Ghost In The Shell's Morals Are Confusing And Amazing

GHOST IN THE SHELL

Whether or not you believe Scarlett Johansson starring in Ghost In The Shell is a case of Hollywood whitewashing, this we can confirm: out front of this $100mil extravaganza, she has no nipples.

Taking the think-piece-provoking lead role in Hollywood’s long-gestating live-action adaptation of the anime classic, Scar-Jo is stepping into an action-heroine role that was, a generation ago, drawn less as shrine to feminist-empowerment, more as animated wank-fodder. The protagonist of Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film, routinely called the Major, was a near-future cybernetic killer whose android frame was constructed — both within the narrative and without — as somewhere between bodily ideal and male fantasy, the kicker being that she oft got about her detectivist biz with her kit off. Here, Ghost In The Shell was showing its manga roots, its post-Blade Runner (and proto-Matrix) cyber-punk racket delivered with a hit of hentai.

Rupert Sanders’ live-action adaptation is, in many ways, reverent of its source text: a noble, heavy homage that hopes, only, to bring the weird, wonderful, wacky world of New Port City to a grander audience. But having a hyper-sexualised heroine is a bridge too far for a Hollywood studio seeking to maximise their returns on a mega-budget. Once again, the morals taught to us by American ratings-classification are amazing: endless bouts of automatic weaponfire and bloodied carnage are cool for impressionable kids to watch, but a robotic body with nipples would pervert their minds.

So here’s Johansson, nipples unfreed and anatomically smooth as a barbie doll, swandiving from high-buildings, ass-kicking bad-guys, and firing off rounds at anyone who looks at her cross-eyed. The outrage-industrial-complex ‘controversy’ of her casting recedes once the film rolls, and you see how perfectly she’s cast: Sanders making visual allusions to Lost In Translation, Her, Under The Skin, and Lucy; her role, as ‘alien’ intellect lost inside a form of sculpted, weaponised femininity, drawing on her entire cinematic history, the understood ideal of Johansson as screen siren. Here, the lead role hasn’t been whitewashed, only redrawn to fit the ideal of Hollywood beauty standards: echoing Ex Machina’s evocation that imminent cutting-edge robo-creations are sure to be the thinking-engineer’s sexbot.

Johansson so ably inhabits this idea — human mind, android body; silicone eyes the gateway to her little lost soul — that you wish her role was more interesting. In the one big — and, ultimately, unfortunate — change from the original, her Major isn’t drawn to existential questions about the nature of reality, and the blurry boundaries at the envelope edge of ‘human’ experience. Instead, she has a Bourne-eque obsession with her own identity; seeking only to know who she was before being turned into a killing-machine. This obsession with the self, in concert with standard grappling over the morals of shooting bad-guys, positions Ghost In The Shell within the realm of the modern-day comic-book blockbuster, and makes it feel like that most familiar popcorn-movie product: an origin story.

Just as the story — whose screenwriters include the hacky Ehren Kruger, longtime Transformers typist — trends towards a generic Hollywood take on the text’s eternally-rich themes, the casting befits its internationalist ambition. Peter Ferdinando is the ruthless head of the sinister robotics empire; Juliette Binoche the maternal engineer who birthed Johansson into her new body; Takeshi Kitano the Angry Japanese Captain, commanding his Mod Squad (whose ranks include Chin Han, Lasarus Ratuere, and Danusia Samal) via only artfully-positioned subtitles; Pilou Asbæk the blonde-frosted brute who becomes the Major’s trusted off-sider; Michael Pitt the would-be villain, an insurgent digi-vigilante in Darth hood and TextEdit Speech voice. None of them quite shine in their roles, but they’re not really invited to: instead, trussed in ridiculous outfit and unmoving coifs, they’re anime characters made human.

The imagined worlds of anime are the genre’s eternal draw, and Sanders has the ambition to try and measure up to them in his live action take. Ghost In The Shell is, visually, an utter riot; a colourful, rhapsodic rumpus of visual overload. Here, too, Sanders leans on other visions of dystopian-cityscapes past; not just Oshii’s original (and sequel) or the well-populated realm of dystopian animation, and not just Blade Runner, either, but everything from Johnny Mnemonic (the other grid-lurid Keanu sci-fi) to Terry Gilliam’s overlooked The Zero Theorem.

Its New Port City is a towering, teetering mass of humanity that serves as corporate canvas, its streets and buildings bathed in giant advertising holograms: swimming koi and wrapping serpents, geisha tipping water into oncoming traffic as fluttering flowers sell consumers better versions of themselves. The City’s denizens, again, are humans pushing at the limits of humanity, wielding various implants and upgrades that range from millionaire-slick to chop-shop butchery. The city is duly dark, shadowy, and riddled with vice; a kind of digital Gotham, forever in need of cleaning up.

And, once the Major dispatches a familiar-to-fans Spidertank, then she can get to cleanin’; the film finishing — in true superhero origin-story style — with her standing atop a skyscraper, looking down upon the city, out towards the limitless horizon of future adventures/sequels. With her sleek cyber-body, she’s ready to dive from on high, and plunge deep into the city’s darkest depths. Nipples would only offer unnecessary wind resistance.

A SILENT VOICE

A Silent Voice is an anime portrait of wild teenage hormones, adolescent anxieties, high-school self-loathing, and soap-operatic emotion. It’s, essentially, about what it means to have friends, but it’s also a film about suffering, psychological fallout, and formative trauma. It begins with a young deaf girl, Nishimiya, arriving in a Japanese 6th grade class, soon becoming the object of bullying. When she transfers away to escape the harassment, the school turns on Ishida, the chief bully: shaming and ostracising him in the same fashion; bullying, as always, never the work of an individual, but of social conditioning. Five years later: Ishida is friendless, despondent, suicidal; his goal is to seek out Nishimiya, apologise, then nobly kill himself. From there, a tortured love story unfolds, with an ensemble dealing with repercussions of what happened, in their social circle, at that moment of innocence lost.

Adapting Yoshitoki Ōima’s manga, director Naoko Yamada shows a familiar anime fondness for the natural world: immaculately rendering koi ponds, raindrops, flowers; her film full of the small details —like the way the tag of Ishida’s t-shirt tends to stick up— that show an eye for daily life. Yet the most profound artistic choices are out to capture loneliness and isolation: Ishida’s schoolmates rendered faceless behind crossed-out Xs; his conversations coming with faces cropped out, which suggests his avoidance of eye contact, but also emphasises body language, and the difficulty of communication for its deaf heroine. The film is, ultimately, neither a work of quotidian drama or something more fantastic or high-concept. It’s a teen melodrama filled with tears, climaxing with a cathartic coming together of star-cross’d kids that delivers not true love, but guttural sobs.

LAND OF MINE

In the wake of WW2, a troop of Germans are being brought in to remove landmines from Danish beaches, paraded in front of local troops who treat them with scorn, violence, full Full Metal hostility. Their indentured servitude is a form of post-war penance, in which free men’re still treated as prisoners-of-war: detained, drilled, and set to death-defying work. Of course, they’re not exactly men: mere boys, really, drafted to defend Deutschland in the dying days of an already lost war.

Land Of Mine exhumes a forgotten chapter of distant Danish history, excavating what was, essentially, a clean-up exercise being forcibly enacted as state-sanctioned retribution. Whilst the symbolic neatness of the story, as echoed by the simple pun of the English-language title (its Danish title is, really, just Under The Sand), lends itself to the simple lessons of war, director Martin Zandvliet exhibits a winning combination of dramatic reserve and strong cinematic composition. And, its wartime themes —who is being forced to fight for what cause, the weight of nationalism and the worth of vengeance— remain plenty timely.

A MAN CALLED ØVE

Øve is the grumpy old coot next door: glowering, taciturn, full of condescension, lectures, and kids-these-days rage. Every morning, his performs his “rounds”, doing a lap of the council estate in which he dwells, making sure the many regulations are being followed to the letter. He’s also considering killing himself. In such, Øve is, symbolically, Sweden itself: a human nanny state, all endless regulations, frosty exterior, and suicidal depression in winter. And, as avatar for a nation, he needs to move with the times. Enter, a plurality of peoples —immigrants, kids, queers, fatties— to warm his black heart and become his unlikely friends, the gang banding together to, eventually, topple something that even a rules-obsessed Swede can’t abide by: heartless bureaucrats!

This rudimentary parable —directed by Hannes Holm, adapted from a “bestselling” novel by Fredrik Backman— is cinema for people who like their films populated by caricatures, their stories loaded with contrivance, their heartstrings verily yanked at. As A Man Called Øve pushes forward with its old-prick-learns-to-care-again storyline, a B-story narrative presses back into the past, unearthing all the various hardships that made him the cantankerous curmudgeon that he is. Meaning: tragedies! With mawkish sentimentality matched to swelling string music! The film’s billed as a crowdpleaser, but this just means that the only people who’ll be pleased are those who blindly go along with a crowd.

THE COUNTRY DOCTOR

The Country Doctor’s title betrays its sense of ambition, which is essentially that of a mid-tier television drama. Here, eternal French silver fox François Cluzet plays a local GP who's spent years doing the rounds of rural farmlands, tending to local yokels suspicious of modern-day medicine. He’s no distant dispenser of drugs, but member of a community: a friendly face from around these parts, who treats them as humans, not patients. Only, when he comes down with inoperable cancer, he’s forced to take on help, in the form of Marianne Denicourt; with whom initial friction produces sparks, the simmering sexual tension mounting in the obligatory scene where he presses his cold metal stethoscope against her heaving bosom.

Thomas Lilti’s previous picture, Hippocrates: Diary Of A French Doctor was, as its title suggests, another medical drama. And he seems to have found a niche, presenting another perfectly-respectable, well-made mediocrity; where medical morality is forever weighing on its principals, and a sad-montage is only a death-of-an-elderly-patient away. Given how its set up is so reminiscent of ’80s TV staples A Country Practice and All Creatures Great And Small, the only thing it’s missing is a twee piano theme tune.