“Please don’t suck,” the words I’ve been muttering to myself for months since seeing the first trailer for the Ghost in the Shell live action adaptation. With its release just days away, reality is starting to set in. I hoped for the best with so many films last year. Suicide Squad. Fantastic Beasts. Rogue One. And they all fell somewhere between meh and shite. There are just too many reasons to temper my hopes for Ghost in the Shell.
For those who haven’t seen it, Ghost in the Shell is a 1995 anime film directed by Mamoru Oshii based on manga by Masamune Shirow. After 1988’s Akira, Ghost in the Shell was the next anime feature film to make waves in the West. Its influence is still seen today in anime and in sci-fi as a whole. Most famously, The Matrix was heavily inspired by Ghost in the Shell, borrowing the green text and the network accessible via neck holes:
Image credit: Warner Bros, Kodansha
It’s set the near-future where the world is so well-connected through the internet that national borders have begun to blur. Nearly everyone is cybernetically enhanced in some way or another. Most have brain implants which improve their memory storage capacity and cognitive abilities, but physical modifications are commonplace too:
Image credit: Kodansha
At the heart of the story is Major Kusanagi, a police officer. She is a cyborg (possessing an entirely artificial body) with remnants of her organic brain. Because of her brain, she is still conscious, still alive – this consciousness or “soul” is known as a ghost. Hence the title – she is a living, conscious person inside a machine or shell. But hey, aren’t we all?
Image credit: Kodansha
When the Major and her team are tasked with locating a computer hacker known only as the Puppet Master, capable of ghost-hacking (literally hacking into one’s consciousness), she has a series of encounters that prompt her to question her own personhood and identity. We, the audience, go along with her to question ours.
And it’s great. With a swift 80-minute runtime, it establishes its fascinating world with an incredible amount of detail and poses many questions about the nature of life and the union of humans and machines. The characters don’t treat their implants as technological marvels – they’re just an everyday part of life for them. This was oddly prescient stuff two decades ago. It’s exactly how things will be in a few years. Just as smartphones have become normal, so too will wearable technology (or has it already?) and eventually implantable technology.
Along comes Hollywood with an expensive, flashy remake with pretty visuals and a sexy leading lady. All my arguments boil down to one simple question. It’s the same question we always ask when remakes are announced. For what reason does this story need to be retold? Hollywood gives the same answer each time. They say that they want to bring the story to a new audience. I’ve never really understood what this means. The original films still exist. Young people can still watch them.
This is also the reason that remakes usually don’t bother me. For every shitty Total Recall or Ghostbusters remake, we still have the original, which goes untarnished. There’s also the off-chance the remake will be good. 1982’s The Thing, Ocean’s Eleven, and The Departed are all adaptations of previous films that surpass the originals. Why am I so certain Ghost in the Shell will suck?
First, let’s consider Hollywood’s track record of adapting manga into live action cinema. While Japan’s adaptations are numerous, Hollywood has actually made surprisingly few. There are the lesser known films like The Guyver and its sequel, and the straight-to-video Fist of the North Star – all poorly received and forgotten about. Then we have Speed Racer, the film that made us wonder if the Wachowskis had just fluked with The Matrix. Worse yet are the universally panned The Last Airbender and Dragonball: Evolution – both of which have been touted as two of the worst films of all time.
Some of you may have noticed one missing. Believe it or not, there is just one missing, and that’s Oldboy. And I’m not talking about Park Chan-Wook’s compelling revenge thriller, I mean the 2013 Hollywood remake. That, too, was heavily criticised for failing to do anything fresh with the story. All the films on this very short list have something in common. They all suck. But okay – who’s to say Ghost in the Shell won’t be the exception?
You might expect that the team behind Ghost in the Shell are avid fans of the source material and are passionate about bringing the story to life. Well, even if they were, that’s no guarantee of quality. Shyamalan was a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender and even received the blessing of its creators before starting production on his disaster. The Wachowskis are known to be huge anime fans and that wasn’t enough for Speed Racer.
So let’s look at the creative force driving Ghost in the Shell into cinemas. Behind the camera is director Rupert Sanders. I hadn’t heard of him, either, so I wondered what it was about his catalogue that made him suitable to direct this delicate, cerebral world of science fiction. Let’s discuss every feature film he’s ever directed. First on the list is Snow White and the Huntsman. Next… Oh, actually, that’s his entire filmography.
Penning the screenplay are two writers credited on a handful of small films, and Ehren Kruger. Haven’t heard of him? He’s the writer of the latest three Transformers films, stories which are widely regarded for their thought-provoking narrative and thematic depth.
And it doesn’t bode well when your producer is Avi Arad – a man whose Wikipedia page comically lists him as a businessman before mentioning that he’s a film producer. He’s best known for his involvement in the Marvel Cinematic Money Printing Machine. Oh dear. Remember when I asked what the purpose of remaking this film was? If you were ever in any doubt that this remake is just a cash-grab, hopefully that doubt will fade now.
Before I get to the most worrying signs, it’s worth taking a moment to wonder why Hollywood sucks so badly at manga adaptations. It’s easy to brand Hollywood as only making simplistic films catering to the lowest common denominator. But each year, studios take some chances on deeper, more complex stories that often turn out to be great.
Last year gave us Arrival and 10 Cloverfield Lane, for example. Even Disney put a lot of thought into its politically-charged Zootopia. In 2015 we got Mad Max: Fury Road, a flurry of action spectacle layered with all sorts of fascinating commentaries. And even in the superhero genre we’ve had the X-Men films which never forgot about its core theme of discrimination.
I think there’s a reason why anime doesn’t adapt well to live-action. In anime, everything is generally exaggerated and on-the-nose. There’s a reason anime characters have huge eyes – everything is louder and blown-up. Dialogue is written in a matter-of-fact way. There are notable exceptions (the works of studio Ghibli come to mind, as well as the darker political subtext of Attack on Titan) but in my experience this seems to be the case.
Anime artists also have wonderfully creative ways of expressing characters visually. Can you imagine something like this actually working in live action?
In anime, it makes sense for warrior Goku to eat plates and plates of food to feed his inhuman appetite. But when we see Goku in Dragonball: Evolution eating a giant leg of meat, it sticks out as odd. The blown-up dialogue goes by consistently in anime, but in live action it comes off as cheesy or wooden. Simply put, some stories are better told through animation, and maybe they should stay that way.
What worries me most about Ghost in the Shell is what we’ve seen in the trailers. They’ve done some things right. It looks gorgeous. I can imagine the story of Ghost in the Shell taking place in world that looks like the world in the trailer. Controversy aside, I don’t think Scarlett Johansson is a bad pick for the lead role, despite her historically not doing many of her own stunts. But what do we actually know about the story of this thing?
The voice-overs suggest that the Major’s body was constructed after she had an accident. She’s now a one-of-a-kind cyborg who was created to be a super police officer. So… it’s RoboCop. And I hate it. They’ve abandoned all the beauty, nuance, and ambiguity that made Ghost in the Shell such an inspiring film in favour of spoon-feeding us just enough story to string together a generic Hollywood hollow thrills actioner.
In the original, we don’t know why the Major was given her cyborg body. I don’t think she even knows. That’s the point. She’s one-of-a-kind now? What about the haunting moment in the anime where she sees another version of herself just as she’s beginning to question her identity?
Image credit: Kodansha
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for balls-to-the-wall action. But that’s not Ghost in the Shell. Obviously, I don’t want a shot-for-shot retelling, but something with the same name ought to at least adhere to the ideas and tone of the original. They could have made anything similar and called it something else; I’m not against taking inspiration, much like the Wachowskis admitted when they made The Matrix.
Hollywood does this all the time when it comes to anime. I don’t subscribe to the theory that Christopher Nolan stole ideas from 2006 film Paprika when he made Inception, but it’s hard to deny he may have been influenced by some of its visuals and concepts. Then there’s the case of Disney ripping off Kimba the White Lion to make The Lion King.
So why make a film called Ghost in the Shell that isn’t true to the original? Branding. It’s a familiar name, so it’s more likely to put bums in seats. Screw selling us on an original idea. No – they have to take something we love and warp it into something mundane and simplistic, made by a committee of expert money-makers who don’t give a shit about art.
Header image source 1 source 2
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