Ghost In The Shell

Scarlett Johansson stars as a cyber soldier in a live-action take on the Japanimation classic that brings the flash but forgets the heart and brains.

- Jordan Mintzer

If the “ghost” of anime classic Ghost in the Shell refers to the soul looming inside of its killer female cyborg, then this live action reboot from director Rupert Sanders really only leaves us the shell: a heavily computer generated enterprise with more body than brains and more visuals than ideas, as if the original movie’s hard drive had been wiped clean of all that was dark, poetic and mystifying.

Not that it’s easy to follow in the footsteps of Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 Japanimation masterpiece, which remains a cornerstone of the genre and sits somewhere between Blade Runner and The Matrix. But Sanders and his team clearly have opted for a sleek, watered-down version that eschews much of the first film’s AI existentialism for a futuristic shooter that never digs deep enough.

Abetted by a few cool set pieces and a gun-toting Scarlett Johansson, this Paramount release will see strong box-office returns before disappearing from most viewers’ minds.

The movie already met with some criticism two years ago when Johansson was cast as the partrobot, part-human Terminatrix known as Major, whereas the character in Oshii’s movie and Masamune Shirow’s manga series was Asian. Such whitewashing is becoming more and more controversial for Hollywood studios trying to woo a burgeoning fan and financial base in the East, and nearly all the principal players here are Caucasian, save for a memorable “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, who manages to steal most of his scenes without ever getting up from his desk chair.