Ghost in the Shell (2017) Live Action Movie Review
It was inevitable that we would eventually find ourselves here. After spending months delving deeply into the voluminous Ghost in the Shell franchise, I have almost exhausted everything there is to read or watch — except for the 2017 Hollywood movie adaptation. There’s a reason I’ve put off reviewing this one for so long: when I first saw it on release, I hated it. It’s rare for me to have such a visceral reaction to a piece of media — sure, I’ll dislike bad things a lot, but with Ghost in the Shell 2017, I felt insulted. Revisiting it now, seven years later, in the light of my recent experiences with everything else the franchise has to offer, have my feelings changed?
Spoiler — no.
I really really wanted to like this film. I can’t believe that the (multiple) writers, director and actors involved didn’t at least have some love and respect for the original. Apart from the promise of great quantities of money, why else choose to be involved in the adaptation of a (relatively) obscure Japanese anime/manga? In multiple places, the movie shows what I think is supposed to be reverence for several iconic scenes from Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 animated film version. There are even direct visual callbacks to Oshii’s theatrical sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and integrated plot material from Kenji Kamiyama’s excellent 2002 Stand Alone Complex TV show (specifically 2nd Gig). Why else feature Bassett Hounds so frequently, if not to homage Oshii? Even Kenji Kawaii’s iconic theme is used over the ending credits in an attempt to lend this version legitimacy.
Unfortunately, all director Rupert Sanders and his trio of writers manage to achieve by slavishly copying these components is to rob them of all power and meaning. If Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) is a meaty, satisfying Five Guys burger, then Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell (2017) is a bland, over-processed, committee-sanitised McDonalds burger. It looks decent enough on the surface, but bite any deeper and it’s deeply unsatisfying, leaving you feeling empty and slightly queasy.
Take the central character “Mira Killian”, for a prime example. She’s modelled on the iconic face of the franchise, Major Motoko Kusanagi. Her portrayals differ across different GitS media, and that’s fine. It’s perfectly acceptable for various writers and directors to interpret her differently. What’s very important about her is that she is strong, capable, dependable, demanding of respect, yet despite her artificial body she remains identifiably human, with flaws and emotions. Although she’s formidable, she’s not invincible. She gets beaten up, her body breaks, but her spirit never does, despite her occasional existential crises. Motoko Kusanagi is not a victim.
Ghost in the Shell (2017) suffers from what I’ll dub a terminal case of Hollywood Originitis. God forbid we have a major Hollywood science fiction film that allows any of its cast to be at all mysterious, to have obfuscated motivations, to have their past history and formative experiences unexplored. When it comes to character origins, with Hollywood movies, it seems MORE IS MORE, when such over-explanations only harm the characters and make them laughable, pathetic even, when they should be cool and interesting.
Shirow’s original manga version of Major Kusanagi was a fiery hyper-competent soldier with a gremlin-like sense of humour, prone to random philosophising on one hand, and cyber-hacking her teammates to force them to punch themselves on the other. Oshii’s version stripped back the humour to portray a serious, troubled soldier with deep-seated identity worries, who sets out to resolve them. In neither of these instances do we learn anything of Kusanagi’s past, other than she is a full-body cyborg whose only original organic constituent is her brain — and even that’s up for debate. By the end of both stories, via merging with the non-human intelligence “The Puppeteer”, she discovers her purpose and calling, and transcends physical humanity to become something more.
Kamiyama’s Stand Alone Complex was pitched as Ghost in the Shell, but if The Puppeteer had never existed. Over its original 52 episodes and sequel movie, we get to know Kusanagi in far more detail. We learn (after well over 30 episodes) that at the age of six, following a plane crash in which both parents die, she is saved only by complete cyberisation of her body. Her incredible affinity for technology and hacking is due to spending twenty or more years learning how to navigate the world via her cyberbrain. Her incredible military acumen comes from years spent abroad, fighting in the Asian theatre of the fourth world war, during which she met at least some of her now Public Security Section 9 comrades. Kusanagi’s abilities are hard-won through trial and suffering — but she’s not a victim, and her backstory is divulged naturally, only adding to her character.
2013’s Ghost in the Shell: Arise changed things up a little. This version of Major Kusanagi is younger, less sure of herself, and at least initially is in thrall to a Japanese military organisation that claims to own her, body and soul. This version of Kusanagi was cyberised as a newborn baby, having been ripped from her deceased mother’s womb, and her brain placed in a synthetic infant shell. Arise starts the regrettable trend of portraying Kusanagi as something of a victim — at least in its first episode, anyway. I can almost forgive them, as they wanted to portray a more vulnerable, less formidable version of Kusanagi.
Ghost in the Shell 2017 takes this evolution of Kusanagi’s core identity too far. In this version, “Mira Killian” is a memory-less doll, a confused and empty human brain who has been placed into a synthetic shell by the comically evil Hanka Robotics, who loan her to Section 9 as an anti-terrorist soldier. During the movie’s main plot, Mira has only been active for a year, yet somehow everyone calls her “Major”. This makes absolutely no sense. In every other version, Kusanagi’s called “Major” because she actually is one. She’s got years of military service, and earned her promotions. Not so Mira.
Much like Kusanagi, Mira doubts her humanity — but not for the same reasons. She doubts herself because she’s a victim of an obviously corrupt tech company. In previous iterations, Kusanagi’s identity issues are primarily internal. They’re not because of interference from an external source. In 2017’s movie, she doubts her humanity because of what others have done to her. She lacks agency and character because she’s essentially an empty person, and Scarlett Johansson’s almost expressionless portrayal reflects this. In Oshii’s 1995 film, it was fine for the anime Major to appear expressionless and doll-like, in live-action film… not so much. It’s really hard to feel any empathy or interest towards Johansson’s Mira because it seems like she’s merely cosplaying as Major Kusanagi, without truly finding the heart of the character.
Mira’s perpetual victimhood is epitomised in one of the later scenes where she lies immobilised in the lab while one-note villain Cutter (more on him later) forces Juliette Binoche’s conflicted Dr Ouelet to terminate her. Mira lies there, teary eyed, stating “My name is Mira Killian and I do not consent to the removal of my memories.” Previously it had been established that whenever she visits the Hanka labs for check-ups that they can read and edit her memories at will, as long as she consents. Dr Ouelet whispers “We never needed your consent.” Now back in 2017, attending the movie with my daughter and son, we found this line so unintentionally hilarious it has become a longstanding meme in my household.
“Hey dad, why did you take my chocolate?”
“We never needed your consent.”
Or:
“Hey, brother, why did you steal my Pokemon game?”
“We never needed your consent.”
Or:
“Stop pulling my hair! That really hurts!”
“We never needed your consent.”
You get the idea.
This blatant disregard by others of Mira’s personhood, that although has some precedence in the franchise, is so overused, that it succeeds only in making her victimhood the central aspect of her identity. She’s only motivated to hunt down and kill terrorists because of the false memories they’ve given her — not because of an innate sense of justice, or wartime experiences. She’s not incredibly skilled in combat due to many years of self-directed training, but because they made her that way. It robs Mira’s character of all agency, and frankly makes her rather dull and pathetic. This massive, ill-advised change to her character makes this feel less like a Ghost in the Shell film and more like Generic Hollywood Sci-fi #384 — Evil Megacorp Edition.
It’s at this point I’d like to address the rather thorny issue of Scarlett Johansson’s casting as “Major”, which will involve significant spoilers. Later in the film, it is confirmed that Mira’s real name is actually Motoko Kusanagi, like in the manga and anime. We even see her original Japanese face in a couple of brief scenes. This version of Motoko was a troubled runaway with a strained relationship with her single mother. This Motoko spent most of her time in “the Lawless District” with her boyfriend, “protesting advanced cyberisation technology” or something lame like that. Obviously she’s randomly captured by the Evil Hanka Robotics People and she’s forced to endure cyberisation (did you notice the irony in that, did you? Did you?), has her memories suppressed and replaced, and becomes “the first of her kind”, as Hanka apparently intends for everyone in the world to undergo total body cyberisation, for reasons not explained. Maybe just for Evil.
So there’s a few issues here — for one, making Kusanagi a lame runaway anti-technology protester only makes her more annoying. The other is that they actually cast a Japanese person as the Japanese character Motoko Kusanagi, but then had her spend most of the movie being played by a person of European descent. That’s more than a little bit Yikes, though there is some story precedent here. I’m going to be somewhat understanding when it comes to the film makers here. For one, let’s look at the money aspect. This film only got made because of the star power attached to it. Without a recognisable white actress like Johansson in the role, I doubt any Hollywood exec would have greenlit the enormous budget. I’m not defending this, it’s just the way the world currently works. It’s frustrating, but I’m not going to blame the director or writers for it.
The other, more nuanced answer is the nature of the world in-story. In the manga and anime, it’s stated multiple times over that Kusanagi’s body is a “generic, off-the-shelf” model. In the 1995 movie, Kusanagi gets noticeably distressed seeing other women wearing the same shell as her, it only adds to her identity crisis. I expect Hanka Robotics, apparently run as it is by a bunch of white Europeans, view the white European body as “default for humanity.” It’s entirely unsurprising then, that in their hubris, they would put captured Asian people’s brains into replacement synthetic “white” bodies. They do the same with Kusanagi’s male counterpart, Hideo Kuze. It could be viewed as an allegory for a kind of subconscious white supremacy that exists amongst amoral billionaires. Manga author Masamune Shirow himself is on record stating that he drew his original Kusanagi in a white person-modelled cyber body, and for this reason he approved of Johansson’s casting as the default body produced by Hanka. I think this makes narrative and thematic sense, and it stops me from getting too irritated by Johansson’s casting. She actually does look the part of the Major in many places.
In terms of the wider cast, the film does a mixed job. Pilou Asbæk is Batou as far as I’m concerned. He was an excellent choice to play the Major’s close confidante, friend and colleague. They have just enough almost-romantic-but-not-quite tension, and it’s very obvious they care deeply for one another. His look is only complete after his eyes get destroyed and replaced with his iconic protruding lenses, though again I rolled my eyes at why his “origin story” had to be included here. In every other version, Batou is an ex-military “Ranger”, all of whom have their eyes replaced in such a way as part of their role. Including his injuries and replacement here feels like infantilisation of the viewer — he should have started off with his eye lenses, and it should probably have gone unexplained. I wish Hollywood writers would stop treating adult audiences like children who need everything spelled out for them.
“Beat” Takeshi Kitano as Section 9 boss Daisuke Aramaki is certainly a choice, and it’s bizarre how he spends the entire film speaking Japanese, while everyone else just nods, smiles, and replies in English. It’s unintentionally hilarious, and makes no sense whatsoever. Did he only agree to sign on with the condition he didn’t have to speak a word of English? Also, was he perhaps the only Japanese actor the producers had heard of, so he got the role by default? The way he plays the character doesn’t evoke the other versions of Aramaki at all to me, in fact his overall presence/charisma in the film is negligible.
It also seems weird that only a minority of the Japanese Defense Department’s Public Security Section 9 are actually Japanese. Batou’s Pilou Asbæk is Danish, the random new female character Ladriya is English, the bearded guy who I think is probably meant to be Ishikawa is played by a very non-Asian-looking Australian, and other than Kitano as Aramaki, only Chin Han, the actor playing Togusa looks Asian (he is in fact from Singapore). Saito and Borma have actors credited for them (Japanese and New Zealander retrospectively), but they’re barely visible in the finished movie. Poor Pazu is nowhere to be seen.
For a famously traditional, conservative and xenophobic country, I can’t imagine the Japanese government employing such a multicultural collection of people in their highest echelons of public security. It feels like Hollywood-enforced fake diversity tokenistic representation, another form of executives talking down to their audience, rather than the writers and director actually considering coherent, logical worldbuilding. Ghost in the Shell is a story supposedly set in Japan, featuring Japanese characters. Is it too much to expect some realism, or at least consideration there?
I’m all for casting diversity in film-making, but at least let it make sense, rather than casting merely to fit some kind of arbitrary quota. People’s appearances, cultures and origins aren’t interchangeable like cyberbodies. It’s disrespectful to the source material and its country of origin, it’s disrespectful to the actors, and it’s disrespectful to the audience. It would be like watching Black Panther, but apart from a couple of Black African people, all of Wakanda’s highest class of warriors are white Americans, or Maoris, or Inuit, or East Asians.
Cultural context is important! This kind of stuff doesn’t come across as inclusive — instead it looks like unthinking one-size-should-fit-all-and-that-size-is-American cultural imperialism. It’s established in the film that Major is the first total-conversion cyborg body-user, so they wrote themselves out of the excuse that “everyone’s bodies are artificial, therefore ethnic origin is unimportant”. I’d call this ill-advised phenomenon “diversity-washing”. Recasting a bunch of characters of underrepresented (in Hollywood) ethnicities isn’t a good look, if anything it’s brainless, insensitive, stupid, and unnecessary, demonstrating a deep misunderstanding, or possibly even callous misrepresentation of the source material.
Outside of Section 9, the rest of the cast are something of a mixed bag. One-note villain Cutter (Peter Ferdinando) does not fit in the Ghost in the Shell world. At all. His desperately poor character writing betrays a total misunderstanding of the kind of faceless corporate villainy normally present in the franchise’s various iterations. GitS’ corporate villains are usually banal, they don’t get directly involved with the operation of their schemes, and they generally don’t interact with, or become personally involved with, the main characters. Cutter’s eventual one-man war against the Major is ridiculous and out-of-place — he’s a forgettable and generic villain of the type who exists only in lazy, low-effort Hollywood garbage.
At one point Cutter remote controls the hulking multi-ped tank that attacks the Major and Kuze, presumably to add a more personal angle to the climactic battle. Instead, he acts as a distraction. In the anime movie’s equivalent scene, the tank is a faceless opponent, sent by a rival organisation, on the orders of the American Government to destroy or retrieve The Puppeteer. (This movie tellingly ignores the theme of anti-American-imperialism, so prominent in every other manga and anime version of GitS.)
Here, the tank is but an extension of Cutter’s pathetic hubris. His direct control of it removes all sense of meaning from the scene, which in the anime original is about Kusanagi battling against extreme forces in order to evolve. Although the movie version features a large tree and concrete pillars that are shot to pieces, similar to the anime, all allusions to the Tree of Life and evolutionary ascension are removed, making it a thematically empty facsimile. Cutter’s eventual death at Aramaki’s hands, along with the hilariously awkward request for the Major’s consent to end him, is so tonally dissonant that it leaves my head spinning with irritation.
Instead of going with the manga and anime’s Puppeteer/Project 2501 as the main “antagonist”, the 2017 movie instead conflates him with Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig’s Hideo Kuze. Kuze was one of the TV anime’s most fascinating characters, and this cut-down budget version of him is so disappointingly inadequate. His scheme is kind of similar — he wants to build a network between himself and the legions of other people disaffected by society, and eventually upload his consciousness into the net, becoming unbridled from the limitations of his human body. Except this version removes anything remotely empathetic about his story — gone are the mistreated refugees he championed, replaced with… what, exactly? His link to Kusanagi is much shallower — they were… what? Boyfriend and girlfriend or something? His stilted, halting line delivery (presumably due to glitching) and his “evil” hooded appearance are just eye-rollingly lame.
His direct involvement in the film’s version of the “garbageman” scene really does insult the audience with how blatantly everything is spelled out, and although the resulting shallow water fight scene between the Major and Kuze’s mind-controlled minion is cool, it’s merely a shot-for-shot recreation of Oshii’s original, this time with egregious and excessive use of slow motion. This isn’t a Zack Snyder movie, Mr Sanders. You can stop now. (Unfortunately the slo-mo infects almost every other action scene too.) While in the anime the conclusion of this minor plot is understated and subtle, the live action film can’t help but elaborate on the mind-controlled garbage man’s fate, with a too-long interrogation scene that feels manipulative and lurid in comparison. Sometimes less is more, people.
In conflating Kuze with the Puppeteer, it makes the Major’s relationship with him far less interesting. Really, that’s the thing with the whole film. It faithfully recreates so many scenes from the anime, but robs them of all philosophical and thematic depth. It’s like the writers didn’t understand what the original was about, or at least decided they wanted to do their own thing (which I’m fine with), but couldn’t decide with what to fill the void they’d excavated (which I’m not fine with). When the badly-damaged Kusanagi and Kuze are lying on the ground together following the destruction of the tank, Kuze asks her to join with him in his transmigration to a post-human existence. Kusanagi says “no”. That one-word answer for me invalidates the entire movie. If this film isn’t about Kusanagi transcending her humanity to become something more, then what is the point of it? Why even make this? This interaction caused my reaction to the movie to evolve from general dislike to utter hatred. Talk about missing the entire point of the franchise. In fact, Ghost of the Shell (2017) is the premiere example of the Hollywood meat grinder movie-making process Completely Missing The Entire Point.
This version of Kusanagi isn’t interested in becoming more than human, because she’s been robbed of her humanity. She’s a victim, she wants to stay behind to spend time with her real mother, or something. More realistically, the producers were hoping to make a sequel, and it’s pretty hard to do that when your main character transcends this realm of existence, as Shirow himself found when trying to make a manga sequel. Nonetheless, the movie’s ending is intensely disappointing, especially as it ends with Kusanagi standing atop a skyscraper stating “Humanity is our virtue.” I’m sorry, but what the hell does that empty, santised, Hollywood bullshit platitude even mean? This movie has nothing to say about being human, or being post-human, or being a cyborg. No existential theme is explored in any depth, nothing that could justify such an out-of-nowhere statement. It’s empty. It’s soulless. Ghostless, even.
Ok, I’ve been almost nothing but relentlessly negative about this movie. Do I have anything positive to say about it? Well… I have to admit it often looks really good. WETA workshop do a great job of bringing the manga and anime’s world to bright, vibrant, busy live action. Ghost in the Shell’s city is un-named here, though I assume it’s meant to be Japan’s New Port City, built across the water from Niihama Prefecture in the wake of the third and fourth world wars as a replacement capital for Tokyo, much of which was destroyed and submerged. As in Oshii’s 1995 version, New Port City is heavily based on Hong Kong, and that influence is once again obvious here. There’s a mix between New Town glitz with towering skyscrapers adorned by Blade Runner-esque neon and holographic images, and Old Town slums and partially-flooded backstreets that provide a stark counterpoint to the majority of the movie’s hyper-futurism. Some shots, especially in the Old Town, uncannily evoke their counterparts in Oshii’s version.
Little touches like constantly moving holographic road markings are a cool element, and the world looks lived-in, as it should. Some of the city fly-by scenes are a bit much, but I suppose they had to show the money was being spent somewhere (it certainly wasn’t spent on providing a high quality script). The practical effects work is particularly excellent, especially the creepy geisha cyborgs ripped straight from both Innocence and Stand Alone Complex — they even have faces that spring open not dissimilar to Stranger Things’ Demogorgon (though preceding it in concept…) There are cyborgs with obviously metal parts that do look more like they belong in the Alita: Battle Angel movie, but to be fair there are a lot of design crossovers between both franchises — I love them both. The grimy cyborg nightclub that Batou and Major visit is a bit generic, and I don’t know what’s meant to be going on with the grinning loons who attempt to torture a handcuffed Major in a locked room there — that silly scene could be removed, and nothing of value would be lost.
Major’s Batman-like predisposition for brooding on top of skyscrapers is intact, and the futuristic city does look pretty great from her viewpoint. They manage to get her iconic backwards leap and thermoptocam activation very right, it’s a shame the context is so garbled and disappointing. That’s really how I’d describe the experience of the whole film — not just emotionally and philosophically empty, but garbled and unfulfilling. Perhaps that’s just my interpretation as a long-term GitS fan who is unable to separate this from the rest of the canon, but it’s clear the director himself doesn’t want us to consider it separately, why else stick in so many homages and overt nods that scream “hey, do you remember this bit? And this bit? And this dog? And this lady whose eyes move out of her face, and look she smokes heavily and douses her cigarette butts in her drink, just like that one time in Innocence?” It’s made to be cross-referenced, and that also makes it vulnerable to unfavourable comparisons with earlier, better versions of a similar story.
I wish they hadn’t bothered calling this Ghost in the Shell, because that’s not what this is. It’s a generic and bland identikit Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster with the edges and serial numbers filed off. It heavily borrows from what it doesn’t understand, and in doing so makes itself meaningless. I feel bad for everyone involved, because I expect this was probably a labour of love, more than the usual Hollywood drivel. I don’t know if it was executive producer meddling that made this so bland and empty, or whether Sanders and his writing team perhaps weren’t up to the job of reinterpreting Shirow’s, Oshii’s, and Kamiyama’s originals. When one looks at how excellent Robert Rodiguez and James Cameron’s take on Battle Angel Alita was, one can’t help but feel this was a disastrously missed opportunity. I hope never to suffer through this disappointing abomination of a failed adaptation ever again.
Ghost in the Shell (2017)
Director: Rupert Sanders
Screenplay: Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger
Based on: Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Takeshi Kitano, Michael Pitt, Pilou Asbæk
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
JP Premiere: 17th March 2017
US Premiere: 31st March 2017
Language: English (with random Japanese from Kitano)
Runtime: 107 minutes
BBFC rating: 12
