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
devoted Dr Frankenstein to Johansson’s earnest monster. ‘I can repair your body but I can’t protect your mind,’ she says, when Major starts suffering ‘glitches’.
There will doubtless be those who moan that the entire movie is a glitch, compared with Mamoru Oshii’s revered anime of 22 years ago. But in the application of Hollywood gloss to the story’s Japanese framework, it’s a respectable effort.
THERE’S another intriguing collaboration behind the scenes of Free Fire. It was shot, on a budget, largely in a warehouse on the outskirts of Brighton. Yet Martin Scorsese is credited as executive producer, and while Quentin Tarantino isn’t credited, he might as well be; his influence pings around this movie like a ricocheting bullet.
Ben Wheatley directed, and the screenplay is by his wife, Amy Jump. I didn’t care for their last picture together, last year’s High-Rise, but this is much less fanciful.
It is set in Boston in the Seventies, and if you’re wondering how East Sussex could ever pass for Massachusetts, almost all of the action unfolds indoors. The film stars Brie Larson as Justine, who has brokered a clandestine arms deal between the IRA, represented by Chris (Cillian Murphy) and Frank (Michael Smiley), and a crass South African gun-runner nicely played for laughs by Sharlto Copley.
The suave middleman is Ord (Armie Hammer), and everything appears to be going smoothly until personal grievances between the respective entourages — in particular the degenerate Stevo (Sam Riley) on the Irish side, and short-tempered Harry (Jack Reynor) on the other — spill into an extended gunfight in a derelict warehouse. It lasts practically for the film’s entire 90 minutes.
That’s a lot of bullets, but not many of them find their intended targets. Wheatley mischievously subverts the standard cinematic convention that the goodies usually hit and the baddies usually miss. Indeed, he has plenty of mischief, and for all the tension and graphic violence, there are enough laugh-outloud moments to designate this a black comedy.
FOR example, just as it’s becoming slightly unclear who is fighting who, one character articulates our uncertainty perfectly: ‘I’ve forgotten which side I’m on,’ he laments.
I also loved a scene in which a John Denver tape has been slotted into a decrepit old van’s music system, and the lovely strains of Annie’s Song resound around the warehouse. Wheatley has a fine eye, and ear, for the incongruous and the absurd.
It doesn’t always pay off. After a while I tired of the zany choreography of the shoot-out, and some of the wry one-liners began to sound forced. I’m also fairly sure nobody in the Seventies told anyone else to ‘take a chill pill’. Nonetheless, as subTarantino entertainment, Free Fire squarely hits the target.