★★★☆☆
FOR this narratively messy but visually dazzling live-action adaptation of the acclaimed Japanese Manga series, we’re in the near future and a world where the lines between human and machine have become blurred.
Major (Scarlett Johansson) is the first of her kind: a human saved from the brink of death with her brain transferred into another, cybernetically-enhanced body – or “shell” as it’s known – in order to be the perfect weapon against the world’s most dangerous criminals.
She is sent on a mission, alongside gung-ho partner Batou (Pilou Asbæk), by shadowy company head Aramaki (beloved Japanese filmmaker “Beat” Takeshi Kitano) to take down a dangerous new terrorist with the ability to hack into people’s minds. In doing so she begins to discover her past may not be exactly what she thought.
On a technical, primarily visual level this is an impressive piece of work. The film’s key strength is in the overall futuristic world that it creates through peripheral details, rather than the oftentimes overly convoluted plotting.
It kind of knocks you off guard as it throws you into the deep end of its sleek world, alive with vibrant colour and stunning diversity of things to observe. There’s creative and eclectic use of visual effects to create such things as invisibility suits, ever so slightly creepy human-like machines and building-sized hologram advertisements for skin care and bodily enhancements.
Director Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman) helps it stand apart from many other modern blockbusters by allowing us ample time to drink in what we’re seeing through the use of bold establishing shots, while also having the confidence in the ensuing action not just relying on quick cuts.
All of this – like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to which it owes as much of a debt as the original anime due to its melding of slick Apple-esque futurism with gritty urban street life – conjures a believable, lived-in sci-fi world that’s never dull to behold. It’s a film that uses the concept of the big-screen to its fullest effect.
But as much as it presents that eye-popping world in all its glory, revelling in its aesthetics to almost fetishistic levels, it does often feel like a film made for fans of the original anime with the uninitiated left to look in, agog and slightly miffed, from the outside.
The plot tends to tie itself up in knots with regards to character motivations, allegiances, the reach of shady corporations and endless mysteries behind mysteries. It also tries its utmost to ask existential questions about the nature of humanity and the dangers of letting technology rule our lives while at the same time never truly getting under the biomechanical skin of those weighty themes.
Then there’s the rather uncomfortable point of the whitewashing, not least in the casting of Johansson (pictured) in the lead role. The original story is a thoroughly Japanese one; culture, and race and everything in between. You can feel the mechanical choices by committee throughout to get around those problematic speedbumps in the road of translating something so absolutely East Asian to a Western sensibility.
Even if it never quite marries its aesthetic ambitiousness with the tangled web of plotting, there’s something to be said for a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster that at least attempts to stretch its smarts. And even more to be said for one with such an eye-catching and memorable visual style.
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