Years of debate about the divide between android and human was crystallised in the question posed by cult science fiction author Phillip K Dick in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and its 1982 film adaptation, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The latest film in the genre that deals with the intersection of human and machine is Rupert Sanders’s live-action adaptation of the legendary Japanese manga Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirone. The manga had previously made its way to theatres in a highly regarded animated version in 1995.
The film takes in a near future world of cyborgs and hyper surveillance. Scarlett Johansson’s cyborg Major is part of a counter-terrorist organistion headed by shoot-first-ask-questions-later chief (Takeshi Kitano). That set-up takes care of the film’s action sequences, which make full use of high-tech gadgetry and imaginatively designed robots.
As Major attempts to track down a notorious terrorist, she grapples with memories of her past selves and ones her creator (Juliette Binoche) had implanted in her brain. Like the androids in Blade Runner, she is unable to decide if she is human or machine, if her feelings are real or programmed, and her discussions with her doctor form the movie’s emotional core.
Accusations of whitewashing plagued the casting of Scarlett Johansson as the protagonist, although Shirone didn’t mind since the character is a cyborg without a fixed form. Johansson has played hybrid creatures in Under the Skin (2013), Her (2013), and Lucy (2014), and along with Kitano and Binoche, she is able to lend a much-needed air of humanity to the proceedings.
In most of its versions, Ghost in the Shell has been about shiny exteriors and futuristic architecture rather than a philosophical examination of the nature of reality. While the 1995 film version had its fair share of melancholic ruminations, it was also a visual spectacle about a technology-filled future. In the live-action version, Sanders and his cinematographer Jess Hall use the action sequences to expand the gloriously designed world of neon haze and suspended roadways by swerving cameras and constantly moving aerial shots.
Unfortunately, we are not allowed to completely sink into the shiny outer world because much of the running time is spent indoors with pretentious conversations about the nature of reality. The convoluted screenplay by Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, and Ehren Kruger operates in two registers: hyper-kinetic action and philosophical treatise without an emotional core. Like Major, the film is unable to decide about what it really wants to be.