Review: “Ghost in the Shell”

Welcome to “Ghost in the Shell,” starring Scarlett Johansson in a body suit even tighter than she wore in “The Avengers.” If the blatant cultural appropriation wasn’t enough to make you hate this movie, its anticlimactic plot-line and mundane performances will.

“Ghost in the Shell” follows Major (Scarlett Johansson), a cyborg on a journey of self-discovery. She awakens in a dystopian future with a state-of-the-art robotic body and a foggy memory. Built to be a weapon with creativity and intuition, she’s the first of her kind: a human “ghost” inside of an advanced synthetic “shell.” Major accepts her role and hunts down criminals with expert precision and a blank face, making sure to strike suggestive poses throughout.

via Paramount Pictures

Things go swimmingly until she meets her latest target, Kuze (Michael Pitt) another cyborg quite like herself. Soon, she realizes that she has been lied to by her creators and her memories have received an extensive overhaul.

Set in a possible future that looks like “Blade Runner” or “The Fifth Element” with updated special effects, the movie is visually claustrophobic in most scenes. In others, the cinematography looks nice, but is only aesthetic for aesthetics’ sake. There are several scenes that feel out of place, and Johansson’s portrayal of a cyborg questioning her humanity is devoid of just that.

“Ghost in the Shell” didn’t do justice to the 1995 anime classic with the same name. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times says the live-action remake “ditches the original’s big…all-too-human questions, but keeps all the firing guns and car chases, the action clichés and intentional genre stereotypes.”

The film’s constant action is unfortunately empty of a plot that would make it enticing. With so much potential for a good story, “Ghost in the Shell” ends up lifeless and flat, pulling more from “The Borne Identity” than its actual source material.