ghost in the shell

This one features Blade Runner 2049 right alongside IT, Phantom Thread, and The Florida Project.

One thing’s for sure about the new Ghost in the Shell movie: There’s gonna be a whole lot of cyber. Cybercrime, cyber-people, there all is cyber. The plot hinges around, among other things, an android with a human mind investigating a string of brain-hacking crimes that leads her to a bunch of realizations about the nature of consciousness and humanity. Ghost in the Shell imagines a world where the line between human and machine is blurred almost to the point of nonexistence, with corporations selling body-augmentation technology amongst colleagues at fancy dinners. That’s where the opening of the movie finds Major, played by Scarlett Johansson, surveilling a corporate meeting that goes terribly wrong.

The whitewashing controversy surrounding Ghost in the Shell may keep it from becoming 2017’s big box office hit, despite how faithfully the filmmakers have recreated some of the most visually-arresting scenes from the 1995 original. It’s a bummer that Motoko Kusanagi is now Mara Killian because the movie looks absolutely gorgeous, as evidenced in this new clip, which takes its cues directly from an iconic scene in the original.

After nearly six months of writing about teasers, trailers, and rumors for Paramount Pictures’ live-action Ghost in the Shell film, I figured it was time to sit down and actually watch the original 1995 animated movie. And I am here to tell you that it cleared up nothing for me. I’ll admit, the animation, production design, and soundtrack are all as impressive as rumored  —  the manga’s influence on the Wachowski Sisters is pretty hard to ignore in hindsight  —  but one movie was not enough to clear up my confusion regarding the Ghost in the Shell characters and universe as a whole.