SCARLETT’S CYBER SENSATION
Classy and beguiling, Scarlett Johansson is perfect as a cyborg created to crack crime
THeRe has been a right old brouhaha over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost In The Shell, a live-action version of an acclaimed 1995 ‘ anime’ film, which in turn was based on a popular ‘manga’ (quintessentially Japanese art forms meaning adult cartoons and comic strips, basically).
Screams of cultural appropriation and ‘whitewashing’ have rent the air. Some have declared Johansson a more egregious casting choice than that of Tilda Swinton as a Tibetan sage in last year’s Doctor Strange. But each angry thrust of indignation has met an eye-rolling defensive parry. Could any Japanese actress, in the role of the part-human, part- cyborg heroine Major Motoko Kusanagi, sell the movie to audiences around the world like Scarlett J from New York City? Of course not, goes the argument. Get real and count the box-office receipts.
This battle between cultural integrity and commercial imperatives will recede now Ghost In The Shell is in the cinemas, and folk can see for themselves that, on the whole, it works pretty well. The Japanese name has been quietly removed. The lead character answers just to ‘Major’, or ‘Mira’.
Johansson is as classy as ever as the young woman, some distance in the future, apparently rescued from death by the mysterious Hanka Corporation and rebuilt with cybernetic parts, leaving only her mind and soul. In other words, she ends up with the ghost of her humanity inside a high-tech shell, hence the title.
While purists bang on about the original manga, those of us old enough to remember Lindsay Wagner 40 years ago in The Bionic Woman know there’s nothing entirely new about any of this. BuT
Ghost In The Shell persuasively presents a world in which the line between humans and robots is increasingly blurred, which, apart from the beguiling Johansson, is where its appeal chiefly lies. The film’s often overwrought vision of the future is not so disconnected from our rapidly changing present.
Whatever the whitewashing whingers say, Johansson is perfectly cast. Wearing a slight frown throughout, and with much to frown about, Major is deployed by the Japanese government’s shadowy Section 9 to fight cyber-terror.
All the while she is trying to recover fragments of her human memory, notably in a poignant scene in which she encounters a woman who may or may not be her own mother.
British director Rupert Sanders is more interested in action than poignancy, however. At times, watching this film feels like being trapped inside a giant games console, as Sanders indulges his own hologram-tastic notion of what Tokyo might look like in decades to come.
Resembling a shop- window mannequin and therefore about as desexualised as Johansson could ever be (although there is a fleeting moment of lesbian semi- eroticism), Major goes to war, in cahoots with beefy sidekick Batou (Pilou Asbaek), against a deadly cyberhacker called Kuze (Michael Pitt).
Is he the real villain, though, or is it the Hanka chief, Cutter (Peter Ferdinando)? Or even the head of Section 9, who is played by veteran actor Takeshi Kitano and speaks only Japanese?
It’s occasionally mystifying but mostly entertaining fare, if at times a little too dazzlingly futuristic for its own good. But there are plenty of nice touches, not to mention Juliette Binoche, playing the Hanka scientist who is effectively a