Ghost In The Shell (1995) vs Ghost In The Shell (2017)

If you’re any sort of sci-fi fan at all, and especially if you’re into the cyberpunk corner of the genre, then you’ve almost certainly heard of Ghost In The Shell. I saw the movie for the first time when I was around thirteen or fourteen, in hindsight way too young to either be entertained by it or to understand it, so I recently decided to re-visit it along with the American live-action remake that came out a few years ago.

Which one is better? Well, I obviously went in expecting that the Japanese original would be vastly superior to the watered-down American remake. So imagine my surprise when I watched them both back to back and discovered, to my absolute astonishment, that the remake is even more of a huge waste of time than I thought it was going to be.

Ghost In The Shell (1995)

In the near future, electrons and light flow freely

And corporate computer networks eclipse the stars.

Despite great advancements in computerization,

Countries and races are not yet obsolete…

It’s pretty easy to see why this became such a cornerstone of the cybperpunk genre, given that those haunting opening words are possibly the most succinct summation of the genre’s underpinning philosophy that’s ever been written.

Ghost In The Shell started life as a manga by author Masamune Shirow. It’s my understanding--I haven’t read it myself--that this original version of the story was a little less cerebral than people coming to the property via its adaptations and spin-offs might expect, being heavier on raunch and action. 

In 1995 the famous director Mamoru Oshii adapted the manga into an anime film of the same name, and in the process turned it into a slow-paced, moody art piece that’s heavy on philosophizing and introspection (this is kind of Oshii’s thing as an anime director; he had done it multiple times with other properties before this and would go on to do it again afterwards). 

That movie became famous both in Japan and overseas, forming an early spearhead of the mid-90s anime invasion of America and winning Oshii acclaim from cinema buffs and fellow film-makers all over the world. Over the years multiple spin-offs, sequels, reboots and other derivative Ghost In The Shell works have been created, all of them owing more to this first movie’s style and aesthetic than the original manga, which at this point has been thoroughly and permanently eclipsed by its adaptations.

Taking place sometime in the unspecified future, Ghost In The Shell is set in a world transformed by cybernetic enhancement and the ubiquity of the internet. Bodies are modified freely, with a person’s humanity residing solely within the “ghost” that forms their mind; with the advent of advanced artificial intelligence and hackers who can alter a person’s ghost in order to rewrite their memories and identity, even this final separation between human and machine is starting to break down.

The movie’s plot focuses on Section 9, a covert cyber-crime division within Japan’s sprawling security bureaucracy. The team’s on-the-ground operations are led by Major Makoto Kusanagi, a full-body cyborg who has replaced everything but parts of her brain with cybernetics. When Section 9 is pulled into the hunt for a ghost hacker who might be a new form of machine intelligence, Kusanagi sees an opportunity to answer the question that haunts her: is she really human?

If you only know Ghost In The Shell from seeing trailers or images of it, it’s important to know that it is not the movie it was presented as being back during the heady Manga Entertainment days, when it was sold on its reputation as a totally edgy cartoon with tits and blood for grown ups. It is not, in fact, a balls-to-the-wall action romp about hot cybernetic ladies doing sick spin kicks and shooting people; it does contain all of those elements, but 90% of its run-time is political bureaucracy, slow-paced detective mystery and navel-gazing about the nature of humanity.

Just for context, before he made this, one of Mamoru Oshii’s previous works was Angel’s Egg, an infamously impenetrable Christian allegory that consists almost entirely of visual metaphor, more or less completely lacking anything resembling a plot. Oshii was very much still in that mindset when he made Ghost In The Shell, and believe me, you can tell. 

Substantial chunks of the movie’s short runtime (it’s less than 90 minutes long even including credits) are taken up with moody atmosphere shots of future Tokyo, the camera lingering on high-tech skyscrapers and rusting apartment blocks while the movie’s famously strange score blares in the background. There are conversations where the characters are speaking via internet mind-link and don’t even move their mouths, which was probably as much a budget choice as a stylistic one, but it just adds to the movie's sedate, dream-like tone.

Looking at its place in the history of cyberpunk, it’s interesting to note what Ghost In The Shell doesn’t have. There are no Blade Runner-esque holographic billboards on display here, no flying cars or other extremely ostentatious displays of technology; its vision of the Tokyo of the future is just a very large city that has some sleek, high-tech districts, and even those parts look in many ways less futuristic than recently-constructed real life metropolises like the urban cores of Dubai or Shanghai. 

In terms of the story it's telling and the themes it engages with, this is sci-fi of the old school variety, where writers would pick a hypothetical technological innovation and then extrapolate how that would transform society. The difference I see between Ghost In The Shell and earlier works in the same vein--even Blade Runner--is that here the technology facilitates the asking of the question, but not so much the question itself. Musings like “What is the nature of the human mind?” have probably been with us for as long as we’ve been sentient, after all. Ghost In The Shell seems to posit that the really exciting thing about technology isn’t that it will throw up new questions, but that it might provide ways to answer the ones we’ve always had.

Matoko Kusanagi’s actions are driven by just such a quest. Kusanagi appears on the outside to be a cold, calm, supremely self-confident individual, but as the story unfolds we learn that she’s grappling with a profound existential unease due to her status as a full-body cyborg. In a world where bodies, brains, memories and possibly even ghosts can all be created artificially from nothing, how does she know she’s really human? What if her memories of her previous life are false, implanted into her by her Section 9 superiors to make her think she had a life prior to her current state of existence? As she tells her subordinate and cybernetic soft-boi Bateau, she’s never actually seen the organic brain that’s supposedly the proof of her humanity, and (extrapolating logically) isn’t capable of doing so without the use of a technological intermediary that could be falsified. So how does she know that it’s even there.

(In some later Ghost In The Shell stories it’s implied that Kusanagi has never had an organic body, being a cyborg from birth due to some sort of medical intervention; that’s not established to be the case here, but we also don’t learn how she came to her present circumstances, and her cyborg status being involuntary would go a long way towards explaining why she’s so insecure about it where other cyborgs aren’t).

Bateau’s answer is kind of fascinating: Kusanagi is human because other people treat her as human. This doesn’t reassure her, and it’s not hard to see why; after all, if your humanity is reliant on the approval of society, then it could be taken away at any time. What Kusanagi seems to be looking for is a confirmation of her humanity that exists independent of any conditional or external factors, and this is why she takes an immediate interest in the Puppetmaster once he proclaims himself to be a sentient being that exists without physical form.

Speaking of the Puppetmaster, he brings up issues of gender that were interesting and a little startling in how modern they feel. Early on, absolutely nothing is known of the Puppetmaster; the characters refer to him with male pronouns, but they admit that this is just an assumption and could be incorrect. When he appears he does speak with a masculine voice...but he only ever inhabits feminine cyborg bodies, due to various plot circumstances. So what you end up with is a traditionally masculine-voiced character taking on the appearance of women, but still referred to as “he” by the other characters. This all seems to imply--even if unintentionally--a commonly-held mindset where gender is independent of one’s physical appearance.

Or then again, maybe it’s not unintentional. If a human mind can exist completely externally from a body--which is a thing that everyone in this setting accepts without argument--then it inevitably follows that gender must at the very least be highly fluid. Like, you could still have “gender critical” people going on about chromosomes, but in a world where the person you’re talking to might be a machine with part of a human brain grafted into it, people’s genetic makeup is going to be even less relevant to their everyday experiences than it is in real life.

But then you have a being like the Puppetmaster, who literally does not have a physical form at all and never did. If the Puppetmaster is accepted as human--which he isn’t here, but that might only be because this is the first time anyone is encountering a being like this--then does gender even meaningfully exist in any objective capacity? After all, the line separating full-body cyborgs like Kusanagi from the Puppetmaster is very thin (and is all but erased by the end of the movie). There is a reason transhumanism tends to blend so neatly into modern conceptions of gender: because it’s impossible to think about the subject with any level of detail and come away believing that the strict gender binary is valid.

See, this is why I like thoughtful sci-fi instead of pew-pew spaceship stuff or pew-pew military war stories, or this horseshit.

But speaking of feminine cyborg forms, let’s move onto some things about this movie that I didn’t like, because despite my waxing philosophical about it so far, I actually don’t consider it the unalloyed masterpiece that it’s often seen as.

One of the defining features of Ghost In The Shell’s cyborg ladies is their large synthetic robo-titties, which we get extremely well acquainted with due to the way the movie’s camera is often at pains to keep them in frame. At one point someone is talking to the Puppetmaster in a cyborg body, and his boobs are just sort of poking out of the corner of the screen even though the camera angle doesn’t like it should make them visible. Kusanagi even spends half the movie either naked or wearing an impossibly skintight optic camo outfit that’s so form-fitting it perfectly hugs her erect nipples, which is supposedly to facilitate an advanced optic camo system (the male characters who use the same technology wear bulky coats, funnily enough). 

And look, I’m not a prude or opposed to sexualization on principle, but it gets to be a problem when it becomes intrusive or seems incongruous, and it’s both of those things here.

My main complaint with Ghost In The Shell is less to do with any one element and more the feel of the whole package. The movie is distant, cold and clinical outside of small flashes of warmth between Kusanagi and her Section 9 co-workers, all shell and very little ghost (you have to write things like that when you’re talking about this movie, there’s a law). I get that this is likely intentional; the movie’s vision of future Japan is controlled by a machine-like, unfeeling bureaucracy that doesn’t care about human lives--one of the early scenes involves a politician getting an asylum seeker deported even though this will probably result in the man’s death--and I think the coldness and sense of alienation that’s built into the fabric of the movie is a reflection of that.

On the other hand, I’ve felt the same way about all of Oshii’s other movies that I’ve watched, so it might just be that I don’t mesh very well with his personal style, romantic soul that I am.

Despite these gripes, I did enjoy revisiting the movie quite a lot, and if I had seen it when it originally came out pre-The Matrix and Deus Ex and the many sci fi stories that have drawn from it, and if I had been old enough to appreciate it, it probably would have blown my mind. If this corner of the SF space interests you, I highly recommend checking it out; despite the languid pacing, it’s an easy watch due to its short runtime and uncomplicated story.

Ghost In The Shell (2017)

(Note: Spoilers for both versions of the movie from here on out)

In the future, the line between human and machine is disappearing. Advancements in technology allow humans to enhance themselves with cybernetic parts.

Hanka Robotics, funded by the government, is developing a military operative that will blur the line even further. By transplanting a human brain into a fully synthetic body, they will combine the strongest attributes of human and robot.

I really feel like I could just leave it here. The difference between the two movies’ opening text tells you everything you need to know.

In the near-ish future cybernetic enhancement has started to become common, but is still controversial among the general public. Hanka Robotics, an evil mega-corp, takes the brain of a refugee woman named Mira Killian after the boat she and her family were on was attacked and places it in a robot shell, making her the world’s first full-body cyborg. A year later, Major Mira Killian is working in Section 9 when a cybernetic hacker named Kuze begins a campaign of terror aimed at Hanka.

So basically, it’s Robocop.

I’m not even sure where to begin with this one. I guess I can summarize my feelings on Scar In The Jo by saying that it’s more or less exactly what fans of the original feared when the movie first went into production: the basic outline of the anime movie (plus some elements from Stand Alone Complex, the popular Ghost In The Shell TV series that borrowed from both Oshii’s film and the original manga), but with all of the sophistication and intelligence torn out in favour of generic four-quadrant mass appeal. It’s all shell, with no wait I already did that, never mind.

If you want a simulation of the experience of watching the 1995 movie right before this one, just take every compliment I gave the anime and turn it into a negative. The remake does do the hologram-laden Cyberpunk metropolis thing, except with really generic visuals (the movie had the grave misfortune of coming out the same year as Blade Runner 2049), which is far from the movie’s biggest flaw, but just highlights how lazy the whole thing is.

By far the biggest issue is what the movie does with its main character. In the original movie, full body cyborgs seem to still be a very small minority, but there are enough of them around that Kusanagi spots one using the exact same model of shell wandering the streets of Tokyo in the movie’s most haunting and evocative scene. In the Hollywood movie, Mira is (or at least believes) that she’s the only one, and Kusanagi’s complex existential angst has been replaced by Mira simply being lonely and feeling that she’s different from everyone else.

Similarly, Kusanagi’s tough outer exterior that makes her such an interesting character is mostly discarded for a timid protagonist who wears her insecurities in the open. The movie even makes Scarlet Johanssen look waif-ish and somewhat child-like, as though this was a Joss Whedon movie (come to think of it, even Whedon didn’t do that with Johanssen in the Avengers movies), in contrast to Kusanagi’s famously thicc, muscular form. 

I actually found this version of the character kind of annoying. In nearly every scene, she’s constantly whining about how she doesn’t feel human, which starts to feel a little gratuitous since pretty much no one else except the villain seems to look down on her or treat her differently because of her status as a cyborg. By contrast the Japanese version of the character only ever reveals those feelings to Bateau, who’s the closest she seems to have to an actual friend.

The dialogue in this movie is awful across the board--I was cringing at damn near every line--but Mira’s lines are particularly wooden, delivered woodenly by Scarlett Johanssen, although to be fair I’m not sure it would have been possible to deliver dialogue like “I will find him, that is what I was built to do” any better (some scenes near the beginning of the movie have Mira speaking in stilted robo-speech with no contractions, but then elsewhere she talks normally). It’s not like the original movie’s philosophising was particularly subtle, but at least the ideas being expressed were more complex than “Wahhh I’m not a human anymore” or “it’s our actions that make us human and not our memories.”

Oh yeah, about that. In the original movie, we never get an answer as to whether Kusanagi’s fears about her memories being fabricated have any weight to them or not. There’s no actual evidence that her memories aren’t completely genuine or that her superiors are lying to her, but at the same time it’s understandable that she’d be paranoid about it given the world she lives in, so the ambiguity is interesting. Here, Mira’s memories of her pre-cyborg life are heavily fragmented, and by the end you find out even those were completely fabricated, because the movie is just doing the whole “super soldier with amnesia” thing you’ve seen a million times before.

Every element of the plot is this lazy and cliched. The head of Hanka Robotics watches Mira’s creation and is like “mwah ha ha ha, she is a living weapon” and then I guess it’s still supposed to be a surprise when it turns out he’s evil. (It’s interesting to note that although the original movie included a shady mega-corp, it’s only briefly touched on in the plot; the actual villains end up being elements of the Japanese government).

All of the side characters from the original are present and look recognizably like themselves, except their personalities are 1000% less interesting. Bateau and Mira’s relationship is much closer and more conventionally friendly than their dynamic in the original, where Bateau seemed to want to become closer to the Major--possibly to the point of initiating a romance--but couldn’t get past her emotional barriers. The gruff head of Section 9 is just as gruff as in the anime, except when he starts dispensing feel-good platitudes in order to reassure Mira that she’s totally a real human (which, again, is her only character trait and which she talks about constantly). The new recruit cop guy who’s the only Section 9 member without heavy cybernetic enhancement is present and accounted for, except instead of being a chill, laid-back bro who meshes well with the team, he’s a total buzzkill who thinks cybernetics are scary and people shouldn’t trust them (how he got hired for a job where he was going to working with people who are more machine than organic is kind of a mystery).

Actually, that leads us into the two movies’ philosophical stances, which couldn’t be more different.

The original movie is 100% down to clown with all of this transhumanism stuff; there’s no sign that cybernetic enhancement is at all controversial, and the practice has fundamentally altered society’s view of humanity such that the concept of a “ghost” is something that’s widely understood and brought up in casual conversation. At the end of the movie Kusanagi is offered the chance to merge her consciousness with the Puppetmaster’s to create a synthesis being that represents a new kind of sentient life form, and she accepts (partially to save her life, but it seems like she would have been down with the idea anyway)

In the remake, cybernetics are common but controversial, with lots of characters delivering vague dialogue about how becoming a cyborg erodes people’s identities and is some sort of danger to humanity. This gets kind of confusing at times, because it’s really not clear what the movie means by “cybernetics”; like, the first person you see expressing an anti-cybernetic viewpoint clearly has some sort of brain-computer interface hard-wired to his skull. It kind of feels like people are just opposed to replacing body parts with artificial ones, which takes the mildly uncomfortable “prosthetics are creepy and bad” sub-text of a lot of cyberpunk fiction to whole new levels.

The movie ends similarly to the Japanese one, with Kuze offering Mira a chance to transcend their human shells and become beings of pure data, except she rejects the offer because she wants to stay as herself even if it means her own death. People have read this as an extension of the American obsession with individuality versus the more collectivist bent of the Japanese ending, but to be honest I think the film-makers just thought audiences would be too stupid to understand the original version.

At this point, I think it would be interesting to contrast the two movies’ villains. The Puppetmaster is a sentient intelligence, born spontaneously out of the “sea of information” that is the internet, who we learn was being controlled by his human captors in order to facilitate their shady political bullshit. After escaping, he seeks out Motoko Kusanagi because he sees her as a kindred soul, recognizing her existential anxiety as being similar to his own effort to be accepted as human, or at least an order of being deserving of the same status as humans.

In the remake, Kuze is a failed previous attempt at making a cybernetic super soldier, and he wants to destroy Hanka because he’s mad at them for making him a cyborg against his will.

Now, I’m no sci-fi conneasur, but you tell me which one of those concepts seems more interesting.

(Okay, I’m being a little unfair here; like with the Puppetmaster in the original movie, Kuze does still turn out to be a much more sympathetic character than initially presented, and the remake even goes a step further by making his revenge campaign against Hanka arguably justified. Even still, the Puppetmaster is a far more fascinating character).

And finally, it wouldn’t be a review of this movie if I didn’t at least mention the casting.

Ghost In The Shell (2017) takes place in a version of Japan that has a whole lot of American and English people in it. Like, to the point where they seem to be the dominant demographic. The dialogue implies an explanation for this, in that there seems to have been a huge refugee crisis that saw people from those regions fleeing to south-east Asia in large numbers (this is Mira’s backstory before she finds out it was a lie). 

Okay, fine. That’s potentially an interesting concept. Except the movie, in having this version of Japan where there are like a dozen Japanese people on screen and everyone but the Section 9 chief speaks English all the time, manages to spin that concept into an impressive double-whammy where it’s both whitewashing the original movie to hell, and also accidentally endorsing “great replacement” nonsense about refugees and immigrants sweeping into countries and erasing the currently-existing population. I’m not for a second claiming that that was the film-makers intention, but that’s what they ended up falling ass-backwards into.

Similarly, the movie reveals that Mira’s given backstory is a lie, and that she was originally a Japanese girl named...wait for it...Matoko Kusanagi. You see, you absolute fools, you thought this movie was whitewashing the protagonist by casting ScarJo, but in fact they were actually, uh, doing...something else? Sort of?

This twist--which I’m half convinced exists solely as an extremely clumsy way to deflect criticism of the casting--isn’t examined by the movie at all. The ending implies that Mira has reclaimed the Matoko identity despite still looking as ScarJo-esque as she did at the start of the movie, which when simply thrown up on-screen without comment opens up a whole other avenue of accidental, uncomfortable implications. 

But it could have been fodder to ask some interesting questions. Like, what does this bold new cybernetic future do to the concept of race? Do people’s ghosts have races? If it’s possible to construct an entirely new body for yourself, would our current beauty standards that export whiteness as the physical ideal lead to people of colour making themselves look white? Do people buy white shells to avoid racism? Why did Hanka robotics decide to make Mira and Kuze’s shells caucasian, and is that a reflection of the fact that they’re seemingly a Japanese company whose owners and executives are all white? Is there some sort of neo-neo-colonialism going on here?

That one statement in the original movie’s opening text--races have not yet become obsolete--implies more awareness of these topics on the part of the movie’s creators than the people behind the remake, even though the original movie never directly addresses the subject in its actual story. When you’re getting philosophically pummeled by a single line of text in your source material, you know it’s time to throw in the towel.

Despite how much time I’ve spent dunking on the Ghost In The Shell remake for its many dunkable qualities, I should conclude here by saying that I don’t actually hate it. In fact, I think it’s a step up from the baseline of Hollywood action mediocrity. The music is gorgeous, when it’s not just aping cyberpunk cliches it’s capable of moments of visual brilliance, and some of the action scenes are pretty slick. If it existed as its own entity, I might be able to actually like it, overall.

But in comparison to the original? Yeah, there’s no contest. It completely misses the point in every way imaginable, plus several new ways that were invented just for this movie. If this is what we can expect from other long-in-development-hell adaptations like Akira or Evangelion, then I hope they never get made.