Did you see the new Ghost in the Shell movie?

So I just came back from seeing this thing.

I watched the original 1995 movie a few times and always appreciated it for it's art first and foremost. I never considered Ghost in the Shell to be a great anime movie as far as pacing and story goes, always thought it was a little too meandering in places, but the entire package was extremely compelling back in 1996 or so when I first saw it and to a lesser degree I do think it stands the test of time. The "GITS" shows I always thought looked awful and it was at a point in my life where it seemed like anime and me just chose different paths in life and didn't agree anymore as no new shows really appealed to me all that much.

That said, this movie is a weird thing. Ironically I think it really suffers from this identity crisis. After the trailers I was sort of convinced this would be a typical Hollywood adaptation with a lot of action and a light sprinkling of plot lifted from the source material to liven it up. After all you see ScarJo running along that wall offing guys in slow motion and all that. This movie is definitely not an action flick I can tell you that. It moves about as slowly as the original 1995 anime with a lot of talking. That said, it's not nearly as deep or introspective as the source material either. What they've done here is taken the anime movie and the anime show, and then cut and pasted scenes from both, stringing them together to make this loosely tied together end product. Here is the fight with the hacker wearing the stealth camo, here is the diving scene, here is a really poorly done rendition of the major waving her hand over her face to engage the stealth camo.. It's like a best hits collection.

Some of the CGI was good and some of it, especially that final scene before the credits (if you've seen the movie you know the one..) is pretty lackluster. The plot is kind of all over the place, and at one point they kind of abandon an entire part of it in favor of starting another one. There is a lot of talk online about whitewashing but I honestly couldn't care less since thats the least of Ghosts problems.

They did a good job with the city, and there are plenty of languid shots of it sprinkled throughout this film. You can almost believe there would be a world like this in the future seeing the way ads and technology is moving forward. There isn't a whole lot of world building per-se, and I do think some people who aren't familiar with the series might feel a little lost at times.

Did you guys see it? Are you fans of the source material? Overall I thought it was like ehhhh.. middling. I honestly would have preferred if they straight up dumbed it down and made it into a huge action movie instead of trying to straddle the line between trying to please fans while also trying to make it accessible to a worldwide audience.

EDIT: Oh I also forgot to mention that I didn't think ScarJo did an awful job here or anything but I didn't think she was all that great either. She is a good actress in her own right but I don't think she does well in action films. I always thought Mary Elizabeth Winstead from the recent 17 Cloverfield Lane would have fit a lot better in that role, and she has the better physique for it too. I'm not sure if this was Scarletts idea or the director, but she does this exaggerated stiff strut throughout the entire film which I understand is supposed to represent her robotic nature or simply the major still getting acquainted with her body, but it's so forced and unnatural the way she swings her shoulders around that it just ends up looking comical instead. To give credit where credit is due I do think there are moments where she does play someone detached from their body very well.

Everyone says it's Ok, average, middling, so no I won't bother.

I really like the first movie and the Stand Alone Complex show. Never watched Arise, yet.

By the way, it's not white washing. Motoko's body is a robot. She is not asian. This should not be a controversy. ScarJo is attractive, looks like Motoko, and is good at playing a robot. That's not a stab at her acting, I genuinely think she plays a good robot from the way she coldly delivered her lines as the alien in "Under the Skin." She's a good actress.

not yet. that first trailer had me thinking they had the look down pat but later ones made it feel more generic and a rehash of the first movie. to be fair i think they were stuck in a rough spot of having to make it an adaptation for a (potentially) wider audience, which i guess begs the question again of why this was made in the first place. i also heard 2nd hand that it doesn't really delve deep into philosophical, social, and political issues like the movies/series do. i might watch it someday, but then again i said that about the aeon flux movie too and never did (which i also felt i'd enjoy as a friend of mine who was a fan liked it).

i feel like i'm being as nitpicky as others when i say it, but the remix of the original theme grates on me pretty bad.

No, it's literally white-washing. White-washing is a plot point. They literally put an asian brain into a white body.

@taesoawful: What are you talking about.....The body is synthetic. The body is not caucasian.

The major's synthetic body in the original manga isn't supposed to be any particular race. It's just a pale colored synthetic body.

I wish they would have done more their own thing with this. My American Ghost in the Shell adaptation would probably take place in Los Angeles. Major and most of the members of Section 9 would have English names. The plot would be original or borrow from other manga chapters. This looks like a pointless imitation.

Kusanagi is not a robot and she's not really that robotic in the movie, manga or TV show. I'm not sure who I would have picked. I like Brie Larson is Room and Short Term 12. She's a fine actress and taller than Johanson. Maybe if she built up some muscle. Johanson doesn't have the right figure, I feel. The major should have the physique of an athlete. While it's true that she has a fully prosthetic body, the artificial muscles still act like real muscles. Why would Kusanagi not pick an ideal body type for work that's physically demanding? I find it disappointing that actors are always expected to work out and build muscle for action roles, but no one expects the same from actresses. Noomi Rapace in Prometheus and Vasquez from Aliens are rare exceptions.

Of course, I'm suggesting Brie Larson with the assumption that my Ghost in the Shell adaptation takes place in America.

A PG-13 live action Ghost In The Shell movie is not something I'm interested in.

@ezekiel: I don't know, I don't see a problem with her figure. She doesn't appear all that muscular in the show. In the movie she does a bit yeah. I don't see it as a big problem

I would have preferred if scarjo built more muscle though

Yeah, that's pretty shitty too. I want my blood and gore. They decided to remake the shelling scene from the original, but didn't show any nudity, which is absurd, as it's the birth of her body.

@dudeglove: I don't know what is repellent about it. I don't want to get into any spoilers here but some reviewer mentioned how the ending was something that ScarJo should have read and been completely against, or that someone should have told her about it, but I think the whole point of the movie leads up to that ending - that it really doesn't matter, you are not defined by your "shell". The whole movie is about finding your identity beyond the physical, well sort of.. at least it tries to be about that for all of like 15 minutes.. so the whole whitewashing controversy is really weird in this situation especially since the cast is pretty varied.

Also it's admirable that to this day no movie has trumped Fifth Elements sequence of building a body from nothing. The shelling sequence from this movie was pretty disappointing, and not because we didn't get to see any boobs, because who cares, but because it honestly pales in comparison to not only Fifth Element which is a decade old movie, but to the original anime film as well. The CGI in that sequence I thought was kind of poor and the flashing lights near the end were like what..?

Talking about flashing lights - if you have any epileptic tendencies with visual cues being a trigger, there is a fight sequence in the middle of the movie that is HARSH on the eyes to the point where I had to close them and I don't have any of those issues. One of those things they should have caught in the edit or test screenings or something because the intensity of the flickering black and white light is brutal.

I feel super uninterested in it. I don't have much love for the first movie, I was too young and barely into anime when the movie came out. Seeing it several years later didn't do a whole lot for me. Honestly I find most anime movies to be not my thing as I feel they're just too short for their material(I have watched and loved a lot of anime). I DO extremely enjoy the first GitS show, stand alone complex. In my eyes, the first anime movie and this hollywood remake while different than eachother, are also different that stand alone complex in what they are trying to achieve and why looking at those differences I'm not interested.

Also reviews seem blah across the board. Decent spectacle but too busy to be bothered to get really into characters or philosophy from what I've read.

Having watched it from that IGN clip, I don't really like it, but did you mean decades? Cause Fifth Element is 20 years old this year and, you're right, it's still pretty great.

@vortextk: Sure, I was too lazy to fact check exactly how long it has been. I suppose a better phrase would be "over a decade old.."

For anyone interested who is maybe to young to have seen it, here is the Fifth Element sequence:

I'll watch anything with Scarlett Johansson.

Nah, no interest due to whitewashing.

@dudeglove: If Mamoru Oshii is ok with it then who am I to complain.

The art style of the original animation arguably could depict a Caucasian woman as the lead (who is a robot).

By the way, there's a lot of Asian actors in the film so they're doing a pretty bad job at whitewashing.

Never saw the original. SAC is pretty cool. Not really interested in this movie though. GitS seems like the type of thing whose unique attributes would get lost in translation to a big Hollywood production.

@cmblasko: that's not one of the issues this movie seems to have.

i also laughed at people wanting asian actors for full metal alchemist (the characters are german)

This is such an abhorrent comment. I'm not going to go on a whole thing about WWII but to bring up that stuff here (strongly implying) is ludicrous. Japan was responsible for acts worse than some of the most vile Nazi human experimentations. They fed poison to Chinese children disguised as candy amongst mass rape & murder in villages (among their own experimentation).

I have issues with the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as America's disgusting pardoning of the Emperor and bargaining for the research from such experiments, but if we're going to judge America by WWII then Japan comes off far worse for the sheer depravity of their crimes. Japan was embarking on genocide, more than the death toll from the atom bombs would have occurred if not for them being dropped (open to interpretation, but likely America's claim is true).

Anyway my girlfriend is Japanese. She thinks Scarlett looks cool in the role. I've yet to hear a Japanese person complain about 'whitewashing', it seems to be westerners doing it. Just like only westerners tried to say that foreigners wearing kimono is 'cultural appropriation'.

Sorry to OP for going off topic but this annoyed me to be honest.

I've gone back and forth, side to side, and every way in between on this movie leading up to it's release. At some point, I just landed on apathy. And after watching it, that's the best way I can describe my feelings. Apathy.

I just don't care.

That said, I'd throw in the same bucket along with Arise which, if you've heard me bitch and moan about it before, you know how much I hate that show. I couldn't bring myself to hate this though...which is probably worse in some ways? Maybe it's because I didn't get my hopes up like I did with Arise?

Anywho, much like Arise, this movie is maybe at best Ghost in the Shell on the surface. It wants to be Ghost in the Shell. Looks like Ghost in the Shell. Walks like Ghost in the Shell. Acts like Ghost in the Shell. Then it opens it's mouth and you're instantly like "heeeey, you're not Ghost in the Shell."

Kind of depends on the scene.

The art style doesn't matter, though. Anime art is stylized. She's Japanese. She has dark hair and, more importantly, a Japanese name.

I couldn't even make it through the second episode of Arise. I don't know how IG could neglect and mess up the franchise so badly since the end of Stand Alone Complex.

@cmblasko: Same; I'm sick of people making excuses for white washing. No matter the movie, white washing apologist always find a way to justify POC being side lined or replaced but they never seem to give an explanation why the character has to be white. I want the studio to explain why they felt they had to have a white woman play the lead and how they think it added anything to the story line or atmosphere - other than their profit line of course.

On a side note, I've always thought Ghost in the Shell is far too up its own ass with its story telling. The movie and anime more so than the manga. Especially The Stand Alone Complex, the show relays too much on exposition dumps and characters explaining the plot elements to one another instead of explaining through action, AKA proper story telling. Episode 9 "Chat-Chat-Chat" of Stand Alone Complex has to be a prime example of this, 30 minutes of characters talking and spewing empty anime philosophy to one another. I can see if there was some drama, 12 angry men style or Midnight from Doctor Who 10th season but no. They sit in a bland room throwing pseudo-philosophy at each other, explaining plot points to one another and elements of the Laughing Man, which as elite hackers they should already know, but they have to explain it to the audience, so... thinly veiled exposition dump!!!

Also Mamoru Oshii is the director of the GITS movie, not its creator. The creator and writer of GITS: Shirow Masamune, has expressed no opinion on the subject.

Sorry for the rant, but I think GITS broke some interesting new grounds but gets a lot more credit than I think it deserves. Just my opinion though.

The whole "the Major being white" thing really just depends on what the movie is drawing more inspiration from / referencing. If it's the movies, then it's not actually that big of an issue for me. If it's the Stand Alone Complex shows, then it's going to feel weird as pro-Japanese nationalism is a pretty big part of those shows.

On a side note, I think most people criticizing it for whitewashing is doing so less because of the logic of it in world, and more because it feels like an opportunity in which Asian actors and actresses are being denied lead roles in a film with distinctly Asian roots. Excuses such as "she could have passed for white in the source material" and "there are other Asian actors in it" are hardly satisfactory in that case.

Personally, as long as it's not as bad as Firefly in terms of whitewashing, I'll tolerate it. Pretty low bar admittedly.

@ezekiel said:

@wynnduffy said:

@cmblasko said:

Nah, no interest due to whitewashing.

The art style of the original animation arguably could depict a Caucasian woman as the lead (who is a robot).

Kind of depends on the scene.

The art style doesn't matter, though. Anime art is stylized. She's Japanese. She has dark hair and, more importantly, a Japanese name.

I could go back and forth on this and not really care about the outcome to be honest. I think people are overreacting by claiming it is whitewashing (not saying you) but actually the "issue" is Hollywood wants a big name that the western world knows to try and bring in more than just the fans of the anime.

Aside from Takeshi Kitano (who is as usual amazing) and Ken Watanabe there's not a lot of Japanese actors I can think of that western audiences would know (and even these two aren't that popular out of Japan).

I'd choose a Japanese live action GOTS movie over this without a doubt, but there's not that many examples of films that came from Japan and made a stamp on the west. The most popular I can think of is Ring, Juon and Battle Royale (Studio Ghibli stuff too).

If people look beyond race I think it's easy to see why they would put someone like Scarlett in the lead role. J-Cinema is great, but I am a minority in saying that, they want to bring in the masses and this is what we get because of it.

The way I see it they had two choices, make it a Japanese production and subtitle/dub it (which wouldn't make the money they clearly are aspiring to make) or release it in English with someone like Haruka Ayase instead of Scarlett Johannson as the lead. Does anybody think Haruka (who is fantastic) would generate more exposure than Scarlett? Let's not kid ourselves, people.

I agree about Stand Alone Complex. I still liked it, but I wish it had been more personal and used its visuals more instead of being such a dry talky. It's like if you took almost all the personal drama out of The Wire.

I think the manga is kind of underappreciated compared to the adaptations. I like how the characters aren't as stoic as in the movie and how it's not as much a political talky as the TV show, especially season 2. I prefer the more expressive Kusanagi in the manga. She has far better fashion sense than in the TV show, especially season 1, where she wears that trashy leotard.

She also usually looks better from different angles, because she's not designed for cheap TV animation. The manga also has more of a cool cyberPUNK look, which mostly vanished in the other versions.

The manga is also the only version in which she has a boyfriend and a sex life. The adaptations are impersonal in that aspect. None of the characters are very interesting, though.

I don't love the manga, though. The original manga, first movie and TV show all rank about evenly for me. I find them all overrated, but they're generally good. My main problem with the manga is that it's slightly incoherent in some chapters and doesn't feel as connected as the movie chapters and TV show. It also focuses a little too much on the technology at times.

Japanese people are not POC. I hope this post is not considered controversial but I feel that Japanese people have a very light complexion overall. Okinawans are often tanned but on Kyushu, Honshu and Hokkaido, yeeeeeah, a lot of white skin around. I think people who have spent time in Japan would be able to see where I am coming from here.

Anyway I'll repeat what I said above: Scarlett is more popular than any Japanese actress. They want the profit and the exposure, Scarlett has more chance of getting them that. They could have used an Asian-American like Maggie Q but again, does she have the clout of Scarlett? Nope. It could also be that Scarlett's role in Lost in Translation influenced this casting decision, but that is baseless speculation.

Hollywood likes safe bets. I don't have a hard time believing that if Maggie Q (or insert other Asian actress) was more popular she'd have every chance of being the lead.

I think the better question is why it has to take place in East Asia. There would be less controversy right now if the writers had adapted the story to their own culture, like Scorsese did with The Departed and like Kurosawa did with Shakespeare. It's kind of like Matt Damon being the savior of the Chinese in that Great Wall movie and Tom Cruise being the last samurai. They're outsiders. I think a futuristic L.A. would have been more suitable for an English language sci-fi film starring an American star. For a chapter with that Hong Kong look, there is Chinatown. They don't even have to mention Kusanagi. Give her a western name.

I saw it yesterday and thought it was ok but not great. Won't comment on the whitewashing stuff cause that's been talked about to death, but I will say at they tried to work that issue into the plot, however contrived you may think of it. The writing is a bit too hamfisted, they keep banging you over the head about how your ghost being the soul and you are more than your shell. It always seems to try to touch on those philosophical topics but never does anything after that. The city and world looks nice, but it just feels like a slicker version of the world from the 1995 movie, just with more holograms. Seriously, Blade Runner was 30 years ago and has already done that shit way better, I need something new in a sci-fi movie beyond a big geisha hologram ad. I will say though, the Section 9 team is probably the best part of the film. Beat Takeshi steals the show even though he was barely in it. I also liked how diverse the team was, making it much more ambiguous where the city is set. I honestly was just picturing it as a near future Hong Kong, since it featured many iconic HK buildings, architecture and general street layouts.

Anyways, it wasn't great but it wasn't terrible either. It did made me go and watch the 1995 movie and I realised how many of the shots were lifted directly from that.

Then at that point, why would you call it Ghost in the Shell?

I liked what they did with it.

I love Stand Alone Complex, but the movie isn't something I come back to often. But overall this was a well-made adaption that did its own thing.

So i have like 0 knowledge of anything ghost in the shell and cared 0 about seeking out anything ghost in the shell, and saw this movie, and actually thought it was alright, if it wasn't for stuff like Nier and Persona, i would actually seek out and watch stuff like the animated movie and the show now.

Well, if you need easy access, the entire franchise is apparently available on Steam now.

@ezekiel: They are happy to use Japan as a cool backdrop because that's still interesting for the west, but refuse to use a less popular actress as a lead

I'm surprised people have been claiming it's whitewashing instead of being annoyed at them obviously trying to claw exposure by attaching Scarlett to it

Because it has the philosophy, Section 9, the attractive cyborg protagonist, the technology, the extreme violence, the artificial intelligence, the action.... The country isn't THAT important. If it were THAT important, everybody should be complaining that this movie takes place in Hong Kong instead of Japan.

Personally, GITS without the tint of Japanese nationalism isn't GITS. I actually am annoyed if it takes place in Hong Kong instead of Japan.

Future Los Angeles can be pretty exotic, though. Look at the Chinese-influenced cyberpunk world of Blade Runner.

I might be wrong. I'm assuming it takes place in Hong Kong because of what the lead art director says at the end of the following video. I can't tell if he's talking about the actual city or the fictional world when he says, "Hong Kong is out that door." It's weird of him to say that after talking about Major's room like it's real.

@ezekiel: True, Blade Runner holds up so well too

Just to add a little positivity I actually really enjoyed the movie. The originals still exist, and there is current/recent content, so I dont need the adaptions to keep all that much beyond a core idea. I enjoyed this version of the story, I preferred the way it handled the 'questions' (I found the anime to be overly ponderous over something I didnt find as interesting), I really enjoyed the visual style (its cliche, very Blade Runner but its good) and I thought the mixture of a typically western cast speaking english with a lot of asian/japanese people with subtitles actually lending itself to a sense of both near-future culture mixing and added to the aspect of the Major's (and the villain) history in terms of being stolen from herself. The image of the very white/western character approaching her very asian mother and having a sense of "that dosent look right", whether intentional or not, I thought played heavily into how much was stolen from the Major.

Certainly not a perfect movie but I I liked the characters, visuals, action & story well enough I came away pleased and would be interested in a second film.

Considering it grossed only $19 million in it's opening weekend, to be beat by baby Alec Baldwin, I think the argument that ScarJo has the star power studio execs need to sell their movies is lacking. Worldwide sales are the main thing supporting this movie right now. It's a poor excuse at this point to say that films need "star-power" when what people really want are great stories.

There are a lot of arguments being made supporting the white-washing and I only know a cursory amount on the history of Hollywood white-washing, but from what I saw of the plot, this is "Quiet has to be almost naked because of the plot" levels of hoops you have to go through to explain a director's or executive's decision. The whole deal of "Oh, the original director is okay with it" or "I know Japanese people are fine with it" is a pretty bland and tone-deaf hand-waving of the issue. If Spike Lee was okay with an all white remake of "Do the Right Thing" that wouldn't dismiss criticisms of white-washing. There was a really good blog post I read from a Japanese-American explaining how folks in Japan don't see white-washing as a problem because they have their own media and movie industry controlled by Japanese for Japanese. They don't have to worry about representation or job opportunities. I wish I could find that blog again because it was more concise and articulate than I could hope to repeat.

Scarlett is still more well known across the world than any Japanese actresses which would help exposure though, well, except in Japan of course. I'm sure it helps, to me though she has no star power, I think she is boring and I have no reverence for any of the movies she has been in.

But... I sure did have a crush on her when I was like 7 years old watching Home Alone 3.

I don't agree with the casting or this film's existence in general, I'd rather it be a Japanese production. I also do not know the reason Scarlett was chosen but I have a very difficult time believing discrimination against Asian actresses took place. Whitewashing is a loaded term, some people love throwing around those.

@core1065: Yep, lots of people doing mental gymnastics to defend a subpar movie against the dreaded liberal/PC/SJW/whatever criticism. "But she was never Japanese! She's a robot, she doesn't have a race! Her skin color is light in complexion!" LOL, whatever.

Lots of Asian actors in the film but the main character is played by a white American actress? HUH, WEIRD.

How do people bear going around unironically calling people "POCs." That shit's so patronizing. Like all that "ally" business.

Tilda Swinton and Chiwetel Ejiofor were great in Doctor Strange. If Stephen Strange was Indian, it'd be weird. If Link was reincarnated as a girl, that'd be cool. Scarlet Johannsen could believably pull off looking like Mokoto, but they somehow still made her look like she was cosplaying. This movie don't look great but I'll still watch it at some point, maybe, probably in the background while I'm doing something else. If they ever make a live-action Akira movie, I'd hope everyone in it (except the American spy guy and them boat folks IIRC) would look Japanese, and that it be set in Neo-Tokyo (which to be clear would be in Japan). Also, adapt the books. At least two movies.

@cmblasko: You're too thirsty to make this about race.

I will never understand people who get more offended than the races they think they're defending.

Your attitude is too extreme in my opinion thus there's no way we will reach any common ground. I'm not going to waste the mod team's time or risk getting OP's thread locked, so let's leave it.

Yeah, this multiple decade's old, Hollywood shuffle-casting shit is so fucking old. Minority scenery (locations, supporting cast) but the focal point (main characters) who the audience sees through and relates with most must be white.

No matter what's being discussed, the defenders are what really get me though. You can still like the thing being criticized, whether or not you believe in the criticism. Some people saying that the movie is white-washing isn't a personal attack against you nor does it make you a bad person if you enjoyed it.

You should reconsider making assumptions about the race of someone you're talking to on the internet.

I still think it's more that Hollywood are trying to get more interest by putting better known actors in the roles than some kind of effort to white everything up. Just like in video games, who/what's on the boxart/poster matters for the average schmuck and there's an aversion to risk taking.

I haven't watched this movie and I won't be so I'm not trying to defend it, I didn't like GITS (the original) but maybe I'll revisit it someday.

When it comes to these American adaptations I usually find the original and watch those instead. When I heard about the American remake of Oldboy I finally got around to watching the Korean version -- fantastic.

Juon (The Grudge), Battle Royale (Hunger Games-ish), Oldboy, The Vanishing and Ring were all better than the American wannabes. I know some people who simply won't watch films with subtitles, suckers I say.

Yeah that's true, though as an extension of that people shouldn't assume X race/gender/whatever are offended by something and start name calling or spitting out accusations. I'm not sure but I think when this site hired Dan and Jason there were people criticising the site for being sexist, but they had no way of knowing if sex played a role in hiring...