Ghost in the Shell: The Official Movie Novelization Review
I often wonder what the point of movie novelisations are in the modern day. When I was a kid, novelisations played an important role — visual media wasn’t as easily accessible to lowly consumers. Disney movies, for example, would be trotted out every few years for repeat limited theatrical runs, and you’d be fortunate to catch a screening. Outside of those rare occasions though, those films remained ephemeral — for years, Disney delayed releasing any of its classics on home media.
Even the eventual VHS and DVD releases would only be available for a short time before Disney locked them away in their infamous vault again. Cheap, accessible paperback novelisations, often with a sheaf of eight or sixteen pages of colour movie stills jammed in the middle, were often the only way for kids to re-live a faintly-remembered movie they’d seen previously in the theatre. Novelisations were also useful for people with no easy cinema access, such as me, living in the Scottish Highlands, over a hundred miles from the nearest movie theatre, as at that time my remote little town at least still had its own book shop.
Even some more adult movies got novelisations, not just Disney films and family-oriented blockbusters. Alan Dean Foster wrote excellent novel adaptations of the first three Alien movies. With Foster granted access to early scripts full of scenes that would be later deleted from the finished products, these novels were tense, well-written and full of extra material. Foster’s novels added value to an already excellent film series (and yes, I still include Alien 3 in that category…)
With the advent and subsequent runaway success of streaming services and digital storefronts, movie-watching has changed. Unless Warner Brother’s hated CEO David Zaslav has callously shelved your movie or TV show, deleting them from existence, or Disney Plus has vaulted your production for poor streaming numbers, most things are more or less available easily. There’s always blu-ray, DVD, or even piracy. Unless a sociopathic entertainment executive has decided your film would be less profitable than a tax write-off, taking legal and non-legal avenues into account, most movies are more accessible now than they’ve ever been.
So why on Earth did 2017’s live action Ghost in the Shell movie get a novelisation? Maybe I’m just not aware of them, but it seems very few Hollywood films get novelisations these days. Perhaps the studio was convinced the film would be a massive mega-hit, so prepped as many tie-ins as possible? That certainly sounds convincing — around the movie release period we got two different manga/comic anthologies, a collection of short stories, and two large glossy art books. Art books and manga I can understand, for me the only postive aspect of the live action film is its visuals. Strip these out though, and what do you have left?
Author James Swallow is a prolific writer who has produced tie-in fiction for a large number of media properties, such as Star Trek, Judge Dredd, Warhammer 40K, Deus Ex, Stargate, and Doctor Who. It’s likely he was seen as a safe pair of hands, with relevant writing experience. Co-writer Abbie Bernstein I’m unsure of the rationale for her involvement. Her bibliography mainly covers non-fiction writing about films, plus she has also written and directed her own short films. Swallow also lives in London, UK, while Bernstein lives in LA, California. I can only imagine they collaborated remotely.
Bless them, Swallow and Bernstein do their best with what is revealed as an extremely thin story once stripped of its visual splendour. Unlike Foster’s Alien work, there are no new scenes here, no extra insight into character motivation or interiority. I don’t get the impression that the authors were granted access to multiple script variations, what we have here is essentially the final script committed to prose, with detailed descriptions of what is on the screen. It’s kind of like watching the film but with an incredibly detailed running commentary on all the time. The writing is certainly competent, I can’t fault them for their ability, but there’s really nothing new here, nothing that justifies its existence.
There are few surprises — although we gain some access to Scarlett Johansson’s protagonist Mira’s thoughts, there’s nothing in her thought processes that can’t be easily inferred from just watching the film. She’s an empty, amnesiac victim and the only saving grace that comes from reading rather than watching her is that we’re not stuck staring at Johansson’s sulky expressionless teenager-like expression throughout the whole thing.
As the narrative is omniscient third-person in style, we also get access to other characters’ thoughts and motivations, but again, everything here is so obvious. Dr Oulet, Mira’s “creator” has maternal feelings towards her, but she’s also conflicted because of the terrible things she’s done for her awful employer, Hanka Robotics. There’s nothing beyond surface level exploration of this, however. The theme of surrogate motherhood is briefly raised by the text, but it has to move on because the next scene is beginning. This half-formed theme of parenthood is mostly absent from any other Ghost in the Shell material, and it seems weird and somewhat reductive towards Mira’s character that the search for a mother figure seems to underpin many of her actions.
Similarly we get little to no extra insight into Mira (Motoko’s) biological mother’s feelings other than what can be easily deducted from the film. Antagonist Hideo Kuze remains as pathetic and underdeveloped as ever, while Hanka CEO Cutter is just as much of a cookie-cutter evil rich corporate dude as before. It’s not even satisfying when he dies.
Action scenes are described in slavish blow-by-blow nature, but there’s little inspiration or dynamism to the text. Swallow and Bernstein relate exactly what we’re seeing on screen, little more, little less. It’s in the quieter moments that some of their more descriptive prose shines a little more, their words effectively conjuring memories of the movie’s incredible background worldbuilding, courtesy of WETA. However, all of this beautifully descriptive prose is made redundant by the fact one could just watch the movie. I guess if there were an audiobook version of this it could be good for the sight-impaired?
I heartily dislike the live-action version of Ghost in the Shell for many reasons, that I related in detail during my recent review. This novelisation does little to allay my reservations or complaints about the garbage writing, and despite some decent descriptions, it adds little to a movie I already felt was a waste of my time and an insult to my intelligence. Compared to Junichi Fujisaku’s three Stand Alone Complex novels, this is a very poor cousin. I read this only for completionist purposes, and I don’t reccommend anyone else joins me. It’s just the same thematically empty, derivative crap as its ill-made movie progenitor. Seriously, I don’t get why this even exists.
Ghost in the Shell: The Official Movie Novelization
Written by: James Swallow and Abbie Bernstein
Based on the movie: Ghost in the Shell (2017)
Original work: Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow
UK/US Publisher: Titan Books
UK/US Publication date: 26th September 2017
Pages: 240
Language: English
ISBN 13: 978–1785657528
