Review of Ghost in the Shell (2017) by Moviemew _ — 04 Mar 2018

"Ghost in the Shell" has visuals which'd make you expect it to be a great movie, but storywise, it's an absolute flop.

Starting with the scarce positive aspects to this film, you've got good-looking shots, nice use of lighting, great CGI and, well, Scarlett Johansson's face - making up a remarkable portion of the entire runtime, might I add. The movie tries to go for an artificially lit, serene, techy sci-fi-look, and succeeds to be entirely consistent in that regard. The cybernetic bodysuit the protagonist wears during the entire movie, realistically damaged from time to time as well as able to morph into a translucent form when needed, receives quite some cinematographic focus, overall: this, along with the decors and suchlike, form a nice pair of visually appealing elements.

On the flip side, however, is the incredibly shallow story the film tries to convey. Sure, the premiss is cool: robot-girl in Japan fights bad people, then meets other bad people, then discovers the societal system was her real oppressor all along ... but that's it. Apart from this being oddly cliché and hardly developing a single character, viewers might just never get the feeling the film takes off, as its plot is of such lacklustreness. What's more, is that, even though the story and characters barely evolve, the exposition of the beginning status quo is exponentially more difficult to fully understand, thus diminishing any possibly impactful story elements.

All-in-all, "Ghost in the Shell" deserves credit for its beautiful, serene, Japanese sci-fi-look, albeit whilst failing at basic storytelling. I'd recommend it as a screensaver making optimal use of ScarJo's boob-suit; don't watch it for any amount of story, since there barely is any.