Ghost in the Shell

With Ghost in the Shell, British director Rupert Sanders has created a glittering, action-packed spectacle. It manages to echo the cyberpunk dystopia of the future LA in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, combined with the hints of Lang's Metropolis. From the start, your eyes dart across the screen examining the titan-sized holograms dominating the fictional skyline of New Port City. Advertising is everything, from gym memberships to restaurants, reflecting off the swaths of polished glass.

The visual references read like a bible of futuristic sci-fis, and in 3D can easily trigger vertigo as the camera swings up, rolls and travels back down. As a world creator, Sander’s should be commended. The sets, costumes and props have been designed to the highest levels of detail, from porcelain-faced geishas to the cybernetic body-augmentations that adorn nearly every character.

Scarlett Johansson looks the part in the lead role, echoing performances from a quadrilogy of past acting turns; she's like her characters from The Avengers, Lucy, Under the Skin and Her rolled into one. Danish actor Pilou Asbæk, Juliette Binoche and Danusia Samal make up the international cast, but all fade into the background when ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano looms on screen, complete with a haircut that would make Jim Jarmusch green with envy. There is the accusation of white-washing (a problem plaguing Hollywood cinema still), yet when you reference the original the characters aren’t overtly Asian in appearance, and both Sanders and the original director, Mamoru Oshii, have said the accusations are unfounded.

While Ghost in the Shell replicates some of the most famous scenes from the anime, the plot has been fleshed out, while the philosophical themes are redacted.

It is a cat and mouse plot, where a terrorist, Kuze (Michael Pitt), has discovered a way to hack human minds, and Johansson's Major has the task of hunting him down. Major is an intriguing character: she moves with the not-quite-human glide of AI’s David, but with eyes that reveal the soul beneath the shell. Along the way, we are reminded that she has a ‘ghost’ (read soul) several times; these attempts to imbue Koestler’s famous essay Ghost in the Machine into the plot were handled more deftly in the original anime.

Comparisons to The Matrix are likely, but it should be viewed as a spiritual successor, nodding to ideas of personhood and the nature of memory and how it defines our reality, melded with the man and machine quandaries of Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop.

Ghost in the Shell is a movie that aims to dazzle. In this respect, it is a tremendous success. While there is the odd false note in the screenplay, and plotting that's frustratingly rudimentary, it has moments that are cinematically sublime, making you hope that more is on its way.