Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
In the near future, Major is the first of her kind: a human saved from a terrible crash, then cyber-enhanced to be a perfect soldier devoted to stopping the world's most dangerous criminals.
Ghost in the Shell (2017) is visually spectacular, with stunning neo-noir cyberpunk cityscape cinematography that faithfully recreates iconic imagery from the anime. However, the film strips away much of the philosophical depth that made the source material iconic, replacing it with a more generic identity-crisis origin story. The acting is serviceable but flat, with Scarlett Johansson delivering a deliberately robotic performance that works conceptually but lacks emotional resonance. The ending resolves into a fairly conventional action-movie conclusion. As a live-action remake, it offers little that is genuinely new beyond the visual translation, making it derivative despite its impressive surface beauty.