Of all the ideas the new Ghost in the Shell offers up, one emerges as its thesis. Memory, it posits, doesn’t define our humanity. Instead, our actions define us. As the lines between human and machine are blurred, we’re afforded the radical opportunity to create new selves that are shaped by the past, without clinging to it. That notion aligns well with the film itself, and how it was made. As part of a far larger cyberpunk tradition, it draws on old ideas and tries to forge a new path forward. And through its treatment of its franchise’s history, the movie succeeds in some ways — and crucially fails in others.
As a live-action adaptation of a cherished anime masterpiece, Ghost in the Shell is a technically solid, though lesser, homage to the film and the sundry TV series that inspired it. It wrestles ably with questions about posthumanity and individuality in a visually sumptuous origin story that leaves plenty of room for follow-up. And maybe that would be enough, if it weren’t for the controversy at the heart of the film. Where 1995’s Ghost in the Shell skirted the problem of race almost entirely, the update not only brings it to the surface, but makes it into a monster. The approach exposes the cracks in the aging premises that informed the first film, and possibly even the entire cyberpunk genre.
Major spoilers ahead.
Ghost in the Shell, directed by Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman), follows Major Mira Killian (Scarlett Johansson), a cyborg operative who heads the counter-terrorism task force Section 9 in an unnamed futuristic city in East Asia. Led by section chief Daisuke Aramaki (Takeshi Kitano), she and fellow operatives Batou (Pilou Asbæk), Togusa (Chin Han), and others investigate hackers and cyber-criminals in a future where terrorism can mean planting false memories into citizens’ digitally enhanced brains, or even turning them into puppets. Their work leads them to a hacker known only as Kuze (Michael Pitt), who has a vendetta against Hanka Robotics, the powerful robotics company and government contractor that created Mira’s body. But Kuze takes a special interest in Mira, and he drags her deep into a conspiracy that implicates the people closest to her.
Sanders and company did their homework
It’s clear from the outset that Sanders and company did their Ghost In The Shell homework. They demonstrate a real appreciation for Masamune Shirow’s original manga and the adaptations and spinoffs that followed it. Though Ghost’s story is framed around the narrative established in Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 classic anime film, story elements and setpieces from Shirow’s manga, the 2004 sequel feature Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex TV series, and other cyberpunk classics are peppered liberally throughout, making the film feel fresh, yet familiar.