Cool visuals, compelling cyborg performances
WE COULD talk about the style in Ghost in the Shell all day, and confine the plot to two words. (It’ll do.) As Blade Runner did before it, this slinky, cyberpunk action flick makes its style the entire statement, pondering a future of human-robot synergy by visualising it in as much eyepopping detail as possible.
The ghost of the title – derived from the Japanese manga comics by Masamune Shirow, already adapted as anime features – is the human consciousness of the heroine. Played by a blackcropped Scarlett Johansson, she is physically a robot in all ways but the cerebral: the mind, and soul, of her old human form has been ported into a cyborg shell.
Her job, as an asset of the Hanka Corporation which performed this fusion, is to weed out “terrorists”, though the term is interestingly synonymous throughout with anyone considered hostile to the company, whether with fair cause or not.
Sometimes called The Major, sometimes Mira, she is an operative figuring out her place in this hermetic universe, which is a richly conceptualised dystopolis borrowing liberally from all cyberpunk fictions before it.
The main characters in Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 animated film weren’t notably Japanese in appearance. Nor is Johansson.
Purists may not want to hear it, but she’s ideal at the conceptual side of the role. The unusual disconnect between Johansson’s intelligence and her coolly dispassionate looks has been exploited before, most brilliantly in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Here she is both ghost and shell – a pair of soulful eyes, welling with memory and confusion, stranded inside a gorgeously supple action figure.
Directing is Rupert Sanders, who improves massively on his emptily glossy debut Snow White and the Huntsman.
His visual assault this time is thrillingly well-organised and 80% dazzling. The only disappointment is the shop-window, fly-by shots pimping out the environment – they’re overbusy and over-digitised, especially the kitschy holographic landmarks perched high in this concentration city, making the future look like a giant game of Pokémon Go. It’s much better when streets, towers and overpasses are seen on the hoof, rather than shown off, as an out-of-focus neon light show, fuzzy and infinite.
The film needs foreground to make its background work. Lingering close-ups of Mira and her partner Batou ( Borgen ’s Pilou Asbæk), talking on a barge at night, are jaw-droppingly textured on an Imax screen.
A rain-slicked street, which she walks down briefly to pet and feed Batou’s dog, is just a few seconds of ambient magic.
But touches like this make all the difference. Style is a matter of casting, too – when is it not? Johansson is in her element, but Asbæk looks equally fantastic with his spiky hedge of bleachedwhite hair. (Elegantly, the script fills in how his character comes to sport hi-tech goggles where he used to have eyes.)
As their boss, the imperturbable Takeshi Kitano is ingeniously used because his face, half-immobilised in a 1994 scooter accident, lends itself uncannily to thoughts of hidden vital signs. There’s a never-eerier function for Michael Pitt. He is a failed prototype, thrown on the junk-heap, his face patched together, voice semi-computerised.
More so than Oshii’s film, this one emphasises itself as a latterday iteration of the Frankenstein myth, with Pitt as its Creature, and Juliette Binoche’s motherscientist Dr Ouelet as its Victor/ Victoria.
Her part could have been phoned in or hammed up like nobody’s business, but Binoche plays it with grit and feeling. The dialogue floats themes up to the film’s glittering surface, and they manage to hover there with surprising perseverance.
For Johansson, this could easily be a franchise in the making, her own futuristic, post-human equivalent of a John Wick or Bourne. It needs the embrace of an audience first, but with trappings this seductive, it’s hard to see how the offer can be refused. — The Daily Telegraph