Ghost in the Shell

No, I have not read the manga by Masamune Shirow. I have not seen the 1995 animated film. And that’s fine. Most people who see a film adaptation will not be familiar with the source material anyway.

In this case, though, it might be an actively good thing that my first Ghost in the Shell experience is this Hollywood mounting. Because my brain was not able to fill in everything that is missing from the plot and the characters, which is just about everything, and I could see clearly the precise sort of disappointing failure it is. A movie needs to stand on its own, and this one does not. With no background info, I was bored by its trite and shallow characters, insulted by its retreat into very well-worn clichés of science-fiction cinema, and bewildered by what is supposed to be its mystery yet which surely is completely transparent to everyone watching.

There was much consternation – and rightly so – about the casting of a white Western actress, Scarlett Johansson, in the central role here, as a character who is Japanese.

Turns out, this is the least offensive thing about Ghost in the Shell.

It is sometime in the nearish future, in a sprawling and neon-drenched Japanese city, and Johansson is Major, a human mind in a machine body – we can tell because Johansson walks stiffly except when she has to do some sexy cyborg ass-kicking, when suddenly she moves with smooth sleekness.

She works for a law-enforcement agency called Section 9, which hunts terrorists, or something like that. Whatever exactly it is that they do is cool, though – the movie swears! – and involves a lot of Major in a long black trench, crouching on rooftops glaring out over the city. And a lot of Major running around and bashing bad guys, while dressed in what is meant to be either a skintight bodysuit or the actual shell of her cyborg body; Major might be naked.

Director Rupert Sanders, in his second feature after Snow White and the Huntsman, is obviously much more interested in signifiers of cyberpunk cool here than in what any of it actually means. He was a director of commercials before he turned to movies, and he is doing nothing but selling here – or at least trying to. There are robot geishas, 50-foot-tall advertising holograms in the street, and downloading your brain into a mechanical body, which seems awesome because you don’t feel pain, plus you’re repaired superquick when you get shot.

I think there is supposed to be some deep and troubled brooding about What That Means: something something identity, or individuality, with that cerebral hacking.

But instead of delivering a clear idea of what it’s supposed to mean to us audience members, all we get are a few ostensible signifiers of “deep and troubling” – lots of furrowed brows, for example – which makes no sense in what tiny context there is here.

Are we meant to be happily geeked by the idea of downloading our minds into robots, or freaked out? The movie cannot even take a stand on this. It somehow wants it all.

The best that might be said about Ghost in the Shell is that it accidentally highlights the problem of geeks embracing ideas that are problematic. But the script, written by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler, isn’t anywhere near self-aware enough to realize that is what it might be doing.

Instead we get a “mystery” about scientists at Hanka, the company that made Major, turning up murdered. And maybe Major wasn’t told the truth about how her brain ended up in a robot (I’m shocked; shocked!), and someone who knows some answers telling Major not to take the medication the scientists told her to take.

“I don’t know who to trust anymore,” says Major, like a thousand other characters have said in a thousand other movies in which There Is Something Going On.

Through it all, we never know why we should care. Supposedly it’s encapsulated in the fortune-cookie wisdom of “We cling to memories as if they define us, but they don’t. What we do defines us,” as if what we do doesn’t become memories that define us.

If only as much attention had been paid to plot and character that was paid to production design. And even that, one imagines, seems to have been developed thusly: “Give me Blade Runner,” Sanders surely must’ve said, “but, like, times a million.”

Which does at least have the awesome effect of reminding me how great Blade Runner is, and that I really should watch it again soon.

Ghost in the Shell (1 1/2) • Directed by Rupert Sanders • Starring Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbæk, Takeshi Kitano • Rated PG-13 • 106 min. • At Century Cinemas Del Monte, Century Marina, Maya Cinemas, Northridge Cinemas, Lighthouse Cinemas