He’s also cast the film appropriately for all the accusations of ‘whitewashing’, there’s diversity here, with a Dane (Borgen’s Pilou Asbaek) as the lens-eyed Batou, a Singaporean (Chin Han) as mulletted cop Han, and Japanese cinematic legend ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano as sly boss man Aramaki. His reconstruction of the original’s key set-pieces, including the urban lagoon slugfest with an invisible Major, and the climactic showdown with a ‘Spider Tank’ (think ED-209 crossed with a Starship Troopers Tanker Bug), is impressive. Director Rupert Sanders is an adept world-(re)builder and visualist, as proven by his debut Snow White & The Huntsman, which at least looked great. Of course, familiarity can often encourage nostalgia, and that’s not hurt by the fact that Ghost In The Shell ’17 is a cogently constructed entertainment. So preoccupied with the shell, it forgot to bring enough ghost. But if you're a longstanding fan of this genre, then the original’s deep, abiding influence on Hollywood (beyond The Matrix there's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, Avatar, hell, even HBO’s Westworld) makes its remake feel derivative of so many movies other than its source material. Or that the Major's psychic tussle to recover the truth of her life before she became a hard-bodied, crime-fighting, walking weapon is just another version of Murphy's struggle in RoboCop. That it took over 20 years for Hollywood to reskin it for live action isn’t that surprising after all, weren’t there already enough science-fiction pictures out there that shared its neon-tinged hardwiring? Perhaps it's been long enough for an audience to glide over the advertisement-dominated, skyscraperscape of the 2017 Ghost In The Shell and not feel like it's just Blade Runner re-scanned. Ghost In The Shell was a deserved crossover phenomenon, earning its comparisons with the likes of Blade Runner and paving the way for The Matrix ("We wanna do that for real," was the Wachowskis’ pitch). In 1995, Japanese director Mamoru Oshii released a manga-adapting anime which asked searching questions about what makes us human while serving up astonishingly slick and inventive hi-tech action sequences.
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