This movie is one of those films where the first thing that grabs you is not even the story... It's the visuals, the city, the technology, the giant holograms everywhere, the robots, the cybernetic bodies... Everything just looks crazy..
It's the kind of future where you can look around and start wondering if you're actually watching a movie or somebody's very expensive dream about what the future might look like...
Scarlett Johansson plays Major, a woman whose brain has been placed inside a completely artificial body... She's basically human consciousness inside a machine and she's REALLY good at being a machine...
The way she moves, talks and fights is almost emotionless... She looks like someone who could walk through a wall, kill ten people and then calmly ask what happened and that's actually important because Major isn't just trying to stop criminals... She's trying to understand herself... Who was she before this body, Where did her memories go?, Was she actually saved... Or was something taken away from her?... That question becomes the heart of the movie...
Major works for Section 9, a special anti-terrorism unit, and she's sent after criminals who are capable of hacking people's minds and manipulating their memories and I found that idea really interesting because imagine somebody being able to enter your mind and change what you remember...
How do you even know your memories are yours?, How do you know the person you think you are is actually who you are?... That's where Ghost in the Shell gets really interesting..
Unfortunately, I don't think the movie explores those ideas as deeply as it could have...
It raises some BIG questions... Then sometimes it feels like it gets distracted by explosions.
The action is actually pretty good.
Major can fight and when she starts moving, she doesn't fight like a normal human being... She's ridiculously fast and powerful, and the cybernetic body gives her some really cool abilities..
There's one scene where she basically goes invisible and attacks people, and I was just sitting there like..
“Yeah... I definitely don't want to fight this woman.”..
Batou was another character I really liked... He's Major's partner, and unlike Major, he feels much more human and relaxed... Their relationship isn't overly romantic, which I appreciated...
He's basically the guy who can still joke around while everybody else is busy discussing the meaning of human existence...
Aramaki also brings a lot of presence to the movie... Even when he's just sitting there, he somehow looks like the person you don't want to argue with but the real star of the movie, apart from Johansson, is the world itself.... This futuristic city is beautiful and disturbing at the same time..
You've got huge buildings covered with holographic advertisements, crowded streets, robots, cybernetic humans and people constantly upgrading their bodies.
And underneath all that technology, there's still poverty, crime, loneliness and people trying to survive... That contrast worked for me because the movie is basically asking...
If technology allows us to change everything about our bodies...
At what point do we stop being human?, and that's a question I actually enjoyed thinking about after the movie ended.
But then we get to the story and this is where I had problems...
The movie spends so much time trying to explain Major's past that some of the mystery disappears, Instead of allowing us to slowly discover who she is, the film gives us answers and honestly, I would have preferred more mystery...
The story could have been deeper...
Some of the dialogue feels like the characters are explaining things to me instead of letting me discover them and sometimes the movie looks far more impressive than the actual story underneath it. But Honestly... It looks GOOD..
The production design, cyberpunk city and visual effects are probably the strongest parts of the movie. Even reviewers who disliked the story generally acknowledged how striking the film looks and Scarlett Johansson carries the movie pretty well..
Major is supposed to feel disconnected from normal humanity, and Johansson manages to make that emptiness interesting.
Rating: 75/100
