It's possible that when we all die and are reborn as cyborgs or aliens, we'll look like Scarlett Johansson: white and bewildered, gamine-haired and supremely athletic, fierce on the outside and gentler within. The actor's recent list of post-human roles is impressive. She is an extraterrestrial seducer sucking men's souls in Under The Skin; a human-CPU-God hybrid in Lucy; a cybernetic assassin in Ghost In The Shell, which is our subject today. Mind you, even devoid of her physical self, she still embodies the voice of artificial intelligence, as in Her, in which she purrs her way into the consciousness of that world.
What inspired all of this? Her box office appeal (solid, but nothing spectacular) or her bodily presence (not really, in fact she possesses the shape of a Renaissance painting model)? We'll have time to mull that over in Ghost In The Shell, an entertaining, self-serious and somewhat derivative adaptation of hugely popular Japanese manga comics. The whitewashing uproar has subsided -- why is a Caucasian actress playing an iconic Asian cyborg superheroine? -- and yet the film unwittingly courts opposition argument by telling a story of identity theft and manufactured memory.
"You are what we all will become one day," intones a scientist played by Juliette Binoche as she looks at Johansson -- and we're tempted to take that prophecy as a sort of curse.
What we all will become is a cyborg with the "ghost" inside -- the human soul, that is, still valued as a superior quality even in a movie that relies less on human acting than on computerised imagery. Johansson is Major Mira, a fearless operative of Section 9 and finest prototype of human-machine hybridity. Her antiterrorism task force safeguards the dystopian city that has Japanese letterings though it looks like a zonked-out rendition of Hong Kong. Or maybe it just looks like Blade Runner with a 100-times bigger budget: the image in Ghost In The Shell is gorgeous, a cyberpunk cityscape of lurid holograms, iridescent freeways and shimmering neon fogs, all quivering under the nearly-endless rain and heavy skies. When the light is dim, the grey slabs of apartment blocks spell gloom.
The story involves cerebral hacking, memory wiping, brainwave streaming, and a "deep dive" into the downloaded consciousness of a geisha robot (seriously). But principally it's about Major's quest to find out about her past (she's in the same rut as Jason Bourne, with their purloined memory). This is a world where most people are "enhanced" and where a suspect terrorist (Michael Pitt) oozes a robo-grunge charisma of 1990s rock musicians. Major's signature move is to take off her clothes and do a vertiginous plunge into the mayhem in the near-nude -- only that she's not nude, her sexless shell exposing her ambivalent state of being, not a machine, not a human, and certainly not a woman.
Fans would find a lot to pick on -- and to cheer, I suppose. For average viewers, the pacing is quick and the stunning visuals keep you fascinated. For all the supposedly nerdy machinations of the plot, nothing is actually too complicated: the original comics Ghost In The Shell came out in 1989 and had all the cultish elements, but the narrative of an android in search of its inner humanity has since become a little too familiar, from Blade Runner all the way to AI: Artificial Intelligence, with detours in The Matrix and even in Johansson vehicles such as Lucy and Her.
That question of identity, of who Major actually is under the shell, is plain in itself. The film, however, perhaps adds new layers through the fact that it's an American film with purportedly Japanese (or international) influences. Skin colour and national characteristics are blithely mixed here -- you have the American corporate type, a French actress playing chief scientist, and Takeshi Kitano, one of Japan's most recognisable faces, playing the police chief (he's always fun to watch). Major's back story, once revealed, will only fuel the whitewashing debate should one care to pursue it to the end.
In a year when we'll soon see the reboot of Blade Runner, we can't help but wonder why the future is so glum. Here, Johansson has slipped into her shell with smile-less professionalism and inhabits the futuristic cityscape infested with cyborg yakuza with ease, and not with joy. There's no other way for director Rupert Sanders but to take the material very seriously and transform the geeky essence of the narrative into popular entertainment for a global audience. At that level, Ghost In The Shell doesn't disappoint; its appeal is moody and atmospheric, and the appearance of depth makes us feel less guilty. We only wish that Johansson would soon come back to Earth and play human. No more half-creature. That way the talk of humanity may seem fresher -- and real.
Ghost In The Shell
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Takeshi Kitano, Juliette Binoche.
Directed by Rupert Sanders.
