Rupert Sanders, “Ghost in the Shell” (2017)
In adapting a major Japanese anime series into a potentially lucrative movie franchise, Hollywood opted for a standard origin story in which a main character, turned into a cyborg for a counter-terrorism unit, has recurrent memories of her past and tries to trace these memories in order to understand where she has come from and what she was originally. In the process she discovers she has been lied to by the very people who remade her and who employ her as a counter-terrorism operator. For some reason the knowledge and awareness the cyborg gains as a result of knowing her ancestry and where she comes from make her dangerous to her employers so they set out to destroy her.
That’s the live-action film “Ghost in the Shell” in a, er, nutshell and a very boring and generically Bladerunner-esque nutshell it is too. The actors do what they can with the material and the cyborg Mira Killian (played by Scarlett Johansson in sleepwalking mode) is far more robot than human but the plot narrative they have to grapple with shows signs of having been worked over so many times in other films that what should have been an exciting first film of many to come ends up looking rusty and in need of panel-beater treatment instead. The usual devices of gunfights, a buddy relationship with another cyborg Batou, a plot twist in which a supposed villain reveals his true nature and Killian’s true nature to the astonished Killian herself, and ham-fisted attempts to use a generic Japanese megalopolis as a major character in the film pad out the story but ultimately the film comes across as very tired, formulaic and – horror of horrors – outdated.
While the plot brings up themes deemed to be relevant to American mainstream movie audiences – the notion of memories being part of one’s identity and individuality, Killian’s eventual determination not to be defined by her memories but by her actions, the idea that self-awareness, self-knowledge and knowing one’s origins can be dangerous in a society where people can be owned and lied to by corporations – it doesn’t leave much room for an investigation of how humans augmented with cybernetic attachments endowing them with superhuman abilities might cope and even change and adapt to their attachments and abilities psychologically so that the boundaries between what is human and what is artificial disappear and a true cyber-human fusion is born. This is probably one of the things that fans of the original anime series were hoping for. Even so, Mira Killian / Motoko Kusanagi’s origin story deserves a much better treatment by being combined with the philosophical speculations that the anime series is known for and following the implications and consequences of such a combination.