I keep jumping back and forth on if I want to write about Ghost in the Shell. I kept leaning toward not writing about it because I couldn't get my thoughts organized in this incoherent mess of a movie. It's like the film has a buckshot of ideas that it fires out of a shotgun 500 feet away hoping some might hit the target. Even worse, was that I couldn't really tell if my bias was effecting why I thought the movie was bad. Is it bad only because I am a fan of the classic 1995 anime movie and the TV series, or, would I still think the movie was bad even if I knew nothing about GitS before hand?
To try to solve this question, I did what I normally don't do before writing about a movie, which is look up reviewers I like for their thoughts. Well...solving this question only got more complicated as reviewers I like had a "it wasn't that bad, it was okay" opinions from those who knew nothing of the franchise to another review "really liking it" despite being a fan of the franchise. The overall reviews were pretty bad though according to Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, especially from old media sources. The few I skimmed weren't particularly helpful either but now that the movie is bombing, it has led to a few think pieces.
Those think pieces has helped me. Most of them talk about 1 or 2 issues but I think it's a combination of 3 issues that explains why I didn't like this movie and maybe why it bombed.
1. The Movie Tries to Appeal to Fans, while...
Ghost in the Shell borrows from the manga, the 1995 classic anime, several different TV series, and even a little from the "semi-official" sequels to the 95 anime. This leads to a movie that looks like it went through 17 rewrites and has wayyyyy too many plots going on.
This movie is about The Major, who is a police officer/soldier for Section 9, a counter-terrorism task group (the movie ignores this but Tokyo is a police state in this future. The police and military are sort of the same thing). She has to investigate high profile assassinations among executives of a robotics company. Intercut with that, she also has 2 different self-discovery plots, one about her role in humanity and another about her lost memories.
That is a lot to deal with for a movie that doesn't need extended action sequences, never mind an action movie like GitS. It was apparent that the multiple plots were too much to handle as the main plot ends with a completely unnecessary Captain America: Civil War style plot twist, the role in humanity plot is not resolved, and her lost memories thing suddenly becomes important for no reason. At no point does the Major seem to give two flying fucks about her lost memories but hey, lets resolve that anyway. The audience isn't going to care about a plot if the character doesn't even care.
Ghost in the Shell has always been about heady topics like what it means to be human when AI, cyborgs, and other Deus Ex like features exist. (Can you tell I like this genre?). The movie tries to be that but instead goes into a character centric amnesia arc. GitS has never been a character driven story. It's about its themes and ideas. Major is by far the most fleshed out character in other versions but even then, only barely*. The characters are baseline archetypes for a reason. You can't be faithful to the source material and do a character driven story unless the movie is 4 hours long.
*The GitS TV series' does flesh out other characters more, true, but that's only because you can't have every episode be a Philosophy 101 class.
2. ...Also Trying to Appeal to a Mass Audience.
The movie explains it's title like 5 times. Major, at the most basic level, isn't human or an AI robot. She is a human consciousness inside a robot body, the first of her kind. The movie likes to call it a human spirit or soul, which muddies the cyberpunk theme a little, but yes, she is literally a "ghost in a shell". Her former human life had a near death experience, her consciousness was put into a robot for reasons unknown, and it wiped out her memory.
If you know anything about The Matrix, Deus Ex, or fucking Blade Runner, you don't need to explain this over and over. The audience gets it. Yet for some reason, "The Net"* is completely ignored. The role of the internet is maybe mentioned off hand but that is it. Why this is left out is mind boggling because it explains the unexplained. Since I'm a fan, I know why her consciousness was put into a robot body, but the movie doesn't say. The villain, Hideo Kuze, kind of dances around that with vague dialogue but never clearly explains what a new person to the franchise is going to want to know.
*Yes it's called "The Net". This franchise was made in the 90's yo.
The inexplicable mess of storytelling and editing probably didn't help either.
3. The Whitewashing.
There has been a weird Hollywood trend in the last few months of movies looking to cash in on the Asian market. Remember The Great Wall starring Matt Damon (no, you didn't, but you do now)? That was only a couple months ago. Hmmmm....if I had to take a guess, it's that these projects saw Asia as their profit, but needed a big name actor to make the movie so that the West would cover the costs of the movie.
Almost NOBODY sees a movie for the actor or actress anymore. Why is this still a thing? Johnny Depp did a bunch of movies that flopped after Pirates because Hollywood thought people wanted to see Depp. The movie Aloha! is so shit it was sold only on its actors and still flopped. Movie 43 is a bomb, and grossly incompetent, that promoted its high number of A-list actors as it's only selling point.
This movie probably does not get made without Scarlet Johanssen. Yet, the "progressive" mind set of Hollywood has not seemed to realize this movie would be better with a Japanese actress, even an unknown one. ScarJo is horribly miscast in this movie because the Major is supposed to be contemplative, down to business, and empty looking. She is supposed to act like a robot who says human things....NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
The movie tried to defend itself against the controversy by showing that the cast is actually multi-ethnic. This is true, but besides Beat Takeshi Kitano*, they are barely in the movie. Togusa, a major character in every GitS adaptation, has 1.5 scenes. The 0.5 is from a 2 second long shot of him getting ready for the final battle only to disappear from the movie all together. He doesn't show up for the movies climax. Have fun...Japanese actor with almost no screen time.
*The scenes with Beat Takeshi and ScarJo are a microcosm of how this movie sucks. Whenever they speak together, Beat speaks in Japanese with subtitles, ScarJo in English, both understand each other, but THIS IS NOT HOW PEOPLE CONVERSE. It's extremely jarring and takes you out of the movie. Also, because of the way these conversations are shot, I don't think Beat and ScarJo were ever in the same room together. Like Beat refused to do shooting outside of Japan.
Just please stop Hollywood. I'm exhausted about this topic so here is John Oliver.
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