and outright filching. This has been evinced in the many anime works taking direct inspiration from Blade Runner (1982) and in the anime edge imbued upon The Matrix (1999) and its children. Gateways between the two realms are guarded by fans whose affections trend sometimes towards antipathy for the opposite. Rupert Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell represents the first major attempt to directly transpose an anime classic into Hollywood blockbuster terms, adapting Mamoru Oshii’s classic 1995 adaptation of Shirow Masamune’s manga as a live-action, swaggering new chimera. Of all the major works in the anime canon, Ghost in the Shellprobably recommended itself because of its fixation, at once prurient and peculiarly, poetically brooding, on a female body. The body in question was originally that of the heroine Major Matoko Kusanagi, a cyborg warrior employed by the law enforcement organisation, known as Division 9, of an unnamed future city-state, in an age when just about everyone has adopted some kind of cybernetic enhancement.
Inevitably perhaps, and to the equally inevitable objection of some, Kusanagi is here redesignated as Major Mira Killian, and played by Scarlett Johansson. Johansson, who finally found her true leverage as a movie star playing action heroine for Marvel Studios and has since cleverly parleyed her mystique in such films as Under the Skin (2014) to slippery and admirable effect, here gains the kind of lead role she seems born for, lithe and confident in battle and yet stricken with a perpetual wince of implicit emotional crisis. For the most part, the adaptation is straightforward, harking fairly close not just to the story and structure but to the original film’s fascination with peculiar, near-subliminal textures to convey its themes of social and sensatory detachment and dysmorphia. The setting is a megalopolis of the near future where the social landscape has been formed thanks to unspoken calamities and waves of refugees. As opposed to Blade Runner’s sarcastic spin on early ‘80s fears of America’s colonisation by Japanese business might and Chinese population overflow, this Ghost in the Shell inverts this motif and presents itself as both metaphor and exemplar of local identity being broken down by a newly globalised, technologically enhanced way of seeing, thinking, and feeling. Whilst chasing down villains engaged in run-of-the-mill crimes like espionage and cyber terror, Killian and her team, including hulking right-hand-man Batou (Pilou Asbæk), encounter disturbing crimes signalling a strange new force is at loose in the city: a super-hacker who seems intent on targeting and destroying Hanka Robotics, the company that manufactures the most sophisticated cybernetic creations, including Killian’s very own body.
At the outset, a severely injured young woman is seen being wheeled into a Hanka facility and, under the careful guidance of genius biomechanic Ouelet (Juliette Binoche), is completely reconstructed into the form Killian now takes, in a sequence modelled on Oshii’s original but given a sense of tactile engagement unique to a live-action film. A new form of life, and techno-erotica, is synthesised. The Major is the most successful attempt at creating a true cyborg to date, but it soon proves she wasn’t the first. Director Sanders, whose last film Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) suggested his talent for opulent if derivative pictorial effects but never really cohered thanks to an underpowered story and uncertainty how far to push its revisionist mores, here goes to town creating this world of the future. His metropolis is a disorientating tangle of human and technical infrastructure ruled over by holographic advertising, already confusing reality enough as Killian keeps seeing flash visions of suppressed memories she can’t tell apart from coding glitches in her own digitised being. This Ghost in the Shell fleshes out aspects of the original film, like illustrating how Batou gains his signature trait, his eyes replaced by mechanical lenses after he’s blinded by an explosion. But the script, by Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, and Ehren Kruger, also revises the plotline to provide a stronger impetus for the Major’s personal stake in the unfolding madness, as well as more obvious villains and Ouelet playing a traditional tortured creator part.
The greater part of the distinctiveness of Oshii’s film, however, lay less in the nuts and bolts of its futuristic thriller storyline than in how it offered its future of alienation and technologically-enforced evolution without such clear and familiar generic figurations, as there even the apparent villain proved to in fact be indifferent rather than actively hateful in regards to human life, and motivated towards a different end entirely. Everything seemed to be moving according to its own, subterranean logic, humans playing games, believing they’re manipulating events, but really pushed along and increasingly bewildered by the speed of progress. That quality of the original also, however, contributed to its rather sparse and sputtering dramatic impetus, so it’s little wonder that Sanders and company have tried to beef it up on that level. Instead of a rogue artificial intelligence set on a new stage of evolution, this edition instead offers at the heart of the maze one of the misbegotten, Frankensteinian by-products of Ouelet and Kanda’s experiments, dubbed Kuze (Michael Pitt), the Major’s antagonist, mirror, and mate, courting her in a dance through dank labyrinths and scenes of Boschian enslavement to an electronic Mephisto, with a siren call to let slip gates of being and become pure entities after laying waste to the fleshbags. To their credit, Sanders and company retain, in a curter, less overtly philosophical but still consequential sense, the property’s uneasy obsession with isolation and distancing, contemplating the age of human identity being cut adrift from the body. Sanders nods in the direction of the fan service segues of Masamune’s manga, where the Major would regularly engage in lesbian prostitution, in a droll manner that ties it to the larger theme: Killian picks up a hooker and spends a night studying her in fascination, trying to imagine the sensations that she might once have felt.
How the film attempts to deal with its own cross-cultural mutt status is also clever and in a way enriches the themes inherited from Masamune and Oshii with a biting dash of meta-commentary. In a city created as a refugee mecca, where the flotsam of the world wash up, Killian believes herself to be the daughter of refugees who died in their attempts to reach this grimy sanctuary, whilst she was mortally injured, requiring her reconstruction. She takes a daily dose of medicine in the belief it keeps her brain from rejecting its shell, but learns eventually that it actually suppresses her memories, whereupon she starts to learn she and Kuze actually used to members of an anarchist front whose resistance to the state saw them scooped up and used as guinea pigs by Cutter and Ouelet. Thus Killian’s actual identity, as a Japanese woman, has been removed and placed into a more generic and pliable form. Identity has become mutable on many levels – national, psychological, physiological, artistic. Another great touch comes in the casting of Takeshi Kitano as the Division 9 boss, a boding and severe presence who eventually proves both his incorruptibility, and badass credentials, standing up to Cutter and backing the Major. The trouble is all these revisions leave Ghost in the Shell with more action and story but not quite offering enough of either to cut loose of its moorings. The film retains motifs like the Major’s delight in swimming but reshuffles them in consequence. The hunt for Kuze never quite feels urgent or thrilling, dressed up in a couple of well-done but fruitless shoot-outs. The villains, led by regulation besuited scumbag Cutter (Peter Ferdinando), are too bluntly and shallowly employed.
Actually, I couldn’t help but wish Kitano, with his restless humanism and gift for dry humour blended with that operatic brand of emotion that suits great action films, had directed this. Sanders lacks authentic wit and still doesn’t show much growth in independent conceptual imagination since Snow White and the Huntsman: his action scenes tend to be cramped and excessively staccato. Apart from Batou, the rest of Killian’s very multicultural team isn’t allowed much of a look-in. Still, Sanders’ eye is genuinely good, apparent in such fillips of strangeness as a room filled with humans used as a living internet by Kuze to hack the world without detection, and there’s a strong set-piece early where robotic, servile geishas turn hostile and start kidnapping hapless bigwigs whilst machine gun-wielding Yakuzas shoot shit up, and the Major leaps into the fray in her skin-tight, light-deflecting suit that makes her seem at once highly sexualised and yet also perversely embryo-like, a creature being born. This sequence does reveal the film’s shallower roots as another The Matrix riff but doing it, at least, in percussive, visually dynamic manner. This Ghost in the Shell doesn’t ramble on to an awkward, anticlimactic coda like Oshii’s film does, but it frustrates in another way by ending in more conventional style, leaving the Major facing a future not of transcendental possibility but more franchise-worthy adventures with a newly cleansed Division 9. No super-intelligence is born, but rather just another superhero. In this regard, for all the ingenuity that’s gone into this adaptation, it finally finishes up feeling just as divided against itself as the Major herself, an assemblage of pieces, each governed by a different impulse. And yet whilst it’s certainly an imperfect prototype, this Ghost in the Shell still scored points with me because it has some actual ambition, and some of the necessary cinematic muscle to back it up.
