![]() ![]() He instead sets a "single evil man in an otherwise good government" plot into motion, and Major and Kuze become too jacked up on one-dimensional revenge motivations to do anything other than chase the bad guy down and kill, kill, kill. The original film saw Major and the Puppetmaster taking their sweet time, chasing and building respect for each other until they came to agree upon a final, trippy conclusion of uniting as a virus of sorts-not good, not evil, but an exploration of the "human" drive to survive that we may very well be baking into our increasingly automated systems. She complains about feeling lonely and disconnected. Her handlers overtly and clumsily remind her about her "ghost," the soul-like concept that was only hinted at in the first film. ![]() She takes medication to stamp down "glitch" hallucinations, which we later learn contain her real origin story. But Johansson's character spends far more energy battling with and talking to herself (which, among other things, leaves the supporting cast in the shadows). The original film cast her as a stoic, matter-of-fact examiner of the world around her, and this, combined with her conversations with other Section 9 cops, explored the very science-fiction issue of a soul, and the script never beat viewers over the head with its concept of "ghosts" as souls, as well. That's a standard action-movie plot driver, sure, but this follows a different character origin story for Major. When he eventually meets Major, all he talks about is getting revenge. The mastermind behind these killings resembles the "Puppetmaster" hive-mind concept from the original film, though in this reboot, he appears as Hideo Kuze, a character from the Stand-Alone Complex follow-up anime series. Sanders decides to toss details and ideas from both characters into a juicer, then ditches the healthy pulp to reveal a more boring character instead. The subtlety and philosophical ruminations of 1995's Puppetmaster have been replaced with a sullen, emo-band crybaby who complains about his human-to-robot experiment gone awry. Other major members of this augmentation company have been taken out, Major and her team come to learn, and a whodunnit begins. (This possible plot thread about the spread of human-robotic augmentation across the globe, and "messing with the soul," is immediately dropped.) The exec is killed anyway, and his robotic parts are hacked by a gang of robotic geishas, including one admittedly awesome-looking robo-spider-human. Instead of Major jumping into this skyscraper to disrupt a diplomatic negotiation-which sent interesting ripples throughout the anime's plot-she pops into a sales meeting between a robotics company executive and a generic African-nation leader. It also nukes the entire plot structure.ĭirector Rupert Sanders wastes no time yanking the plot in a different direction. But this live-action reboot doesn't just miss the subtle interactions, buried beneath the basic-plot surface, that made the original such a remarkable film. ![]() That, of course, changed once The Matrix entered the film lexicon, but Ghost in the Shell really nailed it first-and as an anime, it never quite reached the heights of popularity it deserved.Ī live-action reboot seems like a solid way to right that wrong, and the film's decades-old template still feels topical: humans toy with robotic upgrades governments and major companies embrace the robotic future a little too much and get burnt as a result characters mull the impact of how life is changed by a fully connected world. When Ghost in the Shell reached theaters in 1995, it was one of the sci-fi film genre's only iconic combinations of high-action setpieces and "how tech influences our lives" plots. And while I went into my screening ready to laugh off rumors of cast white-washing, I left the theater aghast at how blatantly that issue figured in the final product. Respect for the viewer goes into the garbage, replaced by an obnoxious, paint-by-numbers plot of good versus evil. Every bit of social commentary and science-fiction mystique that made the Japanese film and books so stunning has been wrung dry. Not bad.īut this pedestrian action movie looks nigh unbearable through the lens of the original series. She shoots guns, kicks faces, and beats the bad guys. Scarlett Johansson runs around futuristic, CGI-filled worlds in a skin-tight outfit. That's the only way to enjoy this live-action reboot: oblivious to 1995's original anime film or its manga comic-book precursor. The producers of this week's new Ghost in the Shell film must really believe nobody has seen its source material. Enlarge / The shattering and rippling of this glass wall looks quite awesome in action, especially the way it reflects off of Major's live-camo bodysuit. ![]()
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