Ghost In The Shell Review

Scarlett Johansson stars as Major Mira Killian, a cyborg with a human brain (as opposed to AI) created by Hanka Robotics and working for Section 9, the counter-terrorism section of the Japanese government, with Batou and Togusa.

Interesting to see Johansson starring as another enhanced, all-action character (as previously as the Black Widow and Lucy, to name a few) and it is a far cry from her breakthrough in Ghost World with Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi.

Also of note in the cast is Takeshi Kitano as Chief Daisuke Aramaki, the man in charge of Section 9.

There has been a lot of controversial talk about this movie and "whitewashing" which I think is worth mentioning but not really an issue in my eyes, I see what people are talking about but it's apparent that the character portrayed by Johansson is an Asian character in a cyborg body which isn't representative of her previous appearance. If anything, Johansson's casting helps highlight this.

So we are set in the near future, where the lines between man and robot are becoming increasingly blurred by enhancements offered by companies such as Hanka Robotics. A terrorist who we discover is known as "Kuze" launches an attack on Hanza Robotics, hacking a geisha robot who Killian destroys after it kills a person being held hostage.

What follows is a game of cat and mouse as Killian tries to find out who she really is and how she is tied to Kuze. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the movie which has the effect of making the movie move quickly and doesn’t give enough time for information to really make sense before rushing on to the next scene.

She finds out eventually that she was not actually called Mira Killian and the backstory she believes was fake and told to her in order to make her resolve to fight terrorism stronger. It transpired that her and Kuze were taken from the same place, her real name was Motoko Kusanagi and Kuze was Hideo Kuze - her boyfriend.

The final fight scene with a “Spider Tank” was, in my opinion, rushed and didn’t give a big enough sense of dread or danger. It fizzled out rather anti-climatically and left me thinking that the movie would have been better-handled as a multi-part movie or a TV mini-series.

I’d rate the movie 3 / 5. It wasn’t terrible but could have been so much better.