Ghost In The Shell

So many movies, TV shows and other pieces of pop culture have sampled or stolen from the 1995 Japanese animated movie Ghost In The Shell over the years that a straight remake can't help but seem a little late to the party.

But there are other issues with Hollywood's take on this futuristic tale of the increasingly blurred line between humanity and technology, beyond the whole been-there-seen-that feeling that make this version a bit underwhelming.

The main problem is that Ghost In The Shell seems to have trouble deciding on a tone. It's too chilly and detached to succeed as a typical sci-fi action blockbuster but not quite offbeat enough to qualify as an intriguing oddity.

So, while it's gorgeous to look at - the production design is brilliant, making the movie feel like a documentary broadcast back from the future - and occasionally interesting to ponder, it doesn't dig deep enough or drive hard enough.

Set in a futuristic, multicultural and unnamed city that resembles Hong Kong on steroids, Ghost In The Shell follows the adventures of Major, a counterterrorism agent played by Scarlett Johansson.

Major's body is a synthetic, robotic chassis but her brain is human - she is the first example of a fusion between the genuine and the artificial.

Major's memories of her past are fuzzy - she's been told by her superiors that she was rescued from a near-fatal accident and only transplanting her brain (and her consciousness, or 'ghost') into a robotic 'shell' saved her life.

But she's experiencing what she calls "glitches", mental flashes that may be malfunctions... or may be memories.

And when she pursues a new villain in town, a homicidal computer hacker named Kuze (Michael Carmen Pitt), she gradually discovers that the two of them are connected in ways she couldn't have imagined.

The case Major is investigating isn't particularly riveting - any viewer who has caught a few tales of espionage over the years may be able to discern the secrets and lies pretty quickly - but the way Ghost In The Shell goes about it isn't completely uninteresting.

Director Rupert Sanders (Snow White And The Huntsman) and his top-notch technical team create a world that feels both utterly foreign and increasingly plausible, and watching Major and her colleagues navigate their way through it frequently delivers a disorienting, lost-without-a-map feel.

It's just too bad the action sequences are, for the most part, fairly so-so, despite Johansson's captivatingly calm screen presence and capabilities when it comes to throwing a punch.