Ghost In The Shell

Director:
Rupert Sanders

Cast:
Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbaek, Juliette Binoche

The long awaited live-action remake to the classic 90’s animated film, “Beauty and the….errr” I mean “Ghost In The Shell”.

Scarlett Johansson stars as “Major”, and in a world where people are embracing mechanical enhancements (robot arms, legs, eyes, etc.), Major is unique in that she’s the first human to have her mind and soul transplanted into a completely artificial body. With this new life, she’s then recruited into a government agency where she assigned to go after people who commit cyber crimes.

 
On an assignment one evening, her and the team she works with, discover that there are assassination attempts being made on people who work for the company that actually built the Major’s cybernetic body. She has a personal stake in this mystery and is taken through a Web of discovery about herself and the people who helped make her who she is.
The unfortunate aspect about adapting much loved stories like “Ghost in the Shell”, is that by the time they’re considered classics, other storytellers have already mined that field and created something else. It happened with “John Carter of Mars” and now with this. “The Matrix” has definitely “borrowed” a lot of aspects from this story and the original Anime, but that was almost 20 years ago. In order for a live action “Ghost In The Shell” to work, ALL the components better be in top form. From the script, to the acting, and directing.

 
I won’t compare this to the original animated film, because as much as I liked it years ago, I don’t think I really ever “got” it, especially to a place where it’s on a pedestal as a movie I love. So this new version has a chance to show me a story I could at least like, and it failed.

The pace is incredibly slow, which wouldn’t be that bad if there were interesting characters to watch. The action sequences don’t have nearly as much style or impact as they should. And when there’s only a few of them, those should be standing out.

Once the mystery of who is going after the scientists comes to the forefront, I was not invested in any of the characters or their goals. This was an incredibly mediocre plot that I kept waiting for it to shift into a higher gear. Instead, it just crawls to a stop.

I will admit the visual landscape here is absolutely fantastic. This looked amazingly like a live action version of a city you would see in a top notch futuristic Anime. Unfortunately, it’s what happened within the city limits wasn’t exciting enough for me.

Grade: 2.5 out of 5

-“Marquee Mark” Markellus