Ghost in the Shell
Scarlett Johansson stuns in this soulful action spectacle
We could talk about the style in Ghost in the Shell all day, and confine the plot to brief brackets. (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 simply by visualising it in as much eyepopping detail as possible. The ghost of the title – derived from the Japanese manga comics by Masamune Shirow, which were heretofore adapted as anime features – is the human consciousness of the heroine.
Played by a black-cropped 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”.
Sometimes called “The Major”, sometimes “Mira”, she is an operative figuring out her place in this richly conceptualised dystopolis which borrows liberally from all the cyberpunk fictions that have come before it. The main characters in Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 animated film weren’t notably Japanese in appearance. Nor is Johansson.
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 debut Snow White and the Huntsman. His visual assault this time is thrillingly wellorganised. The only disappointment are the fly-by shots pimping out the environment – they’re overbusy and over-digitised, especially the kitschy holographic landmarks, perched high up in this concentration city, which make the future look like one giant game of Pokémon Go.
It’s much better when the streets, towers and overpasses are caught on
the hoof, rather than shown off, as an out-of-focus neon light show, fuzzy and infinite. Lingering close-ups of Mira and her partner Batou ( Borgen’s Pilou Asbæk), just 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 bleached-white hair.
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 latter-day iteration of the Frankenstein myth, with Pitt as its Creature, and Juliette Binoche’s mother-scientist 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.
Sanders uses bursts of action to suggest the rules of all this cyber-espionage: compared with the gluttonous overkill of the Matrix pictures, his sequences are satisfyingly disciplined. A painted geisha-synthetic disturbingly sprouts spider-legs in attack mode; masked assassins round on a major character with pummelling gunfire when he’s coffined in his car. There are moments that directly recreate Oshii’s best scenes, with real sets and actors performing a balletic kind of stuntkaraoke.
But the story is far more graspable – more streamlined – and the gracenotes, action-free, tend to be the highlights. When Mira meets a freckled, female street-walker, and finds out she’s fully human, they share a transfixed caress – a real Pris-from-Blade-Runner moment.
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 a willing audience first, but with trappings this glintingly cool and seductive, it’s hard to see how the offer can be refused.
A pair of soulful eyes, welling with memory and confusion, stranded inside a gorgeous action figure