"Ghost in the Shell" (IndieWire 29/03/17)

Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 cyberpunk opus Ghost in the Shell, one of the first Japanese anime titles to cross over to Western audiences, has been reissued and repackaged so often since the millennium that it’s scant surprise studio execs seized upon it as reproducible property. Possibly it was a matter of waiting: for digital effects houses to get up to spec, the right deals to be struck, and any accusations of cultural appropriation to blow over. Paramount’s all-new live-action Ghost, powered by hefty reserves of American and Far Eastern money, emerges as a dazzling logistical display with a missing file where the human interest might once have been stored.

Fans need not blubber unduly: as overseen by Snow White and the Huntsman’s Rupert Sanders, this transliteration would seem faithful enough to satiate those who just want to see favourite scenes and characters redrawn on the biggest screen imaginable. As that suggests, what’s been tinkered with is the scale: Oshii’s knotty postmodern inquiries into identity – a stopover on that fin-de-siècle sci-fi continuum connecting Blade Runner to The Matrix – are here stretched into IMAX-ready, 3D-enabled spectacle. Blown up to this magnitude, ideas already threadbare through twenty years of recycling start to look doubly thin.

Narratively, there’s little to separate the two movies. Again, we open on the creation of a cyborg – Scarlett Johansson’s Major, being a human brain, retrieved in the wake of a fatal accident, set lovingly in a slinky-dinky metal-plastic carapace – who evolves to exist at the mercy of multiple masters. There’s the counterterrorism chief (Takeshi Kitano) who dispatches her to investigate a series of assassinations; the female engineer (Juliette Binoche, slumming elegantly) who nurtures her and patches her up; and her corporate manufacturers – embodied by Peter Ferdinando’s brooding Mr. Cutter – who regard her as no more than an asset on a spreadsheet.

More compelling than any of these figures, however, is the realm they pass through. The flawed but glitzy Snow White rehash positioned Sanders as a facilitator of lavishly visualised if faintly derivative worlds; armed here with both the latest modelling software and several skilled analogue collaborators – production designer Jan Roelfs (Gattaca), emergent cinematographer Jess Hall (Transcendence) – he goes into hyperdrive. Every scene thrusts out something to catch (and occasionally caress) the eye: murky drinking dens besieged by scuttling, arachnoid attendants, a watery virtual limbo where binary ones and zeroes float up like bubbles.

So yes, it’s the shiniest of kit; whether the emotions are stirred is another matter. Johansson sets the level of engagement, by playing the impervious shell rather better than she does the restless ghost. In 2013’s unsettling Under the Skin, the actress was directed into signalling a hybrid’s dawning consciousness (and conscience); here, she’s limited to looking puzzled while convoluted plot stuff streams around her. The time Johansson has logged among the Avengers means she could perform the role’s asskicking aspects in her sleep – but in so many other scenes, she appears to be on autopilot: left to execute commands, rather than encouraged to flesh this part out.

Supporting players are defined chiefly by their hairstyles. Snowtown ne’er-do-well Daniel Henshall models a mullet that identifies him as an individual of questionable judgement; Major’s sidekick Pilou Asbaek sports a shock of white fluff that might work for manga heroes but turns grown men into Billy Idol tribute acts. As his explosion-blackened corneas are replaced with ophthalmic lenses, you sense a rampant techno-decorousness beginning to consume the performers – a instinct compounded upon seeing Buddhist monks plugged into a towering cable router redolent of Avatar’s Tree of Life. Like much else here, it’s striking but second-hand.

That last image has presumably been designed to chime with a moment when even the Dalai Lama delivers his wisdom in 140-character bytes, yet – like the allusions to corporate overreach and female consent – it doesn’t connect meaningfully with anything else: the data collected from Oshii’s film is pinged round inside the new film’s circuitry without it ever threatening to accumulate any critical mass. The result is a Ghost for the Twitterati, all flashing lights and pretty colours, at once distracting and distractible, busily spinning its wheels ahead of a citytrashing finale that recalls… well, every other citytrashing finale of the past half-decade.

As with Twitter, the film is not without its passing, superficial pleasures, and non-devotees might soak up some of its stimuli for future repurposing as profile photos, or as the backdrop to a club night. Sanders is becoming increasingly adept at framing the kind of images any 14-year-old would deem cool (Scar-Jo in slo-mo, erupting through plate glass in latex!), which should ensure smooth progress in the modern movie business. Yet whatever philosophical nuggets were lurking amid Oshii’s tangled plotting, they surely merited closer consideration by a filmmaker who wasn’t just trading in gloss, and doesn’t merely regard human beings as elements of design.

Grade: B-