By Michael Cavna
The Washington Post
Can you adapt a two-decade-old animated masterpiece into a modern digital film and still retain its elusive soul?
That question seems to sit at the crux of the first wave of criticism for the strongly anticipated “Ghost in the Shell,” which officially opens Friday.
Because the film was not made available for preview to most media outlets, early word from the trades and a few cinema sites is the only illumination we have. (And judging by the middling to positive reviews so far, it strikes as odd that the studio apparently was so fearful of screening the film for the media. The suits need to believe, and trust.)
The original “Ghost in the Shell,” Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 anime hit adapted from the ’80s-sprung manga series, has gotten the Hollywood treatment before. The tale of the Major, the cyberpunk bot with the human brain, inspired “The Matrix” wholly and elements of so many sci-fi films more elliptically.
Now, director Rupert Sanders (“Snow White and the Huntsman”) takes a crack at the live-action/CGI remake with Scarlett Johansson controversially cast as the lead, as complaints of whitewashing a role that some think should have gone to an actor of Asian descent have faced off against arguments that a cyborg has no ethnicity.
So just how do the lucky few early reviewers weigh what’s on the screen?
Variety’s Guy Lodge praises Sanders’ distinctly original ideas.
“Sanders, stepping up his game considerably from 2012’s gorgeous but inert ‘Snow White and the Huntsman,’ throws in a few painstaking replicas of shots and images from the 1995 film to appease the devoted,” Lodge writes, “but is largely content to let this telling move to its own rhythm — a driving, furious one that brings the complex proceedings in at a snappy 107 minutes. …
“From a fleeting shot of clattering, spider-like cyborg fingers to an extended garbage-truck chase, stray images and set pieces from the animated films have been compiled and collaged into a cleanly compressed version of … events that is arguably structured more along Western lines – and into a story world that, for all its recognizable visual cues, is very much its own iridescent creation.”
The Telegraph’s Tim Tobey says “Ghost” scores, but only on style points, writing: “As ‘Blade Runner’ did before it, this slinky, cyberpunk action flick makes its style the entire statement, pondering a future of human-robot synergy simply by visualising it in as much eye-popping detail as possible.”
IndieWire’s Mike McCahill is of like mind, appreciating the dazzling effects but wondering where the human element escaped to. McCahill writes: ” ‘Ghost,’ powered by hefty reserves of American and Asian money, emerges as a dazzling logistical display with a missing file where the human interest might once have been stored.”
And to be fair, McCahill does really like those state-of-the-art effects, which take on extra resonance in a time of self-driving cars (and crashes) and Elon Musk’s vision of merging the mind and A.I.:
“Armed here with the latest modeling software and several skilled analogue collaborators, including production designer Jan Roelfs (“Gattaca”), emergent cinematographer Jess Hall (“Transcendence”), he goes into hyperdrive. Every scene thrusts out something to catch (and occasionally caress) the eye: murky drinking dens besieged by scuttling, arachnoid attendants, a watery virtual limbo where binary ones and zeroes float up like bubbles.”
The Wrap’s Ben Croll sees an even bigger disparity between visual achievement and narrative exhaustion.
“Marshaling the very latest in digital photography, stereoscopic imaging and cutting-edge effects, ‘Ghost in the Shell’ is a technical knockout, a here-and-now valentine to what design wizardry Hollywood can pull off in 2017,” Croll writes. “At the same time, it does so in service of a tired tale full of repurposed visual tricks, storytelling clichés and big-studio concessions, to the extent that the film offers a sleek modern polish to a story that feels about 15 years too late.”
Even more negative is the Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer, who appears to be reviewing two different movies:
“If the ‘ghost’ of anime classic ‘Ghost in the Shell’ refers to the soul looming inside of its killer female cyborg, then this live-action reboot … really only leaves us the shell: a heavily computer-generated enterprise with more body than brains, more visuals than ideas, as if the original movie’s hard drive had been wiped clean of all that was dark, poetic and mystifying.
“This Paramount release will see strong box-office returns before disappearing from most of our minds.”
“Ghost in the Shell” (3 stars)
A special forces unit led by a human cyborg hybrid faces the destruction of cyber technology. With Scarlett Johansson, “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Pilou Asbaek, Chin Han and Juliette Binoche. Written by Jamie Moss and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic “The Ghost in the Shell” by Masamune Shirow.
Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence, suggestive content and some disturbing images
Showing: Alderwood Mall, Cinebarre Mountlake Terrace, Everett Stadium, Galaxy Monroe, Marysville, Stanwood Cinemas, Meridian, Pacific Place, Sundance Cinemas, Thornton Place Stadium, Woodinville, Cascade Mall, Oak Harbor Plaza
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