Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
The warning signs come early in Ghost in the Shell, the live action adaptation of the anime classic discussed at least twice before in podcasts passim, opening with a wall of text explaining the basics of its world. Set in the not that distant future, humanity has figured out how to interface directly with machines, and has embraced cyborgisation, replacing flesh and bone with metals and plastics. My main issue with this text is not, necessarily, that it exists, it’s that it shows everything it says perfectly well in the following few scenes. I suppose it’s good that this film is accessible to people with no rudimentary understanding of visual storytelling, I guess.
Leading the field of robo-stuff is Hanke Robotics, who are now developing the first fully robotic body, or Shell, in the parlance of the times, which looks a great deal like Scarlett Johansson. Into this they plug the brain of one Mira Killian, who we’re told had her body destroyed in the same terrorist attack that killed her parents. The CEO of Hanke, Peter Ferdinando’s Cutter, decides that Killian should be sent to Section 9, Japan’s counter-terrorism unit, and a year later Mira’s a Major in the unit. The film presents those events just as breathlessly as I just did, in the hopes that you won’t notice how none of that makes a lick of sense, due to how poorly the changes to the Major’s past over the anime have been thought through in this adaptation.
Anyway, if you let that slide, we’re now more or less in line with the original, as Section 9, headed by Takeshi Kitano’s gruff Chief Daisuke Aramaki investigates attacks by someone calling themselves Kuze (Michael Pitt), and Killian and her team are called to an attack on one of Hanke’s senior staff by a hacked robo-geisha. Putting the hacked geisha down, Killian undertakes a risky connection to the downed machines AI core, which gives her information on where Kuze’s hiding out, but also puts her herself in Kuze’s sights.
While Killian and her right hand man Batou (Pilou “Rice” Asbæk) follow Kuze’s trail into a variety of traps and cool-looking, if ultimately pointless action sequences, Kuze’s busy progressing his plan which appears to be to kill off everyone on the project that created Killian’s shell. This begins the process of Killian having to question her past and her loyalties as the revelations come forth of things not being as they initially seemed, leading to an ending that’s looking for a more cathartic, generically happy ending for the Major than the anime, but winds up just being the final length of rope the film needs to properly hang itself.
Now, that all probably sounds quite negative and, spoiler warning, I’m not recommending this film to anyone, but there’s elements of Ghost in the Shell that I can certainly appreciate. It’s clearly had a lot of considered work put into, particularly on the aesthetic level. Even aside from the mix of practical and digital effects work, which is all very impressive, there’s few films I’ve seen lately that pick a visual style and run with it as well as this. While, obviously, inspired by the anime and the ball of inspirations that took, there’s hints of other influences from other sources, even video games – I’d be surprised if someone one the production design wasn’t a fan of Mass Effect. Visually, it’s a treat, with my only slight niggle being that it rather over-eggs the Blade Runner-eque holographic ads, blowing them up to skyscraper size and looking a bit daft in the process.
The supporting characters of Batou and the Chief are well adapted, feeling like their source material but not slavishly so, and both Asbæk and particularly Kitano are given their moments to shine. A major role is also given to Juliette Binoche as Dr. Ouelet, one of Hanke’s chief boffins, who also winds up carrying almost all of the emotional intensity of the film and does as well as can be expected, although really more of that should have been offloaded to Johansson.
Narratively, though, it’s a bit of a mess. It’s going heavier on the action than the source, and that’s fine, but these feel even more like isolated islands of shootybangs in a sea of dense cyberpunk waffle than the anime, which was already at the limits of tolerance for that sort of thing. To a degree it’s a similar problem to that mentioned when discussing Spirited Away on our Miyazaki episode – the overarching goals of the characters are clear enough, but the actions everyone takes to get there don’t seem altogether coherent, at least on a first view. Particular mention goes to Kuze’s cobbled together network of hacked humans, which is an awesome visual that had no relation to anything going on, unless I blacked out for the sentence where they mentioned what possible use it was. Perhaps it makes sense if you’ve seen the Stand Alone Complex stuff.
As such, it soon becomes very difficult to care about anything Ghost in the Shell offers up. This, primarily, is the film’s problem – it winds up being quite boring. Not all that surprising, really, as it’s also something levelled at the anime, but the real tragedy is that they’ve minimised much of the questions raised and left unanswered by the original which was the primary reason people liked it.
The problem is not that changes have been made from the original – if I wanted to see the original film again, I’d just watch the original film. The problem is that without exception, everything that has been changed makes the film less interesting and, consequently, harder to engage with, even although the thought process behind them was pretty clearly to make the film more palatable to a wider audience.
The changes to the Major’s character are supposed to give her character a more conventional through-line, and changing from the original’s Puppetmaster to the TV series’ Kuze should give a more relatable antagonist, with a backstory to leverage in the final act. Between these major strokes and a host of minor ones, this ought to be a more accessible film to a mass market, but all it does is round off all the interesting edges, leaving a boring slab of product.
The whole whitewashing thing has, I think, been poorly analysed from all sides, but I think it would be interesting to know what’s the chicken and what’s the egg here – the idea of the change to the character or the casting of Johansson. At any rate, it’s not all that important, as I’m sure everyone will do their best to take the wrong lessons away from it anyway.
I’ll always come back to the position that if you make a substandard film, or a niche film, you may well struggle to find an audience, and sometimes you’ll make a substandard niche film, and you’ll really struggle to find an audience no matter who you cast. It’s afflicted the likes of Tom Cruise and Will Smith, and Johansson is no less vulnerable to it. Not, I suppose, that anyone sets out to make a substandard film, but it’s always a risk.
If you’d simply cast, say, Rila Fukushima or Chiaki Kuriyama or anyone else in this script, it’s not going to stop it being a dull film, and it’s not going to be any more successful. It would, however, knock out the need for some identity gymnastics in the final act that, as mentioned, make the Major’s character much weaker overall, but by that point the jig may well have been up anyway. It’s a bit too spoiler-y to get into here, unfortunately, but in solving for the colour of Johansson’s body, I think they’ve greatly weakened the character’s identity and motivation which is in large part, along with an understandably deliberate emotionless performance from Johansson, makes the lead character unable to carry the film. Maybe without that anchor it would be better. In fact it would, because the original is better.
However now we’re getting into a circular argument, where if we take out all the changes they’ve made to the source material, you might as well just watch the source material. Perhaps the solution would have been to go a completely different direction and create a new story in this setting – the various Ghost in the Shell animated series, films and OVAs seem happy to go off in different directions and tones, there’s no reason this couldn’t have done the same, apart from the usual appeals to nostalgia that, if we’re honest, might be the main reason this was made in the first place.
And of course, the counter-argument from a icky business viewpoint, if this had turned out to be a really good film, there is still a – ick – brand value from having a name like Johansson that would help the profitability, which is the only art a studio cares about.
But none of this is a science. There’s plenty of bad films with bad casts that make money, and good films with good casts that lose money, and every permutation in-between. If anyone had a handle on this stuff, we’d be awash with great films, all perfectly cast, and a cursory glance at the cinema schedules will tell you that’s not the case.
I’ve lost the thread of this argument. I guess what I’m loosely saying is that, not to deny anyone’s lived experiences, casting Scarlett Johansson in this film was most likely not an attack on Japanese culture, but a calculated risk to increase the appeal to a wide audience. I’m all for more diversity in film, and this would have been an obvious and high-profile way to do that, but it has chose not to. I’m fairly sure that was a commercial rather than cultural decision, but feel free to vote with your wallet if you disagree.
I am, however, convinced that the reason it’s cratering at the box office is that, in fact, it’s a really dull remake that’s not as good as the original. My recommendation? No matter what your reasoning for not watching it is, the correct decision is to not watch it – certainly not now. Fans of the anime will probably get something from it, but only at the value of a three quid rental rather than the ludicrous cost of a trip to the cinema.
The real irony is that Major Makoto, as I’ve always read her character, would not care what ethnicity her shell was styled to be, just about the combat capabilities of it.