Ghost in the Shell – Review

For avid movie enthusiasts, overall surprise is a rare creature.  Sure, there can be moments of genuine surprise while watching a film, but the overall impression from any given movie is usually in the ballpark of what you were expecting.  Usually when you are proven wrong, it is a film you were hoping tot be great but ended up being a dud.  Ghost in the Shell proves to be the rare gem that vastly surpasses its meagerly set expectations and turns out to be a pretty good movie.

Based on the Japanese manga of the same name, Ghost in the Shell takes place in the not too distant future Japan.  This future fits many common cyberpunk motifs: powerful corporations, oppressive governments, and of course, human augmentation.  The film follows Scarlett Johansson’s character who has taken human augmentation to new heights.  Her human brain has been intricately integrated into a fully cybernetic body.  This incredibly expensive endeavor is the result of a suspect govermnet-corporation cooperative designed to produce super soldiers.  And, just like every other movie/tv show/comic book to ever begin with such a premise, motives are far from pure and things should not be taken at face value.

This is the largest issue for Ghost in the Shell.  It’s not so much of a direct issue, but more of just a tiring notion (and likely also a reason why box office numbers won’t be higher).  The trailers released in the past few months all kind of just pay homage to this tired tale.  Everyone knows what’s going to happen.  Nothing looks that revolutionary.  Scarlett Johannson has been in some other action-lite, tepid sci-fi type films in the past that all seemed to have a similarly generic feeling.

Now, don’t get me wrong . . . there isn’t some dramatic twist that changes all of your preconceived notions.  Things happen pretty similar to how everyone expects before the film begins.  So, why the praise?  It’s all in the execution.

A wide variety of characters have a surprising level of depth.  The portrayal of the augmentations is actually much better than most films get close to.  Instead of just focusing on say visual augmentation which everyone seems to obsess with in this sort of setting, there are a wide variety of augmentations demonstrated which have a very capitalist, supply and demand type feel.  This notion of having whatever augmentations people are willing to pay for makes sense in this mega-corporation type setting.

Portrayal of human interaction is also a plus.  When you have humans who are so heavily augmented, does that change how people interact with each other?  When you have robots are are made to appear so lifelike, how do you know who you are really interacting with?  When humans are so heavily augmented, does that make them less human?  None of these issues are dealt with in a heavy-handed sort of way, but they are all dealt in a tasteful, non-distracting fashion.

Ghost in the Shell is an interesting ride in a very interesting setting.  This would make a very telling first installment in a future franchise, but that will no doubt depend on how the cash roles in.