Ghost in the Shell (2017) review
Ghost in the Shell is easily going to be one of the most visually striking movies I’ll see all year. It’s also an alternately frustrating and bland film held back from achieving any sort of greatness by some really poor story decisions. It’s not a terrible movie, but I had high hopes for it and I’m sadly disappointed.
Spoilers from here on out
I’m not going to pretend I’m any sort of expert on the greater Ghost in the Shell cannon. It’s always been a series that’s interested me, but I’ve only gotten around to watching the 1995 original very recently. Now instead of adapting any one specific movie or storyline from the greater Ghost in the Shell series, or (God forbid) a totally original story set within the framework of the Ghost universe, Ghost in the Shell 2017 decides to do both. It liberally borrows from some of the most iconic visuals and ideas of the series and weaves it together into an “entirely new” storyline. I say “entirely new,” but the actual result is yet another standard, paint-by numbers origin story you’ve seen a dozen times.
The original Ghost in the Shell kinda ended up influencing a lot of pop-culture, so the fact that whatever straight adaptation of Ghost that they ended up doing today was going to feel familiar was inevitable. That said, I was hoping this at least wasn’t going to end up feeling exactly like Robocop, (and not the good Robocop either, the 2014 one) and I’m sad to report that’s exactly what I got. It’s yet another story where our main character is resurrected thanks to the help of a mysterious unknown organization that secretly plans on abusing its power that our hero must discover the truth of in order to take them down.
It’s boring, trite, and you can see every plot-beat coming a mile away. Even when the plot begins to take detours into themes and ideas that might transcend it to something more interesting, they’re quickly abandoned without being given more time to breathe. What’s worse is that the film has gone out of its way to include almost shot-for-shot recreations of scenes from the original source material. The film has to almost bend over backwards for these iconic moments to be reworked into its narrative; and for anyone like myself who’s familiar with these moments, it becomes jarring. This form of nostalgia-bating has been robbed of most of its effectiveness at this point, and I’d appreciate if it died off.
Now Ghost 2017 has garnered quite a bit of pre-release controversy for being the latest offender in a long line of noticeable “whitewashing” of roles that could’ve easily gone to minority actors and actresses. Case in point, Scarlett Johansson plays the lead role of The Major in the film; a young woman rebuilt as a cyborg after suffering an accident she can’t recall the specifics of. I’m not here to go into a lengthy discussion over the morals of this; I feel I’ve heard arguments from both sides to have an understanding of the situation that I’m comfortable with.
What I am here to talk about is how this issue actually ends up affecting the film as a final product. Which it does. As Johansson’s Major discovers her identity throughout the course of the film, it’s revealed that, to put it bluntly, she used to be of Asian race before she was forcibly taken to be rebuilt as a weapon. Now thematically I can almost follow the train of thought that lead to this. It creates a sense of alienation to The Major’s previous life that she has to overcome as the key component of her character arc throughout the film. Unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to any sort of logical evaluation within the story. There’s no in-universe explanation given for why the villain’s decided it was necessary to completely change her race, and all it ends up doing is inexorably tying a major element of the film’s plot to a controversy that had been marring it from the onset. If the film had featured someone literally shooting themselves in the foot, it would’ve been more graceful than this.
Now the sad part is that, honestly, this is almost a great movie from a technical perspective. If the movie had a better story I would probably have ended up liking this a lot. There’s a lot of practical effects work done here that looks beautiful; from the props, to the makeup and costume design, to the sets they’ve constructed for futuristic Tokyo. It’s impressive how much the film has fully embraced the cyberpunk aesthetic that made the original so visually distinctive. Director Rupert Sanders seems like he has a real eye for visually interesting filmmaking if nothing else, and he allows the camera to rest lovingly on the environments the film has created. There are also a few CGI heavy sequences that are all well handled and possess a dreamlike quality to them that’s captivating for the short time they’re around.
The action sequences are all handled well also. They’re nothing especially groundbreaking in any respect, and it’s possibly the PG-13 rating has robbed them of some impact, but they’re not bogged down by excessive shaky-cam and allow the audience to follow the action clearly. The acting isn’t terrible either; although the script is severely lacking in material for the actors to work with. Johansson gets the brunt of this since the character of The Major doesn’t allow her much room to emote outside of “cold and detached,” but she’s clearly trying her best. Pilou Asbæk has better success as Batou, but that might just be because he gets to feed a bunch of dogs at a point in the movie.
Ghost in the Shell hopefully isn’t going to be the worst movie of 2017, but its a sadly frustrating movie. It’s entirely possible viewers unfamiliar with the original source material will actually come away with more to enjoy here, but judging by how little money this has made over its opening weekend, I’m guessing this sadly won’t be the case. It’s very clear they tried to make this adaptation the best it could’ve been, and I do appreciate a lot of the effort that went into this movie, but at the end of the day I can’t strongly recommend it.
The Media Fire gives this movie 5.9/10
