Hardcore fans of the original are bound to have problems with Sanders’ version, even though it borrows plenty of visual inspiration from the earlier movie, particularly the sequence in which Major’s new physical self is created: She’s a featureless naked form rising from a pool of water, her body seemingly coated with something like eggshell. In fact, you’ll probably enjoy it more that way.
The genius of Ghost in the Shell is that you don’t have to care about cyborg-anything to enjoy it. Her job is to fight dark forces with the ability to hack not just into computer networks but into human brains. She’s groomed as an anti-terrorist soldier, a tool of the company whose technology resurrected her, Hanka Corp. Now she’s a cyborg with a human spirit, though her new life isn’t her own, and her memories aren’t either. After an accident that nearly destroyed her body, she was saved from death and wholly rebuilt by benevolent scientist Dr. Even within that context, Major is an anomaly. The picture is set in a future world where humans can be physically cyber-enhanced, made stronger and more intelligent than before.
Movies give us the chance to blur divisions-a challenge that Hollywood films, especially, has been slow to meet.īut Johansson isn’t a liability in Ghost in the Shell. Rigid ethnic tiers already cause more problems in the world than we can count. The issue of whitewashed casting is significant not because we shouldn’t have a white American Major-if Johansson can capture the spirit of the character, why not?-but because we still live in a universe where there isn’t likely to be, say, an Asian James Bond.
In Rupert Sanders’ agile, visually resplendent live-action reimagining of Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 anime masterstroke Ghost in the Shell, Scarlett Johansson plays Major Motoko Kusanagi, a character who, in both the anime and the 1989 Masamune Shirow manga on which it’s based, is clearly Japanese.