‘Ghost in the Shell’
Director: Rupert Sanders. Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Juliette Binoche, Michael Pitt. Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence, suggestive content and some disturbing images. Great Fair Bad Good Bomb of this futuristic world and its characters. Major’s cybernetic body is a marvel: her synthetic flesh detaches in panels or tears in battle to reveal the metallic inner workings. It combat, it camouflages with its surrounding environment, and the resulting fight scenes — Major’s body a mere blur, a disturbance in the water, a shimmering in the air — are more thrilling and unpredictable for it. Each cyborg has its own unique characteristics — detachable eyes, spidery extendable fingers — and the robotic designs are a delight, especially the creepy black-eyed robot geisha who plays a pivotal role in the plot.
The physical environments are a playground for opulent production design. The setting is an Asian-flavored metropolis summer job and apartment hunting while lobbing plenty of frustrated eyerolls at foundering Enid. It’s a quintessential early-21st-century indie film that captures the adolescent terror of becoming trapped in the wrong life, while having no idea what the right life even is.
3. ‘Her’ (2013)
Master music-video director Spike Jonze (“Being John Malkovich,” “Where the Wild Things Are”) has a knack for the beautifully sad and unapologetically weird. Those two gifts are married in this off-kilter, slightly futuristic tale of a lonely, nearly divorced writer named Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with an incorporeal operating system (voiced seductively by Johansson). It would strain credulity were it not for Johansson’s performance, an award-worthy vocal tour de force that had people arguing about Oscar rules for best actress (she wasn’t nominated but deserved to be).
2. ‘Lost in Translation’ (2003)
Sofia Coppola’s minimalist love story treads lightly but hits hard. Johansson plays Charlotte, the young, disillusioned whose futuristic design is eye popping, but borrows heavily from superior visual works of sci-fi like “Blade Runner,” “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” and “Minority Report.” The stories-tall holographic women and adverts hover over the film’s action like ghosts of sci-fi films past.
Even when this new “Ghost in the Shell” gets it right, it’s borrowing from filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and the Wachowskis, who themselves were influenced by the original anime. The film doesn’t expand on or reinterpret the aesthetic so much as it doubles back on and devours it, like a pop-culture ouroboros.
There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before done better, not just in the “Ghost in the Shell,” but in all the superior films it inspired. wife of a photographer on assignment in Tokyo. There, she meets Bob Harris (Bill Murray), a past-hisprime American film actor in a lackluster Stateside marriage who’s relegated to shooting foreign whiskey commercials. Lonely and bemused in a foreign country, the unlikely couple bond in the neon glow of Tokyo, their aching connection culminating in an infamously ambiguous ending. Johansson’s melancholy character doesn’t say much, but she doesn’t need to.
1. ‘Under the Skin’ (2013)
Jonathan Glazer’s powerfully unnerving film is a master class in minimalist terror, filled with sounds and images – a baby wailing on the beach, a deformed face, men sinking lost into liquid black floors – that threaten to haunt a lifetime. Johansson plays an unnamed, otherworldly woman who quietly scours Scotland, preying on men with her sexuality. Glazer uses the camera to offer an alien perspective on humanity, as the alien at its center begins to identify with her prey. It’s a mesmerizing films, and one too elusive to ever give up all its secrets.