Altered Johansson: Ghost in the Shell

Title: Ghost in the Shell
Director: Ruper Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman)
Screenplay: Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger

Let's get one thing out of the way right from the start: This isn't very good. What's interesting to me is the similarities to Netflix's recent cyberpunky titstravaganza, Altered Carbon, and the way they both fail for much the same reasons.

The main problems are the cast--the wrong people in the wrong roles--and the movie's attempts to "humanize" the heroes when the dehumanizing, alienating impact of body-invasive technology is the whole bleeding point.

Not because of the whitewashing thing--as I mentioned in the Altered Carbon review, living in Japan puts a different perspective on the issue for me: Lack of Japanese representation is not really a problem in Japan. On account of it being chock full of Japanese, I suppose. The other point being the silliness of insisting on the 'correct' ethnicity of a character that is, let's be clear about this, a purple-haired cyborg. I'm not saying Hollywood shouldn't make more effort to cast Asians in roles other than kung fu masters and wise old karate sensei. Just saying this is a pretty damn stupid hill to die on.

So Scarlett Johansson as the Major doesn't bug me because of whitewashing. It bugs me because this is absolutely the wrong role for her, wrong, wrong, pouring the milk before adding the cereal wrong. She can do silent and weird or creepy (as in Under the Skin), but the script wants her to alternate between kickass cyberninja and little girl lost/confused about who she is, and it does not work. At all. She looks like she's trying to remember her lines, not her past.

The reason they have her moping around looking like her hamster just died is the writers have decided, just as they did in Altered Carbon, that the hero wasn't sympathetic enough, so they've stuffed her backstory full of cyberpunk tropes 101 and shrunken their world so that absolutely everything revolves around her and this little voyage of discovery she goes on.

Pilou Asbaek (Game of Thrones) is better than I expected given how over-the-top his scenes in GoT are, but he's barely in the movie. Pretty much the only non-Johansson to get some decent screen time is "Beat" Takeshi Kitano who--again this is a living in Japan thing--strikes me as having all the gravitas of a whoopee cushion with none of the sophistication. Doesn't help that he doesn't speak English, so he's literally the only one in the whole movie delivering his lines in Japanese.

Sure there's one or two cool set pieces (like the clip above), but they're lifted directly from the original anime, so I'm reluctant to even give points there--there are entire scenes that are shot-for-shot remakes, just to rub your face in how unnecessary this movie is. What else? The cars look like unfinished video game models, the cityscape is Blade Runner done cheap, and the climax is a total cop-out on the whole message of the movie.

If you must scratch the cyberpunk itch, watch Altered Carbon (for punches and boobs) or Blade Runner (for moody introspection) instead.