Review of Ghost in the Shell (2017) by Jeffregend — 01 Apr 2017

Incredibly shallow. All the meaningful questions raised by the source material don't even so much as show up. With source material that asked things like 'how much can you change before what's left isn't the same as what you started with', or 'what can you trust if you give away control of your senses', this movie somehow turned that into a by the numbers, get revenge on the one dimensional bad guy, sci-fi action flick.

It had a great coat of paint but absolutely zero substance. I can't fault the actors for this however. It's plainly obvious they did what they could with an atrocious script. Whether this is because the creators the film thought audiences would be to stupid to understand the concepts laid out in the original or if the script writers and producers didn't understand it themselves is questionable, although I'm inclined to say both as even when the film attempted to pay lip service to it's source it managed totally botch the message, at times delivering the exact opposite.

Very disappointing, a puddle deep sci-fi action flick that simply used the Ghost in the Shell name and nothing more.