Ghost In The shell: A Safe Sci-Fi Film With Massive Potential
In my usual format, I’ll give you the synopsis the marketing team for the movie wants you to read, tell you what you need to know to decide if you want to watch the movie and then expand on it on the last section. Cool? Cool.
Also, it’s good to note. This is my first review under the FFS publication, if you’re interested in reading some other ones feel free to click here to go to my personal profile.
Synopsis:
“In the near future, Major (Scarlett Johansson) is the first of her kind: A human saved from a terrible crash, who is cyber-enhanced to be a perfect soldier devoted to stopping the world’s most dangerous criminals. When terrorism reaches a new level that includes the ability to hack into people’s minds and control them, Major is uniquely qualified to stop it. As she prepares to face a new enemy, Major discovers that she has been lied to: her life was not saved, it was stolen. She will stop at nothing to recover her past, find out who did this to her and stop them before they do it to others. Based on the internationally acclaimed Japanese Manga.” — IMBD Page Entry.
What you need to know:
It is a solid but bland entry into the Sci-Fi genre that has a massive amount of potential on a franchise level. It wasn’t particularly creative or exciting but it never dipped into boring, sadly it also never delivered a great deal of entertainment.
I think that’s an issue with the movie’s pacing, the slow character driven moments were great to deliver exposition and create a relationship with the audience while the fast action segments were great to show case the beauty of the movie’s style and VFX, but they didn’t unify well enough to bring the film out of the average rating.
It suffers from the same thing that Interstellar suffered from, it wanted to give you such a big spectacle at certain moments that it ended up disjointing the movie to a detriment.
That being said, it is a well-made film with brilliant VFX, stiff dialogue and a very cool (although bland) interpretation of the futuristic cyber-punk setting of the source material.
The best thing the film did was create a world and a cast of characters that have massive potential in later installments of the franchise, it just needs to be executed with more precision and strengthen the philosophical theme of “What is humanity?” that the source material was infused with.
My final score: It’s a solid 6.8/10 for me.
The Extra Bits: (MINOR SPOILERS)
Narrative:
I think the narrative follows the source material fairly well, human gets a new synthetic body and trained to be the perfect soldier under the premise of false memories of a terrorist attack that took her parents and left her dying, which resulted in the new body, when in reality her life was stolen and used for this “Ghost in the Shell” experiment.
It’s explained well, it’s well delivered and we discover the information along with the character at a satisfying pace. We’re either right with her or slightly ahead of her, which is good for the audience to be able to follow the foggy plot but left the film unable to create the tension some of the scenes were screaming for.
The bad guy, Mr. Cutter, and I call him “The bad guy” because he really was a cartoon rendition of a bad guy. His motivations were left unclear, although it seemed to be mostly financial, he’s severely underdeveloped and the movie builds him up as the guy we’re meant to hate from the beginning. He just need more depth and a bit more flair in order to lift him above “Generic Corporate asshole that can shoot things”.
He was just a disappointing villain and I wanted him to be as interesting as Hideo, the antagonist of the film, who was Major’s predecessor and failed experiment.
The film sets Hideo up as the villain of the story, making Major want to hunt him down to stop the death of innocent people. Throughout the first half of the movie we get a lot of interesting build up for Hideo as the bad guy, he was mysterious, I wanted to know more about him every time he showed up on screen, he was good at raising questions that lied within the narrative and was simply interesting.
When the bait and switch happens and it turns out that Hideo is a misunderstood antagonist and the actual bad guy is generic corporate owner Mr. Cutter, the film became much less interesting and more of your generic character driven sci-fi.
There was a morality conflict in Hideo that made him enticing and it was sad to see that be replaced by greedy, simplistic bloodshed at the half-point of the movie.
The narrative was good enough to be enjoyed for its own merit but it could have been stronger if Mr. Cutter was as complex and cunning as Hideo.
Philosophy:
My biggest problem with the film isn’t even the filmmaking, it’s the fact that it severely downplays the philosophical theme of the meaning of humanity and the conflict that Major carries with her every time she shoots a robot or is faced with evidence that her body is synthetic. It’s presented as the core conflict she has and yet there seems to be no emotional gravity coming from it by the end of the movie.
It really is a shame since those were the questions and struggles I wanted to be presented with, I wanted to think about what it meant to be a human when your body is synthetic and you can’t remember your past and I couldn’t.
That pushed the movie down a couple of points for me, it could have been a good action movie with a thoughtful ideology and theme but instead it was just a good action movie with a brilliant first half and an uninteresting second half with an unconvincingly optimistic ending.
Performances:
They were okay, but not amazing. Scarlett’s been in a lot of movies that I love and I really enjoy seeing her on screen but this film called for a nuanced and troubled character and what she delivered was a bland action movie archetype with good moments of subtlety. Sadly, there just weren’t many of those moments.
The supporting cast suffered from the same problem, they were all just a little too bland. The movie was asking for more banter and more small conversations that exposed character but it just didn’t happen, which was a shame. But, they were entertaining on the action scene.
Verdict:
Could have been a film that stood out and showed that adaptations aren’t doomed to mediocrity but it ended being just a bit too bland and a bit too safe to pull it off. It just happened to be entertaining and a very well made film that I hope takes advantage of the massive potential its narrative possesses.
I give it a 6.8 out of ten. Just above average.
